By Blake Dowson | [email protected]

It sure feels like football season.

Freshmen have been living in the dorms for about a week now, students are going to class for the third day today, and every once in a while, there will be a wind that blows through Iowa City that makes it feel like the middle of the fall.

This Saturday will definitely feel like a football Saturday, and the safe bet is to assume plenty of students around campus will celebrate as such (probably as early as 6 a.m.), but there are still 10 more days until the Hawkeyes kick off against Miami (Ohio) on Sept. 3.

But don’t worry Iowa fans — the Hawkeyes feel your pain.

“Everybody is back on campus, and we’ve been going against just each other for so long,” junior Ben Niemann said at Tuesday’s media session. “We’re all just itching to go play.”

Every player at Tuesday’s media session noted that the wait for the first game is getting long.

The team starts in the spring, hitting each other and watching film of each other. Then summer camp starts, and they hit each other and watch film of each other. Now that fall practice has started, well, you can probably guess whom they have been hitting.

Football practice isn’t particularly fun. There’s a lot of drilling, conditioning, and scheming involved. Playing in front of 70,000 fans on Saturdays make that worth it, but the Hawkeyes have spent plenty of weeks drilling, conditioning, and scheming without a game since Jan. 1.

That being said, head coach Kirk Ferentz was quick to point out there are still a lot of logistics to figure out before Miami comes to Iowa City.

“Whether it’s offense, defense, special teams included, we just have a lot of decisions to make and guys to look at,” Ferentz said. “It’s been Iowa vs. Iowa through today; that will continue Thursday, Friday, and we’ll maybe do a little bit of scout work at the end of the week here to get that process going, but we won’t worry about our next opponent until next week, like we always do.”

The Hawkeyes held an intrasquad scrimmage on Aug. 19 to give them some in-game looks, but again, they are still hitting the same guys.

The scrimmage was invaluable for sophomore defensive end Parker Hesse, who said he picked up on a lot of techniques that he still needs to work on.

“Watching film, there are just always a lot of corrections, a lot of technique stuff we have to improve on as individuals and as a unit,” he said. “First and foremost, we’re just trying to bring energy to the defense, and by doing that, elevating the play of all the groups around us.”

There’s still a lot of ground to cover before the team locks hands and swarms out of the tunnel to “Back in Black” in 10 days, and offensive coordinator Greg Davis voiced his concern on Tuesday about the consistency of his group during practice.

Things need to start clicking on all cylinders before game day, and the team isn’t there yet, frankly.

“The big thing is consistency,” Davis said. “We’re not near consistent enough right now. There will be two or three really good looking, really sharp plays, and then we’ll jump offside or somebody will blow something.”

So there is work to be done. But with classes starting, students and players alike start to hear marching bands play in their heads and the I-O-W-A chant bouncing from corner to corner in Kinnick Stadium.

Compared with when the team started spring ball, the season is practically upon them. But for them, the final week before they finally get to hit someone else can last forever.

“When school starts, you get that itch. We want to play a game. It’s kind of like [we’re] holding it back a bit,” junior offensive lineman Ike Boettger said. “But we still have another week and a half and we have a lot of work to do before that first game.”

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