So much goodness for Hawkeyes in season-ending KO of Kentucky

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Saturday was such a great day for Iowa football, yet it was terribly sad.

The awful part was the news Jack Campbell’s grandfather died late Friday night here, the victim of a vehicle-pedestrian accident. William Smith Jr., of Waterloo, 76, was pronounced deceased at Vanderbilt Medical Center.

Campbell wasn’t told about his grandfather until after his team’s 21-0 Music City Bowl win over Kentucky. His parents wanted his mind and spirit to be free to focus on his last game with Iowa. He was the soul of the 2022 Hawkeyes as a talent and leader, and as usual he led them in tackles (10, one of them a quarterback sack.)

The rest of this is trivial in comparison, but it clearly wasn’t trivial to the participants. Iowa did all it could have reasonably wanted at Nissan Stadium and had a dominant victory to carry into its offseason.

In some statistical ways, this was like Iowa’s lackluster 7-3 season-opening win over South Dakota State. The defense outscored the offense in that one, too, but Iowa put up two safeties then. In this contest, it was two interception returns for touchdowns, hammers.

As he was in the season-opener when he punted 10 times for a 47.9-yard average, Tory Taylor was magnificent. His eight kicks averaged 48.2 yards. He put four of them inside the Kentucky 10 and two others inside the 15. Game-changer, all game.

“I don’t know if I’ve seen sharper than what I saw today,” Ferentz said. “He was on it, just on it, every time.”

That did so much for the Hawkeyes to keep the field tilted. It was prologue for Taylor’s postgame announcement that makes the 2023 Iowa team instantly better.

Though he’ll be 26 next July and surely would have had a chance to earn one of the NFL’s 32 punting jobs, Taylor is returning for another season as a Hawkeye.

“It’s going to be a special year,” he said.

“I really think this team can go far and I just want to be a part of it.”

So the newer kids on Iowa’s block will have the graybeard from Australia to lean on again next fall. Some of the newer guys made victory easier than it normally might have been on a day with one offensive score.

Hello, Xavier Nwankpa. We’d heard about you for a long time, a blue-chipper out of Southeast Polk and all. The first-year freshman safety put in the special teams work this season and learned behind a core of proven secondary talent, including NFL-bound safety Kaevon Merriweather.

Merriweather opted out of this game. Nwankpa got promoted to first-team, and his Iowa career saga got an instant liftoff.

He picked off a pass and returned it 52 yards for six points in the second quarter, 11 seconds after Iowa had a quick, clean 42-yard TD drive.

Later in that quarter, Cooper DeJean turned a mistake of a Destin Wade pass into a 14-yard pick-6 of his own, and it was 21-0. DeJean is a sophomore. DeJean and Nwankpa, with a lot of Iowa football left in them. How much drool does that cause in Hawkeye World?

“We’ve really got a chance to keep making an impact, keep the DoughBoyz tradition alive,” Nwankpa said.

DeJean was a first-team All-Big Ten player by the media in his first season as a starter. Who gets three pick-6s in a season? Properly, he was voted this game’s MVP.

“I think it’s more of a team award,” DeJean said, which is what you’d expect from a team guy. But pretty much everyone who saw him play this season was in agreement that this fellow is special.

Before his interception/score, DeJean returned a punt from the Iowa 6 to the 40. Big. Not long after that, he hustled down the other end of the field to down a Taylor punt at the Kentucky 2. Big.

“I’m lucky to have him on the punt unit,” Taylor said, “and moving forward, I certainly hope he stays.”

Then there’s Joe Labas. The redshirt freshman took his first college snap at quarterback, and 47 more after that. He kept his head and never surrendered the ball.

Where Labas fits with incoming transfer Cade McNamara getting the QB1 spot is unknown, but he’ll always have this game.

Iowa tight end extraordinaire Sam LaPorta called Labas “Broadway Joe.” Well, Labas wasn’t a Joe Namath here, or Joe Montana or Joe Theismann or Joe Burrow.

He took care of business, though. Everybody took care of business this day.

Finally, condolences to Jack Campbell and his family.

“Mr. Smith, I can just tell you this from personal experience,” Ferentz said, “had a really big influence on Jack’s entire life. I know he was here to cheer on his grandson and was very, very proud of Jack.”

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