Story stays the same: Iowa football team posts good record, owns Nebraska

LINCOLN, Neb. — Here are two statistics about the Iowa football team, one with a needle pointed outward and the other with a salute directed inward:

1. Iowa has a 7-game winning streak in Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium. The last time Nebraska won seven straight here was 2016, and it plays 14 games here for every time the Hawkeyes visit.

2. Iowa has won at least eight games every full season since 2015. That’s 10 seasons running, something matched only by Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State. In other words, the creme de la creme of the college game.

“It doesn’t make headlines, I guess, eight wins doesn’t,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said. “But the game’s always about trying to do your best. Our guys have been able to do that.

A 6-3 Big Ten mark? Hey, only five of the other 17 teams in the league are better.

“It’s hard to win. It’s hard to win in college football games. … There’s a lot of people competing, trying to do the same thing. So, I’m proud of the consistency there.

“It would not have been a shame or unjust, but this team deserved to be at least an 8-win team, and I’ll be surprised if … they don’t try to win nine.”

The lead was a hot potato in the first half of Iowa’s 40-16 win over Nebraska on Friday afternoon. In the second half, the Hawkeyes peeled and roasted the Huskers to maintain their authority in this series.

There are those who would look at 8-4 and yawn. Some years, that might even be fair. Not this one. The four losses came to teams that were ranked at the time and all were settled by one score.

Nobody has played No. 2 Indiana as tough as the Hawkeyes. No one but Indiana and Penn State have battled Oregon as hard as Iowa did.

Close doesn’t bring out the cigars, of course. Nonetheless, Iowa is a team that came to play in all of its 12 games, and that closed another regular season breathing fire instead of wheezing to the finish line.

It’s been a capable club. When it did lose, the other team had to do some great things to make it happen.

It’s been a spirited club. You can pinpoint players across all three units, but the year of Mark Gronowski at quarterback has been fun to watch. Gronowski didn’t put up the kind of passing numbers he had at South Dakota State while being one of the best players in FCS over the last quarter-century, winning two national-titles and one National Player of the Year Award.

He did, however, produce excitement and results. He was a balanced offense by himself Friday with 166 passing yards and 64 more rushing.

His two rushing touchdowns gave him 15, as many as any quarterback in the country. His 491 rushing yards are an Iowa single-season record for a QB. His ability to not only escape would-be tacklers but to turn broken plays into big plays made up for a considerable chunk of the passing shortages.

The sixth-year senior came into fall camp rusty after offseason surgery. It didn’t stop him from doing other important things in advance of the season to come.

“When I got here I just tried to build relationships,” Gronowski said. “All I could do really was learn the playbook, build relationships with guys, hang out with them. I feel it was really great to do all that because all of a sudden, things started to roll.

“I got to start playing again, the relationships were strong, and I continued to build those the entire year. It’s been a lot of fun spending time with the O-linemen, those goofy guys up front.”

Gronowski’s personality never wavered. Every time you heard him speak, win or lose, he was steady and upbeat.

He got hurt in the fourth quarter of that 20-15 loss to Indiana and couldn’t finish the game, so it’s fair to wonder if Iowa could have hung a loss on the unbeaten Hoosiers had he been able to go the distance. He came back the next week.

Friday, he clicked on a couple of highlight-reel passes. One was a 35-yarder for a touchdown to blossoming freshman tight end D.J. Vonnahme in the first quarter. Another was for 27 yards to the Nebraska 1. Reece Vander Zee made perhaps Iowa’s catch of the year with his one-hand stab, but the pass was money, too.

This was a 40-point game for Iowa. This was an eighth win. The Huskers haven’t won eight games in a season since 2016. What used to be taken for granted here is now taken for granted by some Hawkeye people. It shouldn’t be.

Nebraska wants to be Iowa now. But it isn’t. It still isn’t.

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