By Blake Dowson
The Sept. 17 loss to North Dakota State left most of the Iowa players and coaches searching for answers, and for words, after the game.
And while most of the players answered each question about what went wrong by saying they would need to watch the film first, linebacker Bo Bower said simply what was in the forefront of each person’s mind.
“We didn’t execute right defensively,” he said. “That’s why we lost…They just ran it up our throats. That’s why they won.”
Therein lies the midseason, uh-oh the Big Ten slate is upon us, crisis the Iowa football team has on its hands.
Teams don’t do to Iowa what North Dakota State did to Iowa, and especially not a Football Championship Subdivision school. The Bison ran it up the Hawkeyes throats to the tune of 239 yards rushing, with more than 200 of that coming in the second half.
For the Hawkeyes? They managed 34 total yards on the ground, their lowest total in 39 years.
Head coach Kirk Ferentz and his Iowa teams have long prided themselves on being the “bullies of the Big Ten,” pushing people around in the trenches and breaking them down until they break in the fourth quarter.
But it was the Hawkeyes who broke in the fourth quarter against North Dakota State, not the team they paid $500,000 to come play them.
“If you can’t stop the run, then you can’t win games,” junior Ben Niemann said on Tuesday. “You have to stop the ground game first.”
You also have to be able to set the tone with your own ground game, which the Hawkeyes failed to do. In the most crucial stretch of the game with Iowa clinging to a 1-point lead late in the fourth quarter, all the Hawkeyes had to do was get two first downs, and the game was over.
The sequence ended up: run for minus-2 yards, run for 1 yard, sack, punt. That’s not Iowa football, as the players reminded reporters after the loss.
“We just didn’t play up to Iowa football standards. We got to get back to that next week,” tight end George Kittle said after the loss. “We didn’t match their intensity. We didn’t play as physical as we needed to. We didn’t play as smart as we needed to … It’s incredibly frustrating. That’s just not the football team that we are. But that’s what we put on the field today.”
Playing Iowa football is making the makeable plays, Ferentz says, and that simply didn’t happen against the Bison. The “makeable” plays are ones that any player can make — it doesn’t need to be a superstar.
The Hawkeyes are built around expecting each and every player to be able to execute those makeable plays, because superstar players such as Desmond King don’t come around all that often.
“Probably the biggest, most glaring thing in my mind, we’re just not doing well with the makeables,” Ferentz said. “And that’s really the story of football, especially in close ball games, which we tend to be involved in a lot of those.”
The challenge now is to fix those mistakes and in a hurry. Iowa hasn’t played a week after a regular-season loss since late November 2014. The key, when all is said and done, is balance.
“Being able to run the ball, being able to pass the ball, being able to tackle, anything with sound, fundamental football, that’s what we need to get back to,” wide receiver Matt VandeBerg said.