It was a terrific loss

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The responses Iowa's football players got as they made their way out of their Ohio Stadium locker room to their team buses last night were cheers and hugs.

Sure, the welcoming committee consisted almost entirely of family members and close friends. But they surely represented the hearts and minds of most Hawkeye fans.

No, Iowa didn't get out of the vaunted Horseshoe with a win in the winner-take-all game for the Big Ten's berth in the Rose Bowl. Ohio State won in overtime, 27-24.

But this was more a story of the Buckeyes winning a terrific college game than the Hawkeyes losing it.

Iowa was down 24-10 with 11:11 left after being disheartened by a 49-yard touchdown run by OSU's Brandon Saine. But instead of willingly surrendering the roses and a guaranteed share of a Big Ten championship, the Hawkeyes answered on the next play when Derrell Johnson-Koulianos had a brilliant 99-yard kickoff return for a touchdown.

Ohio State's Devin Barclay, a 26-year-old junior walk-on who has played for four Major League Soccer teams in five years, missed a 47-yard field goal, and Iowa got the ball with 7:11 left.

Ten plays later, freshman quarterback James Vandenberg added another feather to a terrific first college start when he fired a 10-yard bullet to Marvin McNutt. The score was tied at 24.

But Iowa went backward over its four plays and failed to score. After three conservative running plays, OSU turned to Barclay, who had replaced injured kicker Aaron Pettrey two weeks earlier after Pettrey's season-ending knee injury.

Barclay knocked home a 39-yard field goal to win the game and got more fame and glory than he perhaps could have compiled in 39 U.S. pro soccer lifetimes.

Iowa's players could only trudge off, knowing that, sometime, winning efforts don't produce wins.

“Those were two great groups going at each other,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said.

Relatively few outside Iowa's football complex saw the Hawkeyes providing the kind of competition they did. If it's possible for a team to gain national stature in defeat, Iowa did so this day.

But Pasadena must wait for at least another year.