Hlas: Westworld suits Iowa Hawkeyes fine

Iowa and Northwestern compete against each other in the quieter side of Big Ten football, the West Division.

Saturday's winner of the game between the two can make a strong case for being the second-best team in the West behind Wisconsin and try to build on that with five games to play. Commemorative T-shirts, however, will not go to the printers tonight.

Four of the Big Ten's five ranked teams are from the East Division. The East is 8-2 in games against the West, with seven of those East wins earned on the road.

Iowa is 0-2 against the East. Ohio State may have stomped out the last flickers of light in Mike Riley's Nebraska program. Minnesota couldn't use its home field to protect itself against either Maryland or Michigan State, two games you would have felt comfortable predicting the Gophers to win before the season began.

Even Rutgers, the Least of the East, got a double-digit win when it went to Illinois last Saturday.

Take away Wisconsin and no Big Ten West team got as much as a single 25th-place vote in the latest coaches' poll. Which makes this an unusual season so far.

That's right, unusual. When the Big Ten divorced itself of the non-geographic and super-pompous Legends and Leaders divisions that existed from 2011 through 2013, the fear was the East would be top-heavy and the West not so much.

Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State getting lumped together surely would tilt the league's power toward the Eastern Seaboard.

But for the first three years of East and West divisions, that simply didn't happen. They were 7-7 against each other in 2014 and 2015, and last year the West won 11 of the 21 regular-season games between the two.

However, this season is the one many foresaw four years ago.

Of course, it isn't as if the West has covered itself in glory since the league's geographical divide. Three different East teams have won Big Ten championship games the last three years, and the only two programs to represent the league in the College Football Playoff are Ohio State and Michigan State.

The only West teams to reach New Year's Six bowls in the last three years were Wisconsin, which beat Western Michigan in a forgettable Cotton Bowl, and Iowa, which would like to forget its Rose Bowl experience against Stanford.

The other Westies haven't gotten a sniff of a major bowl the last three seasons. Nebraska, brought into the Big Ten under the pretense it was a national football program, has become less of a one since it made its debut in the conference in 2011.

Not that any of this affects Iowa negatively. Let the schools with the 100,000-seat stadiums in states with populations of 10 million-plus stay on the other side of the league's border wall. Long ago, the Hawkeyes have shown they can compete with the Big Ten's biggest boys. But would you want to face all of them every year if you wanted to reach higher ground?

Iowa went 8-0 in the Big Ten in 2015, as has been noted here a time or two. It didn't hurt that its East opponents were Indiana and Maryland, not Michigan State and Ohio State.

It's games like today's and next Saturday's against Minnesota that are the Hawkeyes' bread and butter. They wants to stay ahead of Northwestern and Minnesota and Nebraska, stay ahead of Purdue and Illinois. If you do that, you're happy to bang helmets with Wisconsin and have the chance to get yourself to Indianapolis for the league's title game every so often.

Making it to Indy is a pretty big reach for the '17 Hawkeyes thanks to those two losses to East teams. Wisconsin avoids Ohio State and Penn State in the regular season. Luck of the draw, and all that.

But the only way for Iowa to maintain a chance to reach Indy this season? Make the Northwesterns of the West go south.