Do the Hawkeyes enjoy playing football?

IOWA CITY - The question took Iowa senior quarterback Rick Stanzi by surprise.

Do you have fun playing football?

"Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Definitely," Stanzi said. "It's tough. There's a lot of hard stuff that goes into it, there's a lot of down times, there's upsetting moments. When you lose on the road that's not fun. But it beats a lot of other things."

Iowa players rarely open up beyond the cliches preached by the football staff about working hard, improvement and the team-first concept. Often the players' rhetoric in interview sessions shape their disposition in interview sessions.

Senior guard Julian Vandervelde said the fun comes from pushing himself to become better. He added that it took two or three years before he could turn Iowa's fierce work program into his version of fun.

"You come in as a freshman and everything is so much faster and there's so much more weights and conditioning and everything," Vandervelde said. "The playbook is so much bigger and all this. But once you get into the flow and the rhythm of it, once you get into the Iowa way and the Iowa mentality starts to sink in, that work starts to become fun, which is really bizarre. You start looking forward to practice rather than dreading it."

Iowa players and coaches have tried to avoid acknowledging the lofty expectations many observers had for the program. Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said Tuesday the team's annual goals include winning the Big Ten title and improving each week. He reminded the players in the spring and summer that their goals match the team's expectations, not those from outside the program.

Still, senior punter Ryan Donahue said it's fun to indulge in some of the hype without taking it to heart.

"In the preseason we knew we had to go out and work hard and win games just like we did last year to receive the hype that we did," Donahue said. "It's not something we listen to verbatim; it's not something that we built upon for our success of the season is what everyone else says it's what we say."

But getting back to the original question to Stanzi. Is football fun?

"I know the most the fun that I've ever had is when you win," Stanzi said. "So that's kind of where the fun is. When you don't work hard, you can't win, then you can't have fun. It kind of goes in that order."