How Iowa football’s resiliency fueled unexpected surge in Big Ten West

MINNEAPOLIS — Kirk Ferentz will be the first person to say he does not “know anything about gambling” and is “not advocating” for it.

But the 24th-year Iowa head coach gave a little retrospective gambling wisdom after his team won its fourth straight Big Ten game following a three-game losing streak.

“I’d guess if you put 10 bucks on us four weeks ago, you’d probably be OK,” Ferentz said. “It probably would have been a good deal. You’d probably have a hard time finding any takers on that one.”

Iowa now is the favorite to win the Big Ten West, with a 3-8 Nebraska team as the last one standing in the Hawkeyes’ way.

As Ferentz’s gambling talk alluded to, the comeback to a potential division title that’s now probable seemed rather improbable earlier in the season.

Even before Iowa’s three-game losing streak to Michigan, Illinois and Ohio State, ESPN’s Football Power Index gave the Hawkeyes only a 4.7 percent chance of winning the Big Ten West.

The low odds were despite an especially weak year for the Big Ten West, which has not had multiple teams ranked at the same time in the AP Top 25 this season.

Following Iowa’s bye week — after the Michigan and Illinois losses and before the inevitable Ohio State loss — ESPN’s FPI gave the Hawkeyes a 90.7 percent chance of beating Northwestern, 31.8 percent chance of beating Purdue, a 51.3 percent chance of beating Wisconsin and a 27.2 percent chance of beating Minnesota.

All football factors aside, the odds of four things with those probabilities all happening are about 4 percent.

But that’s exactly what Iowa accomplished. The Hawkeyes won all four games, and they went from being tied for last in the division to being one win away from the division title.

“People wanted to cancel our season,” linebacker Seth Benson said. “I heard Jack (Campbell) say no one believed in us. But we believed in ourselves. We never quit.”

Quarterback Spencer Petras described the turnaround as a “really special” journey.

“This team has been through quite a bit,” Petras said. “Our ability to be resilient and continue to push the thing through has been pretty cool to see.”

Petras said the resiliency is a “testament to our team’s culture.”

“It starts with our head coach and his leadership,” Petras said. “I also just can’t say enough about our leaders on defense.”

Petras recognized he and the offense put the defense in “a lot of really, really, rough, rough spots” when Iowa lost four weeks ago to Ohio State.

“It’d be easy for a unit to kind of turn on the offense, but they didn’t,” Petras said. “They certainly didn’t. They just continued to go to work.”

Iowa’s offensive players were not in a feel-good position either at that point in the season.

“It’d be easy for an offensive unit to kind of give up after that (Ohio State) game,” Petras said. “It’d be easy for an offensive line unit to give up after the game they had last week. … But that’s not what we do.”

Iowa has more work to do before celebrating its turnaround too much, though.

Iowa’s late-season resiliency will be much less memorable if Iowa loses to Nebraska next week. It’d finish without a trip to Indianapolis and at 7-5 — what would be the team’s worst regular-season record since 2017.

Extending the current winning streak to five games, on the other hand, would complete the comeback story of a 3-4 team that was a national punch line for its ineffective offense to winning a division title.

“You got one more and got to go finish it out,” Petras said, “because we got a hell of a lot to play for.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com