Over the weekend in college football, the #4 ranked Iowa Hawkeyes were shocked at home by the 5-4 Northwestern Wildcats. The loss ended their dream run at a national championship and prompted many to finally learn what most of us already knew, the Hawkeyes lived on a wing and a prayer this season.
The Hawkeyes needed a couple of fourth quarter comebacks against average Big Ten opponents along with stealing a win against Northern Iowa to vault themselves into national contention. They were that annoying pretty girl at a party that someone always invites. They had no substance but their record was nice to look at.
Mainly now, Iowa fans are expecting me to bash their team through the rest of this post but I'm not going to since I really actually wanted to like their team. They had a charismatic quarterback in Ricky Stanzi, the frankness of head coach Kirk Ferentz and a tough as nails defense. The team just never got to a point where I thought they deserve a shot at the national championship. I can see it in teams like TCU/Florida/Texas but not Iowa. When you have to comeback to win in more than a 1/3 of your games, it just shows that the level of competition is either lacking or your team isn't very good to stabilize during an entire football game. What eventually irked me the most was the BCS computer polls.
The polls ranked Iowa as the best team in the nation. I'm one of the few stanch BCS supporters left and even this had me swaying my vote to a playoff. How can a computer determine a team that barely squeaked by opponents as the best team in the nation? It's not like there were teams that weren't better: Texas, Florida, and Alabama. This again proves the fact that computers can't actually watch games but instead just spit out a ranking based on strength of schedule, etc. I thought that style points were to supposed to mean something, BCS.
At least, we will not have to worry about the doomsday scenario that could vaulted a Florida-Iowa title game. (Some of you may note that Iowa almost beat Florida in the Outback Bowl back in 2006, but that was almost three years ago so I think we can throw that out.)
Iowa became a victim of the BCS computers, it's a strange concept. You had fans who really did not care about Iowa football root against Iowa to lose so that their team could vault themselves up in the standings. The Hawkeyes eventually brought back the point of what do we college football fans look for in champion, a lucky team that stays undefeated or a team that purely annihilated it's opponents.
For now, Northwestern vanquished the Hawkeyes and set clock back to midnight. In the end, isn't that how it should have been?
The Iowa Hawkeyes leave the BCS Title Dance
