The good, bad and ugly moments in Iowa football’s season finale at Nebraska

IOWA CITY — It always feels good beating a rival, but to do it in a dominant way? That makes it sweeter.

“It definitely feels good when you have a good win,” Hawkeye running back Kamari Moulton said. “It's a good team win, and everybody works so hard. It's a great feeling to end off with a game like today.”

Iowa football’s 40-16 win at Nebraska closed out the regular season with three trophy victories and positions the Hawkeyes in the top half of the Big Ten. It’s a game with emotion involved, where the senior players bid farewell to the final known collegiate games of their careers, but also a game of pride.

And there’s a lot for Iowa to be proud of this season.

“I just really appreciate that it's a long road,” head coach Kirk Ferentz said. “To get only 12 chances to compete that are guaranteed, it's a lot of work that goes into it. It's been easy to work with these guys, proud of how they competed and how they fought.”

Now there’s nothing else left to do but wait to see where the Hawkeyes are headed for their bowl game sometime in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, here are the key good, bad and ugly moments from Iowa’s win against the Big Red:

The good

DJ Vonnahme’s touchdown pass

The story of redshirt freshman DJ Vonnahme is one that’ll snowball throughout the impending offseason. Starting off his Hawkeye career as a walk-on, he ends the 2025 season as quarterback Mark Gronowski’s leading receiver. Vonnahme’s recorded 288 receiving yards and scored two touchdowns in the last four games of the regular season.

His 35-yard touchdown catch against the Cornhuskers was not only the team’s longest touchdown pass of the season, it was also the score that opened the floodgates for the rest of the Hawkeyes’ offense.

“We were running through it all week,” Vonnahme said of his play. “And we knew that they double-teamed outside guys. So I just wanted to quick turn-around, get vertical.”

Vonnahme took the starting tight end position in four games this season, catching 22 passes.

The bad

A bad kickoff bounce

In a play that could’ve ended in disaster, Iowa’s special teams watched as the ball hit the turf after Nebraska scored a field goal to tie the game at 10. The muffed play resulted in the Cornhuskers recovering the ball deep in Iowa territory, bringing the Hawkeye defense right back onto the field.

The play got the roaring Memorial Stadium faithful right back into the game. Granted, after The Kiligan’s “The Cornhusker” was played, the Hawkeyes made sure Nebraska stayed pretty quiet through the rest of the game. Iowa held the Huskers to another field goal, and shortly thereafter, the Hawkeyes added a 3-yard rushing touchdown by Moulton.

The ugly

Johnson’s 70-yard dash

The first 15 minutes was as typical for an Iowa-Nebraska football game as it gets, except normally, the major plays that happened in Friday’s first quarter are spread out over 60 minutes.

One of the five drives Nebraska had in the opening frame included the Cornhuskers’ only touchdown of the game, a 1-yard punch-in by running back Emmett Johnson.

That’s not the ugly. It’s the 70-yard run Johnson had just one play before.

The Cornhusker running back is one of the best rushers in the country, and he recorded a career-high 217 rushing yards all by himself; he had well over half that number in the first quarter.

Ferentz made sure to give Johnson his flowers at the end of the game, because in most cases, the Hawkeyes needed two or three defenders to bring him to the ground.

“We had tremendous respect for number 21, he's a really good football player,” Ferentz said postgame. “We had a hard time tackling him, you know, so he ran the ball really well, popped the one real big run ... That was a really big play for them.”

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