Hlas: No spring fever this year for Hawkeyes at Kinnick

By Mike Hlas, The Gazette

IOWA CITY — An Iowa sports information official estimated the crowd at Iowa's spring football game Saturday at 8,000.

Were that the case, there were 12,000 people at the Cedar Rapids Titans' indoor football game Saturday night at the U.S. Cellular Center, 10,000 at the Nebraska-Iowa baseball game here Saturday afternoon, and 500 in my living room Saturday night to watch boxing on HBO.

The gathering at Kinnick Stadium was less than 8,000, but let's not make a federal case out of it. For one thing, inflating spring game crowd-counts is a time-honored tradition at many schools. Not Ohio State (99,391 this year), Nebraska (76,881), Penn State (68,000), Michigan (60,000) or Michigan State (48,000), but many others.

For another, the weather here was flat-out lousy. It was windy and cold after a lot of rain Friday night and Saturday morning. To be here this day, you had to be family or friends of the players, or an Iowa football fanatic. Many of them checked out at halftime and missed the Hawkeyes' lone touchdown of the day.

The intimate gathering, however, symbolized where the Iowa program is as it works to rebuild two areas. The first is the stature of the team itself, coming off a 7-6 season and a belly flop of a finish. The other is the affection of the fan base.

Had the Hawkeyes barreled through last season and capped things with a bravura performance at a bowl game, many more fans would have endured Saturday's windchill to feel warmer inside just by watching Iowa's players bump shoulder pads into each other.

'The fans at Iowa want to support the football team,' Hawkeyes Coach Kirk Ferentz said after Saturday's event. 'Our job is to give them a reason to support it.'

Truer words were never spoken. Alas, no number of words or perfect combination of them will make this year's season-ticket sales compare favorably to last season's. Still, you can't stop preaching to the true-believers first, then try to literally win the affection of the show-me types during the season.

Ferentz will stand before an I-Club crowd in West Des Moines Tuesday to give a stump speech that he hopes will help keep the true-believers in the flock. He'll do the same between now and June 8 in Mason City, Newton, Omaha, Keystone, Clinton, Burlington, Dubuque, Okoboji and Davenport. What will he say?

'I'm still working on it,' he said.

'In a nutshell ... pretty much what I told you back in January. None of us walked out of the stadium happy back in Jacksonville or certainly in Kinnick in our last ballgame (against Nebraska on Very Black Friday). We're disappointed. Neither of those games were representative of what we want to be or who we want to be.

'We can talk about that all we want, but our focus has been on let's do something about it. Let's see what we can do to change things and get better as a group.'

The switch to C.J. Beathard at quarterback is the story of the season. Beathard looked like you'd expect Saturday. He showed off his mighty throwing arm, but the all-around savvy will have to surface later. And, like every QB on earth, he'll desperately need offensive tackles who give him a chance to succeed.

'We had some physical mistakes like missing balls today,' Beathard said. 'It sucks, but it doesn't bother me as much because I know I can make the throws. I just missed them.'

'A lot's been written and said about him,' said Ferentz, 'but the bottom line is he hasn't played a lot in games over the last couple years. The good news is that he's prepared for that. If we were playing tomorrow, I think he'd be ready to go.'

But the Hawkeyes aren't playing tomorrow, and that's a good thing. Because absence makes the heart grow fonder. The public around these parts may need a few more football-free months for its hearts to rewarm.

See you in September. Maybe.

Comments: (319) 368-8840; mike.hlas@thegazette.com

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