Hawkeyes to play Kentucky in Citrus Bowl after 10-3 season

IOWA CITY — Next stop, Orlando.

The No. 15 Iowa Hawkeyes (10-3) will be playing in the Vrbo Citrus Bowl against No. 22 Kentucky (9-3) on Jan. 1 at noon (CT). Brett McMurphy from the Action Network first reported the bowl matchup.

The Citrus Bowl is the most prestigious bowl with a Big Ten affiliation outside of the New Year’s Six bowls. The Hawkeyes fell out of the New Year’s Six conversation after Michigan thumped them, 42-3, in Saturday’s Big Ten championship game.

“I feel like we got a good bowl based on how good our season was,” safety/linebacker Dane Belton said. “We had an opportunity to go to a better bowl, but I feel like this is a great opportunity for our team.”

The matchup will pit Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops against his alma mater. Stoops played for the Hawkeyes in the late 1980s and then was a graduate assistant under then-coach Hayden Fry.

The Wildcats are coming off their second nine-plus-win season in the last 37 years. Like Iowa, Kentucky started the season 6-0 before hitting a midseason snag. UK lost three straight games — one was to then-No. 1 Georgia and another was by three points to Tennessee — before winning its last three games.

It will be the Hawkeyes’ second trip to the Citrus Bowl in program history. They beat LSU, 30-25, when it was called Capital One Bowl.

“Citrus would be great because we haven't been there for a while,” Iowa athletics director Gary Barta said last month.

Citrus Bowl representatives frequently attended Iowa’s regular-season games, including the Hawkeyes’ win over then-No. 3 Penn State.

Iowa has been invited to bowls in nine consecutive seasons although the Jan. 1 game will be Iowa’s first bowl game since the 2019 Holiday Bowl. The team was supposed to play Missouri in the 2020 Music City Bowl, but a rise in COVID-19 cases in Missouri’s program axed the game.

“You see the banner up there in our indoor (facility), and it doesn’t say champions,” Belton said, referencing the Music City Bowl banner in the northwest corner of the practice field. “We want to go out here this year and definitely get a banner that says champions on it.”

The bowl will be a homecoming of sorts for Belton. He grew up in Tampa, which is about an hour-and-a-half from Camping World Stadium.

“It's definitely a great opportunity to be anywhere close to home,” Belton said, and “have a lot of family come to the games, especially being so far away from home in Iowa.”

The Hawkeyes’ last bowl that came off a Big Ten title game loss didn’t go so well. Stanford waltzed past Iowa, 45-16, in the Rose Bowl after the 2015 season.

“We weren't where we needed to be mentally or emotionally in that ball game,” Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz said. “We’ve got to do a better job as coaches.”

No opt-out conversations yet

Ferentz said he has not talked with potentially-NFL-bound players about whether they’ll opt out of the Citrus Bowl.

“We'll start having those conversations this week,” Ferentz said.

He “touched base with some guys” during Iowa’s bye week, but that’s it.

Iowa center Tyler Linderbaum, a projected first-round pick in many mock drafts, has little doubt about what he’s going to do. He’ll be heading to Orlando.

“Dumb question,” Linderbaum said lightheartedly to a reporter asking about it.

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