I am officially opening up my recruitment!

Thank you & God Bless pic.twitter.com/Q3qILK12ni

— EB5™ (@eno_benjamin5) October 23, 2016

You may have heard the Hawkeyes had a game yesterday. They won. Patrolling the interwebz reveals that there is a bit of discomfort within the fanbase. Unfulfilled expectations of a 30+ point beatdown with plenty of reserves in the second half left some fans wondering if the #17 Hawkeyes lived up to its hype. So let’s take a look. What went right and what went wrong in the Hawkeyes’ opening game?

What went right?

Special Teams: I will actually start with what I thought was an underrated aspect of the game. News flash: Ron Coluzzi has a leg. The graduate transfer boomed touchback after touchback on kickoffs and had three punts for a respectable 41.7 average, with a long of 50 yards. I wasn’t crazy about the rugby style punt since it seemed to take away from his natural power. Regardless, any potential return game that Miami had was neutralized. And then Keith Duncan was 6/6 on extra points and had a field goal. New Kirk didn’t let him kick a 35ish yarder in the second half when he opted to go for it on 4th and 6, but I think that is more on Kirk than Duncan.

Running Game: The two-headed monster of Akrum Wadley and LeShun Daniels took care of business. As expected, the offensive line imposed their will on an overmatched front 7 from Miami and pushed Wadley and Daniels to 22 attempts, 204 yards, and 4 touchdowns. Not a lot to report here, other than in watching the Iowa State game, they really struggled to stop the UNI rushing attack. Granted, UNI is a spread rushing attack instead of power-style. Regardless, Iowa should have a solid advantage here next week.

Hard hits and fumbles: The Hawkeyes forced three fumbles, which made up for allowing way too many yards. I didn’t keep a tally, but there were several times where I was impressed with the hard-hitting and physical nature of the Hawks defense. Having said that, Brandon Snyder’s tackling will need to improve. Like a young Jordan Lomax before him, he focused alot on the big hit instead of wrapping up and planting the runner. He will learn, but he may get burned on that a few times against the Justin Jackson’s and Corey Clement’s of the world.

Photo by Matthew Holst/Getty Images

Anthony Nelson and Jack Hockaday: Good to see the newcomers contribute, although Hockaday wasn’t exactly planned. These two have lots to work on, but their ceiling appears to be relatively high. I thought A. Nelson greatly outplayed M. Nelson strictly in the pass rush. Hockaday did an admirable job filling in for Josey Jewell with 6 tackles and a forced fumble.

What went wrong?

Greg Mabin: Ok I hesitate to pick on Mabin here. When the Jim Thorpe award winner is on the other side of the field, you will naturally get thrown at more than him. Having said that, Mabin was pretty late in his break on the ball many times and his size should have been adequate to somewhat neutralize the big Miami receivers. But Mabin was picked on, and picked on a lot. To be sure, a lack of a pass rush and schemes that didn’t provide much safety help didn’t do Mabin any favors. But my fear is that next week, Iowa State will constantly line up Allen Lazard on Mabin’s side of the field and throw to him until Iowa stops it.

Photo by Matthew Holst/Getty Images

Short passing defense: This kinda goes hand-in-hand with the Mabin piece, but despite Miami surprisingly gaining 158 yards on the ground, I was never really worried about that. What was frustrating was Miami being able to comfortably dink-and-dunk its way down the field, the way many inferior opponents have been able to do against Iowa in the past. Allowing 424 yards to a team that was near the bottom of the MAC last year is pretty indefensible. I would throw a caveat in here though. With Jewell’s almost-immediate ejection, the defense was forced to run a 4-3 base, cover 2 nearly every play the remainder of the game. I can only recall maybe one blitz from Iowa the entire game. Iowa’s DL is not good enough to generate a solid rush on its own, so it will need some help. UNI was able to trash ISU’s inexperienced OL by blitzing the crap out of them. Once again, I fear Iowa will not play that game and exploit that weakness.

No play action or Kittle: The offense was kept pretty vanilla, in the same way the defense was. Fortunately, the offense was further along than the defense at this point. The offense in the first half looked sharp and crisp. And then Old Kirk made an appearance and kept everything simple in the second half. One of the more frustrating things for me was next-to-no play action and only one target to George Kittle. Those are two very important weapons in the Iowa offense arsenal and they were not used nearly enough, in my opinion. Of course, Kirk and Greg Davis may have just been content with the running game doing its thing and going from there.

All in all, it was a win, although the feeling was kinda ‘meh.’ No rational fan was ever really worried, but we all wanted to see a bit more probably. Bring on the Clones next week and give new coach Matt Campbell a proper introduction to Kinnick Stadium.

Just four days stand between now and the start of Iowa football season, and since the two-deeps were released last week, there has been speculation over who’s going to see playing time where, which freshman will see the field and what’s going on with the quarterback/kicking situation.

Kirk Ferentz addressed those questions and more in his presser leading up to Miami, and he also took the opportunity to dwell on an Iowa team from 10 years ago, surprisingly.

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There were questions over who C.J. Beathard might be throwing to this season, and when Jay Scheel appeared in front of Jerminic Smith—with Riley McCarron earning a starting role—on the depth chart, we got a look at who might be catching the ball this year:

But I think we've made good strides. Matt VandeBerg has been a good player for us for a long time. If you talk about improved players, Riley McCarron really did a nice job for us on a lot of levels last year, but I think we've really seen him take a big step. I think he was a better player in the spring than he was last fall, and certainly he's taken another step forward, so he's really done a good job against some really good players out there in camp, and that's encouraging.

Jay Scheel is making progress, and I think the rest of the younger guys are stepping forward, too, but how ready we are I think we'll find out Saturday, but I think we're making progress there.

I like the idea of C.J. building a rapport with a young guy like Scheel, while still having guys like VandeBerg and George Kittle around as a security blanket. And if McCarron really has improved that much, all the better, though I am a little skeptical.

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Eight freshman on the two-deeps was talked about on the interwebs. A lot. So reporters did their jobs and asked Kirk how that came to be, and how many will actually see playing time on Saturday. That answer probably hinges on whether Iowa is up 50 points at half, or just 30:

How they're going to play Saturday or beyond, who knows. How many will play Saturday or beyond, who knows that, either. But I think it's fair to say we'll have a bigger number than normal. Based on what we've seen in practice, we're really optimistic they'll play well, and we're going to need that to have a good football team.

One of those true freshman could be quarterback Nathan Stanley, who currently has a weird and/or thing going on with Tyler Wiegers:

We haven't made that decision yet. It's kind of like any of those slashes right now, those are both basically coin tosses at this point.

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The last time Iowa and Miami squared off, Ben Roethlisberger was quarterbacking the Redhawks, while Iowa had Nathan Chandler under center. The year before that, Brad Banks was slinging for the Hawkeyes when they squared off against Roethlisberger. And that’s when Kirk opened up the history book.

It really was. I'll go back to the year before, and you remember that just as well. We were lucky to get out of there with a victory. It was really -- that was a tough day. I think their quarterback threw about 70 passes and I think 60 of them went to the right side that day if I recall right, and we had to really fight, and I remember Brad Banks making a great completion down the middle that really kind of ignited us.

As it turns out, that was a really good football team. Both those years they were really good. That was a big win certainly, and what their quarterback went on and has done is really impressive. Yeah, it was a good effort on all parts for us.

Roethlisberger did in fact sling it a lot—51 times! In that game in 2002. Let’s just look at that box score for fun:

 

Oh baby.

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People have always been knocking the fact Iowa doesn’t play some foe from the SEC or Big 12 in a glitzy game to kick off a season, and yeah well it’s not our fault Iowa State is Iowa State.

Someone brought that up to Kirk, and I can’t really argue with his answer:

You know, we've got 12 games scheduled. We play in a really good conference. My guess is we're going to -- every one of the 12 games will be challenging. Just look back last year, we were relaxed in one game in the fourth quarter a little bit, but after that it's college football. So to count on games like that, that's still iffy, if you think those are going to happen. If they happen, great, but you'd better expect a real battle, and I think you just have to look historically, it's kind of the nature of football as you look around.

You know, we'll get plenty of excitement all season long. Hopefully we'll be ready to go Saturday.

Ferentz is right here. Iowa already has its hands full with a schedule that includes Michigan, Northwestern, Penn State and the conference championship, and locking in Iowa State every year doesn’t lend much in the way of flexibility. Teams still need to play tune-up games (and I’ll argue all day that NDSU is better than around 50 percent of mid-majors) so I’m pretty sick of hearing about schedules, and he probably is too.

HawkeyeNation- Be on the lookout!!!
We are adding another member to #Swarm17 tomorrow @ 3:30 ‼️‼️‼️

— Eno Benjamin™ (@eno_benjamin5) August 10, 2016

Former Texas Longhorns offensive coordinator Greg Davis, who now holds the same position with the Iowa Hawkeyes, isn’t exactly known for bombastic statements, but he certainly dropped one recently with his statement about his current quarterback, senior CJ Beathard.

“I think he has a chance to be the best I’ve ever coached,” Davis said on a local radio station. “He’s got a wonderful feel for the game. We give him a lot of flexibility. He’s fixing to get a lot more flexibility because we feel like he’s ready to handle that and do a lot more at the line of scrimmage.”

While claiming that Beathard could be the best quarterback Davis has coached in his four years in Iowa City is one thing, claiming that Beathard could be better than Vince Young and Colt McCoy?

That seems like something veering on the blasphemous considering that Young was ranked the best college football player of the BCS era by Athlon Sports in 2014 and McCoy was the winningest quarterback in college football history at the end of his tenure in Austin.

And that’s the shortest summation possible to acknowledge the incredible careers that both players had in burnt orange.

Let’s at least call it some outsized hyperbole. That seems about as charitable as possible.

To be sure, Beathard is a fine player who had a good 2015 season in the improbable run to the Rose Bowl for Iowa, having dealt with numerous injuries throughout the year. But his passer rating sat at No. 40 nationally and he struggled against ranked teams, throwing four touchdowns and four interceptions in those four games.

In that Rose Bowl appearance, he didn’t exactly have a positive impact on the proceedings in the blowout at the hands of Stanford, in sharp contrast to the two consecutive transcendent performances by Young.

We can’t speculate on what Davis might be smoking up in the cornfields of flyover country, but he should probably just diagram some new variations on his favored horizontal passes and dial down the rhetoric before a horde of Longhorns fans descend on him with pitchforks and righteous indignation.

If you're the type who likes to plan ahead, good news -- more information about the 2016 Iowa football schedule fell into place on Monday. The Big Ten officially announced the start times and TV listings for every game in the first three weeks of the season. We already knew that information for one of Iowa's three games during that stretch (Iowa's Week 2 game against Iowa State was previously announced as a primetime kickoff on BTN), but now we know when (and where on the TV dial) Iowa's 2016 season is going to officially get underway: 2:30 PM CT on ESPNU on September 3rd.  We also know when Iowa's potentially scary game against North Dakota State will kick off: 11 AM CT on ESPN or ESPN2 on September 17th.  Maybe the Bison will be sleepy at that early hour.

In all, we know the start times for just over half of Iowa's regular season games this fall (7/12) and the TV assignments for just under half of those same games (5/12).  The full listings are available below:

WEEK	OPPONENT	TIME (CT)	TV
9/3/16	Miami (OH)	2:30 PM	ESPNU
9/10/16	Iowa State	6:30 PM	BTN
9/17/16	North Dakota State	11:00 AM	ESPN/ESPN2
9/24/16	at Rutgers	TBA	TBA
10/1/16	Northwestern	11:00 AM	TBA
10/8/16	at Minnesota	TBA	TBA
10/15/16	at Purdue	11:00 AM	TBA
10/22/16	Wisconsin	TBA	TBA
10/29/16	BYE	n/a	n/a
11/5/16	at Penn State	6:30 PM	BTN
11/12/16	Michigan	7:00 PM	ABC/ESPN/ESPN2
11/19/16	at Illinois	TBA	TBA
11/25/16	Nebraska	TBA	TBA

The remaining games on Iowa's schedule will likely kick off at either 11 AM or 2:30 PM, although ESPN and BTN have both experimented with non-traditional start times in recent years, so those times aren't locked in -- it's not inconceivable that Iowa could wind up with something 1 PM start or a 3:30 PM start.

The information for the Iowa-Nebraska game is not set, but if at least one of the teams is still playing for something (like, say, a Big Ten West championship), then there's a pretty good chance that it will be a 2:30 PM kickoff. TV-wise, nothing has been officially announced yet, but that game has aired on ABC every year since it became an annual fixture when Nebraska joined the league in 2011 and there's been no indication of that stopping anytime soon.

One other thing we do know: none of the TBA start times will be night games.  The Big Ten's entire night game schedule is locked into place now and there will be no further additions during the season.

The start times and TV assignments for Iowa's remaining 2016 games won't be announced until the season is underway -- 6-12 days prior to kickoff for each game, to be more precise.  So the information you see in the table above is the most that we'll have until mid-September.