Hlas column: Iowa's actual winning goes beyond 10-2

IOWA CITY - Many statistics are obscure and many aren't meaningful.

But while this one is obscure, I think it's telling about the Iowa football program:

The Hawkeyes have gone 29 games without losing a game by a double-digit margin.

The only team in FBS with a longer current streak is Texas, at 31 games. Florida is at 29, Boise State 25. After that, not many teams have gone through 2009 without a 10-point loss. It doesn't take much to lose a single game by two scores and still be a fine team.

But what 29 straight games like that - 22 of them victories - says is that Iowa shows up and competes every week whether or not it's had its ‘A' game. If that is instilled, winning follows.

It's easy to forget that mindset was gone not long ago. After establishing itself as an elite program with No. 8 national-finishes in 2002, 2003 and 2004 and a pretty good Outback Bowl team in 2005, the Hawkeyes slipped into a funk.

After a 5-1 start in 2006, Iowa took a 6-6 mark to the Alamo Bowl.

“Football-wise, a little entitlement virus got in,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said Saturday after his 2009 club wrapped up a 10-2 season with a 12-0 win over Minnesota.

“I can't verify it, but I think probably all of us took things for granted a little bit and we paid a price for it. I've said many times that six-game stretch is the worst stretch for me as a coach. It was probably the poorest job I did.”

That was half the story of dark clouds hanging over the program. The other half was worse.

Arrests to Iowa players were plentiful. The period from April 2007 through March 2008 alone included 14 arrests or citations. Most were relatively minor. A few, however, were pretty heinous.

Ferentz was considered by many to be on a hot seat. His high salary was mentioned in virtually all such commentaries. He was considered vastly overpaid and the head of a rogue program.

Hawkeye football, almost unthinkably after the seasons that went before it, had become an embarrassment in some circles.

Matters weren't helped with the fan base in 2007 when Iowa went 6-6 and closed the season with a dismal 28-19 home loss to Western Michigan. That snapped its string of successive seasons with bowl trips at six.

“It was an immature team, a young team,” Ferentz said. “Hopefully we got the culture straight again.”

He was talking about the football culture. The cultural culture, keeping players from defying society's laws, obviously had to be altered dramatically. It apparently has been. It's been a while since a Hawkeye player has made the bad kind of headlines.

“They were beyond being college-kid mistakes in ‘07,” Ferentz said. “That's when you really get concerned. I know it goes on around the country. You see things happen. But it's not OK. We all knew that in third-grade. We can‘t have that happening.”

Two years after that dismal finale against Western Michigan, Iowa has 19 wins, a resounding Outback Bowl victory, two triumphs over mighty Penn State, and a shot at a BCS bowl invitation.

It didn't happen through luck or shortcuts, and can leave again in a hurry if it isn't managed properly.

This second era of success under Ferentz may be sweeter than the first because it showed adults can change and improve how they think and act.

That, really, should be more inspirational than 10 wins. Ten is just a number. Actual winning goes far deeper.