Although Iowa and North Dakota State haven’t met on the grindiron since 1947, the two teams often cross paths on the recruiting trail.
By Blake Dowson | [email protected]
After games against Miami (Ohio) and Iowa State — two teams that like to spread the field — the Iowa football team will get a familiar look when North Dakota State comes to Kinnick on Saturday.
Anyway you slice it, the Bison are the best team the Hawkeyes will play in the nonconference. The way they win games, in the trenches with a balanced offense, is much the same way Iowa grinds out victories.
That is one way to compare the two programs.
“They play with fullbacks, multiple tight ends, run the ball, throw it. They are very versatile, multiple,” Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz said on Tuesday. “But they’re going to block you. They’re going to come out and block you. If you try to block them, they play blocks. They’re not trying to run around and slip people, finesse them. That’s not their style.”
Pretend that isn’t a quote from Iowa’s headman, and it could easily be another coach describing the Hawkeyes.
That’s because both schools are trying to build the same brand. Both Ferentz and Dakota head coach Chris Klieman want to win in the trenches. They both believe that controlling the line of scrimmage wins games, and for that reason, the two recruit a lot of the same players — or at least the same type of players.
Klieman, who is in his third year as head coach, and former head coach Craig Bohl have long sought the same high-school players Ferentz and the Hawkeyes have: those players who fall through the cracks because they are not quite big enough yet or the number of stars they have been given by a scouting website isn’t good enough.
The Bison regularly take the top of the crop in North Dakota and the surrounding states, much as the Hawks do in Iowa, Illinois, and other border states, and mold those athletes into productive football players.
Currently, Dakota has 63 players on its roster from North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota.
The overlap of recruiting area, together with the Bison having had so much success in the Football Championship Subdivision and against area Football Bowl Subdivision schools recently, has caught Ferentz’s attention.
“If they are recruiting somebody, that gets our attention. I’m not a big one for, ‘Who is recruiting this guy?’ I rarely ask that of our staff when we look at prospects,” Ferentz said. “If North Dakota State is looking at them, that does get my attention, because I think they’ve done a wonderful job, not only guys in Iowa, but in the Midwest.”
Saturday will be a different game from the ones Iowa has played the first two weeks of the season. In certain ways, it’s like the beginning of the Big Ten season — the Bison like to grind and pound much like Wisconsin and Michigan State like to. Dakota won’t try to spread the Hawkeye defense out, it will try to impose its will.
“We’ve got a lot of respect for them. They’re a great team. They’ve got five national championships — that’s crazy,” Iowa quarterback C.J. Beathard said. “I don’t care what conference you’re in, FCS or FBS, I think they’re like 8-3 against FBS opponents. So we have a ton of respect for those guys, and we know they’re going to come in here bringing their best and expecting to win.”