The Iowa football team doesn’t care about style points as long as the wins keep piling up.
By Ryan Rodriguez   |   [email protected]

After an uninspired second half of football against Maryland that saw the 8-0 Hawkeyes take their foot off of the gas and nearly let the Terrapins creep back in to the game, it appears that fatigue is starting to find a home in Iowa City.

The Hawks’ star quarterback hobbled and their offensive line in almost constant flux, the last three weeks have shown the Hawks can still win without putting together their best 60 minutes of football.

Or perhaps even their best 30.

While victories over Maryland, Illinois, and Northwestern at times looked ugly, the Hawkeyes insist that they have no room for style points, especially this late in the season.

“You’ve heard me say it a lot. Style points, this may be stupid on my part, but style points really don’t count with us,” head coach Kirk Ferentz said. “We’re trying to win. That’s our goal every time we go out there.”

It’s a tad strange that in the era of New Kirk, Ferentz isn’t thinking about style.

That style — explosive plays, fake kicks, etc. — earned the Hawks some attention in the early part of the season before Iowa’s continued strain of success began to speak for itself. C.J. Beathard’s miraculous gallops downfield and deep-ball passes had fans both stunned and delighted the first four weeks of the season.

Fast-forward to the present, and a much more battered, grizzled team remains. At this juncture, Iowa is a team for which ugly wins and blowouts mean the same thing.

“I don’t really look at it as, ‘Oh, we have to beat this team by so many points,’ ” Beathard said. “It doesn’t matter because any conference game is going to be a tough win; you can’t expect anything, so you have to approach them the same.”

Maybe it’s a result of a cynical college football atmosphere recently, but it’s probably unfair to expect a team, any team, to be able to put together the same kind of start-to-finish statement wins in the ninth week that they did in the fifth week.

Injuries and fatigue are a natural part of the game. And in a conference with as much parity as the Big Ten, the hurdles only get bigger as the season drags on.

“There are a lot of good teams in the conference, and no one is all that much better than another team,” Beathard said. “That’s why each win is precious. It doesn’t matter how you get there or what it looks like, as long as it counts in the victory column.”

There’s something to be said for teams not feeding into outside opinion, and much to their credit, the Hawks as a whole have done a nice job of blocking out some of the newfound national attention. Not just off the field but on it as well.

The Hawks are committed to the process, whatever that process has been throughout the year.

But at this point that means sacrificing style for the sake of strength.

“You’re going to have off days, everyone does,” wide receiver Tevaun Smith said. “But getting the win is all that matters for us.”

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