At halftime, the Iowa football team is leading Northwestern, 16-10.

By Danny Payne
[email protected]

EVANSTON, Illinois — Well, this game has been, let’s say, eventful so far. There are some notes below.

• Jordan Canzeri left the game at the end of the first quarter with a lower left-leg injury. It looked like his ankle, and Canzeri was on the sideline in a walking boot after being taken to the locker room. Wouldn’t expect him back today.
• Luckily for the Hawks, Akrum Wadley lives to play against Northwestern. He has 9 carries for 76 yards and 2 touchdowns, including a 35-yard touchdown run at the beginning of the second quarter.
• Marshall Koehn missed the PAT on that Wadley touchdown. It was bad, like, really bad. One of the worst PAT attempts I’ve ever seen. It looked like he was trying to take someone out behind the end zone.
• Tevaun Smith is playing and has looked effective. He had a nice catch negated by an offensive pass interference call, but made a jumping catch look easy. The same is true for a long-catch-and-run negated by a holding penalty. That knee injury is close to being gone.
• C.J. Beathard, despite various lower-body injuries, has looked good enough so far. He scrambled on a third down early in the game and was gimpy getting back up, but outside of that, he’s looked fine. Definitely not 100 percent, but he’s good enough today, save for his interception. He didn’t plant his foot and threw a duck on a play-action attempt to Jacob Hillyer. Beathard finished the first half 10-of-17 with 126 yards and an interception.
• Northwestern’s offense is not great, and that’s putting it lightly. On the day, the Wildcats have 118 yards and 7 first downs and were awful on all of the drives except the two scoring ones.
• Greg Mabin needs a lot of work. Mike McHugh burned the junior to set up the Wildcat touchdown. The general rule of thumb for Illinois and Northwestern has been to test Mabin, and good things will happen.
• Penalties have plagued both teams, on Northwestern’s field-goal drive, a Cole Fisher face mask following a big sack gave momentum to the ‘Cats. Iowa has three for 25 yards, Northwestern with three for 35 yards.
• Great job by Iowa setting up the field goal before the half. It’s just too bad Marshall Koehn missed it. The drive was efficient, to say the least. Koehn missed a 34-yard boot to keep the score at 16-10.
• We’ll have more after the game and in the paper this week. See you guys in the second half.