What Are We Doing Here?

On Iowa, expectations and goalsetting in the new Big Ten.

When Kirk Ferentz took over as head coach of Iowa Football in 1999, the goals were fairly clear. Iowa had not won a Big Ten title since 1990, an outright title since 1985. Hayden Fry had taken the Hawkeye faithful on six bowl trips over the last nine seasons, but the Sun Bowl felt a world away from the Rose Bowl, and the Sun Bowl looked like an impossible dream with the roster Ferentz inherited. When Iowa earned a berth in the Alamo Bowl three seasons into his tenure, it felt like the whole of Iowa made the trip. When they made it to the Orange Bowl the following season, Ferentz had reached the biggest goals the program could possibly fathom: A perfect Big Ten record, and Big Ten co-champion. BCS bowl berth. AP Top 10 finish.

Iowa would finish in the AP Top 10 each of the following two campaigns, with Florida bowl trips at the end of each and a second Big Ten co-championship in 2004. Iowa fans are a patient and pragmatic bunch, and so there was virtually no dissent over pushing the program to the “next level” and competing for national titles. To get there in the BCS era — where two teams were selected to play one game for the title — seemed borderline impossible, a bridge too far for a program like Iowa. And those years were extremely enjoyable, watching our little band of local kids and overlooked recruits beat up on the bluebloods.

Ohio State was in its ascendancy back then. Michigan was a perennial force, even if Lloyd Carr’s methods were growing long in the tooth. Penn State was cannon fodder, Nebraska still in the Big 12, Wisconsin still the Alvarez ideal of Wisconsin. It was a difficult conference, to be sure, but a winnable one, as Iowa had shown in 2002 and 2004.

There might not be another team in the country whose fans care more about which bowl they’ll be going to than Iowa. You probably don’t realize this, but bowl projection posts were consistently among the most-viewed at BHGP. Bowl placement isn’t just about travel plans; it has been the barometer by which we measure the non-championship seasons and, at this point, it’s been all non-championship seasons for 20 years. Iowa has gone to Tampa so much that we jokingly refer to it as Kinnick South. Orlando, Jacksonville, Phoenix, New York, Nashville. San Diego has great weather and better history, what with Hayden taking the boys there three times in his heyday. Obviously, Pasadena has its own history. A bowl trip was a mid-tier goal. A trip to Pasadena was something else entirely.

This created a consistent hierarchy of goals by which we measured a season:

• A great season was a conference title and a trip to the Rose Bowl, or the thing that could not even be spoken: The four-team playoff. It’s been nine years since Iowa last seriously contended for that.

• The good seasons would be holding at least three of the rivalry trophies, and maybe picking off an upset of Michigan, OSU or Penn State. Beat up on ISU, Nebraska and Minnesota, grab a surprise win over Jim Harbaugh, and earn a mid-tier bowl trip? Totally acceptable.

• The forgettable seasons were eight wins and a bowl.

• The bad seasons didn’t even have that.

We’ve been fortunate to not have many bad seasons in the last twenty years. Iowa has only missed a bowl once since 2007, and made it to bowl eligibility every year since 2013. From 2015 through 2021, Iowa held at least three traveling trophies each winter, and did so again last year. The Hawkeyes sprung an improbable upset of No. 2 Michigan in 2016, and followed it up by blowing out Ohio State the following autumn. If the standard for a “good” season included those things — and I’d hypothesize that the standard was widely held across the fan base — then things were pretty good.

But the world has turned and left us here. Six of the marquee bowl games are now playoff games, with the participants no longer determined by such antiquities as conference ranking. The rest of the bowls are increasingly an anachronism, with more players defecting than a 1990s Cuban baseball exhibition. On New Year’s Day 2005, Iowa played LSU in the Citrus Bowl, and it felt like a war; when they played Tennessee in the same game 19 years later, half of the Vols roster sat it out. Other bowl games featured rosters so depleted that coaches are openly questioning whether they should even be played.

In the meantime, that 2017 win over Ohio State has been the last time that Iowa has defeated OSU or Michigan. The Hawkeyes are 1-8 against those two programs and Penn State since 2017, and haven’t been nominally competitive against any of them since beating the Nittany Lions in October 2021:

• 2021 Michigan (B10 Championship): UM 42 - Iowa 3

• 2022 Michigan: UM 27 - Iowa 14

• 2022 Ohio State: OSU 54 - Iowa 10

• 2023 Penn State: PSU 31 - Iowa 0

• 2023 Michigan (B10 Championship): UM 26 - Iowa 0

• 2024 Ohio State: OSU 35 - Iowa 7

You will note a couple of Big Ten Championship Game appearances in there. Yes, Iowa won the Big Ten West twice in the last three years of its existence, and Iowa had an opportunity, however nominal, at a conference title those nights. But the Big Ten West is dead, and a berth in the title game will now come from finishing second in a conference that includes not only Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State, but USC, Oregon and Washington. Five of those six teams have played in a national championship game since the last time Iowa won the Big Ten. Even with a favorable schedule from their guaranteed games, there’s about a 5 percent chance Iowa will get a schedule that avoids all six in a given season.

Those recent results make it clear that, despite those division titles and occasional ten-win seasons, Iowa has not kept up with the upper echelon of the conference in the last half-decade. In a world where Ohio State puts $20 million into NIL just for football and Iowa is budgeting $5 million for the entire athletics department, it’s not getting better any time soon. If Iowa cannot be competitive with the top tier of programs, the odds of winning a conference championship in an 18-team Big Ten with no divisions is virtually nil. The chances of a playoff berth are similarly remote: Iowa hasn’t had a final ranking from the College Football Playoff committee that would have put it in a 12-team field since 2015, and the competitive landscape has only worsened since then.

So in the aftermath of yet another blowout loss to one of the Big Ten’s elite programs, I ask: What’s the point of all of this now? What’s the goal by which we measure a season’s success or failure? Playoff appearances and conference titles would require victories over the Ohio States and Oregons of the world and are therefore off the table, non-playoff bowl games are meaningless exhibitions for second-string players that will likely be phased out soon, and the odds of springing an upset on a top team are much more remote than they were a half-decade ago. Are we to measure the season simply on the number of wins, as Kirk Ferentz so often likes to do? Are we willing to say a nine- or ten-win season with blowout losses to the conference’s best programs is a success? More critically, are we prepared to call it a failure? Does a ten-win season with no moments of particular significance and no postseason matter? Do we get enough dopamine from an autumn spent beating up on lesser programs to make that a goal unto itself?

Are we simply to care about trophy games, and determine the season’s merit on whether the pig, the bull, and the metal alloy footballs are ensconced in their cases at the Hansen Football Complex? Are local bragging rights against similarly hopeless teams really enough to justify this endeavor?

This program, and its administration, and its fans, are noted for their reasonableness. Expectations are tempered, and goals are attainable. But what happens to that program, and its fans, when the goals we have marked campaigns by for the last hundred years are suddenly gone? Absent an improbable and unexpected turn back to the standard of this program in the late 2010s, we are faced with building a new model of success. Reduced expectations take a significant amount of the fun and interest out of a football season. On the other hand, the standard by which we’ve measured the last 40 years of Iowa Football risks being unreasonably high, with the same sort of consequences following from that for other programs.

It was painfully obvious on Saturday afternoon that Iowa is not close to the elite at the moment. What, if anything, the program does to address that chasm of talent, creativity and performance is up to them. But how we measure their success is up to us, the fans, and how we recalibrate our standards could do more to determine the future of this program than anything Kirk Ferentz concocts.