High time for Hawkeyes, and it’s gone on a while

Before plunging into a week of hype, hoop-dee-doo and hot gas about you-know-what, these numbers are presented for your consideration:

In its last seven Big Ten football games, Ohio State has seven wins and has outscored its opponents by an average of 20.4 points per game. Pretty dominant, no?

In its last seven Big Ten football games, Iowa has seven wins and has outscored its opponents by an average of 22.7 points per game.

Pretty dominant, no?

This may be one of those things that we weren’t fully aware of until it was well underway. Namely, Iowa may be playing some of its finest football of Kirk Ferentz’s 23 years as head coach, and it didn’t start with its 34-6 rout of Indiana Saturday.

When the Hawkeyes went 12-0 in the 2015 regular season, they outscored foes by 14.2 points per game and that was skewed by a 62-16 waltz over North Texas. Five of those victories were by one score.

When Iowa won its first nine games in 2009 on the way to an Orange Bowl triumph, the average margin of victory in that stretch was 9.9 points. Four of those wins were by three points or less.

The Hawkeyes went 10-3 and won their last four games in 2019, you know. They started 2020 with losses of four points at Purdue and one point to Northwestern, then unleashed the beast against everyone left in their path.

So that’s a 19-5 record since 2019, with no loss by more than a touchdown and 22 of the 24 opponents from Power Five conferences, Oh, there also was a 49-24 Holiday Bowl shellacking of USC.

In fact, the Hawkeyes won their last three games in 2018 including an Outback Bowl win over Mississippi State, so that’s 22 of the last 27.

The latest Iowa triumph was over an Indiana club ranked 17th, a spot higher than the Hawkeyes. Can you say “miscalculation?”

After several teams ranked ahead of Iowa fell in Week 1, the AP poll that comes out Tuesday will have the Hawkeyes up several spots from their preseason No. 18 ranking. If Iowa State slips from its No. 7 position, it won’t slip much.

Not only will the Hawkeyes and Cyclones collide as two AP ranked teams for the first time in series history, they’ll both be ranked in the top half of the Top 25.

The only cooler to this heated week is Iowa State having struggled mightily to post a 16-10 home win over Northern Iowa.

Overrated at No. 7 in the preseason, some are saying about the Cyclones. Too much praise for a team that had a very good 2020 season but has yet to prove it’s elite, they claim.

As always, when one game is in the books a lot of preseason gospel has left the church of college football.

To write off a hard-fought win over UNI as some sort of failure, though, shows either a woeful lack of knowledge about Panthers football or a willingness to ignore it.

UNI doesn’t own the Missouri Valley Football Conference the way it once did, mainly because the MVFC has unquestionably been the nation’s top FCS league. Three words: North Dakota State. FCS dynasty. You may remember a win it earned at Iowa in 2016.

Colorado State, which plays at Iowa on Sept. 25, lost at home to the MVFC’s South Dakota State Friday, 42-23.

UNI still brings it. It won two FCS playoff games and 10 overall in its last full year of play, 2019. It lost to Iowa State in triple-overtime to start that season.

You want a slow start that meant zip? Try Iowa, 2009. The Hawkeyes beat UNI 17-16 in their opener, and only because Iowa blocked two field goals in the final seven seconds. It will live forever as one of the craziest finishes in Hawkeye history.

No one saw Iowa proceeding from that to a 9-0 record, but it did.

Which brings us to what’s next. For the first time ever, maybe, Iowa-Iowa State is about more than all the hot gas. The winner will reside in the top 10 and can dream of touching the sky. The loser is ruined and won’t be heard from again.

(Iowa State beat Iowa in 2002, then the Hawkeyes went unbeaten in the Big Ten, but let’s not ruin the narrative.)

As the late UCLA football coach Red Sanders said, "Beating USC isn’t a matter of life and death; it’s much more important than that."

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com