At the beginning of Iowa football’s contest against Northwestern, fears over the Hawkeyes’ defensive woes seemed to persist.
The Wildcats’ first play of the game featured a missed tackle from Iowa cornerback Deshaun Lee, allowing receiver A.J. Henning to break free for a 21-yard gain. This wound up being Northwestern’s biggest offensive play of the day, as coordinator Phil Parker’s unit dominated the rest of the way.
Highlighted with multiple turnovers, the defense held the Wildcat offense to 162 total yards – the lowest the Hawkeyes had conceded this season.
“Everybody’s thinking the right way, and just pleased with the way they did things and the way it turned out,” Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz said in his postgame press conference. “Everybody made big contributions. The defense played an outstanding game. It’s one of the strangest shoutouts that you’ll see with the way they got involved in scoring.”
On Northwestern’s first drive of the second half, senior safety Quinn Schulte picked off quarterback Jack Lausch’s pass up the middle and returned it eight yards to the Northwestern 26 for his second interception of the season.
“It’s a really good feeling,” Schulte said. “Our job is just go out there and try to get the ball back for the offense, and creating turnovers is one of our goals. And so if we can do that, we’re just trying to help out offense, it helps out the team as a whole.”
On the next defensive possession, defensive lineman Max Llewellyn put two points up on the board with a sack in the end zone. The safety was only made possible because of punter Rhys Dakin placing the ball at the NU six-yard line.
“I would think that it starts with special teams,” linebacker Nick Jackson said. “Rhys Dakin, he put us in some really good situations anytime the ball started on the five or six… it kind of just narrows what they can do. And we credit the safety to him, really heck of a play by our D-line and all that.”
In the midst of Iowa’s offensive explosion in the third quarter, Lausch’s pass was deflected at the Northwestern 35 by Jackson and secured by fellow linebacker Jay Higgins, returning it 10 yards and putting the Hawkeyes within easy scoring distance.
Higgins admitted he had no intention of intercepting the ball. All he wanted was at least half a sack, especially if that meant taking one away from Jackson, his roommate and best friend.
Standing alongside Jackson in a “Stepbrothers”-style post-game interview, Higgins said the ball just wound up in his lap. But the sixth-year had no interest in holding onto the pigskin, immediately dishing it to Jackson as the pair began a game of hot potato while jogging back to the sideline.
“Anytime you need a play, you go to Jay Higgins,” Jackson said, eliciting an embarrassed smile from his teammate. “How fun it is just to have that moment with one of your best friends, it’s just awesome.”
“That’s gonna make me cry,” Higgins responded with a laugh.
The very next play, the grins of the Hawkeyes only got wider, as running back Kaleb Johnson completed a 25-yard run to hit paydirt for the third touchdown of the game.
“It was just good to put clean football out there,” Higgins said. “Obviously, I was vocal last week about how I played. I thought we played great today … I think our leverage as a defense was much better.”
Ferentz joked the Hawkeyes did tackling drills all week. Coming off a poor performance against Michigan State, where the Hawkeyes were plagued by a season-high 19 missed tackles, the remark was on-point. But it was also a lighthearted reminder that this season’s veteran group doesn’t define itself by mistakes.
“Just working on those fundamentals and just knowing that you can’t back down from anything,” Jackson said. “You had a bad week. That doesn’t make you curl up in a ball. You keep going.”