Well, it's the bye week, nestled right in the middle of the 2022 regular season. Six games down, six to go. We've got half a season's worth of data to work with, then, and friends: the picture painted by the data is every bit as dire as you'd imagine.
Iowa has scored seven offensive touchdowns in 2022; 23 FBS players have scored more touchdowns by themselves this season.
The following statistics are all true. We considered putting a fake one in there too to see if readers could find it, but the reality is so grim that any joke scenario that's demonstrably worse would have to include negative points or in-game alien abductions.
Anyway, onward.
- There have been two games played in FBS this season where the winning team had fewer than 10 points. Iowa has played in both, and has a 1-1 record in them.
- Iowa is also the only FBS team to lose to a team that scored in single digits this season, as Iowa's one win on that front came against FCS South Dakota State.
- Every FBS game where the winning team has 10 points or fewer has involved Iowa and/or Iowa State, and KSU's win over ISU on Saturday is the only game that did not involve Iowa.
- Iowa is 3rd in the nation in scoring defense, allowing just 9.8 points per game. Iowa State, incidentally, is 9th. The top 10 teams in scoring defense, as a whole, are 42-10; Iowa and ISU have six of those 10 losses, while the other eight teams are a combined 36-4.
- Iowa is dead-last in the FBS in yards per game at 238.8, and is only one of three FBS teams to average fewer than 200 ypg passing and 100 ypg rushing. Iowa's only fellow travelers on this dreadful journey at the moment are 2-3 Temple (199.0, 83.8) and 1-4 Colorado State (172.2, 72.2).
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On 27 of Iowa's 70 drives* this season, Iowa has failed to gain a single first down. That's 38.6% of drives, or a higher average than every MLB batting leader since Tony Gwynn's .394 in 1993.
*Not counting kneel-outs or other willing attempts to end the half/game. It's even worse with them. - Iowa is 127th out of 131 FBS teams in scoring offense in 2022. Removing the 18 points for the two defensive touchdowns and safeties, Iowa has scored just 70 points in six games, or an FBS-worst 11.67 points per game.
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Iowa has scored seven* offensive touchdowns in 2022; 23 FBS players have scored more touchdowns by themselves this season. Iowa's seven TDs on offense are matched by 17 other FBS players, including one Purdue wide receiver named Charlie Jones.
*If you want to add the two defensive touchdowns from the Rutgers game, Iowa has nine, good enough to match Ohio State's Marvin Harrison, Jr.; all of his touchdowns have come on offense. - Iowa has rushed for 493 yards as a team. 38 FBS players have rushed for more yards, including two KSU players (Deuce Vaughn, Adrian Martinez). Fortunately, no one FBS player has as many receiving yards as Iowa's 940 passing yards, but Iowa's leading receiver Sam LaPorta currently ranks 181st among all receivers. He has no touchdowns this year.
- Iowa averages an FBS-worst 13.33 first downs per game, a hair behind old friends Colorado State and their 13.4. Happily, Iowa is only the tenth-worst FBS team in 3rd down conversion percentage, at a barn-burning 29.6%.
- Iowa is the only FBS team to not convert a fourth down this season; Iowa is 0-for-3 on its attempts.
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Tory Taylor has punted 41 times in six games, trailing only Jack Browning of San Diego State (42). By comparison, Minnesota has punted 8 times all year*. Taylor leads all punters with 322 punt yards per game.
*Minnesota was on its bye week last Saturday and thus only has five games' results to Iowa's six; we can't rule out that its upcoming trip to Illinois will bridge that 33-punt gap, though it seems moderately unlikely. - Iowa has six scoring drives of 50+ yards all year. Three resulted in field goals.
- Spencer Petras has the third-fewest rushing yards in the nation, with -94; only Indiana and Texas State's QBs have had worse seasons. Petras' six-yard QB sneak with 2:24 left in the third quarter was, at that point, Iowa's longest rush of the game; he followed it up shortly thereafter with a 16-yard scramble that would be eclipsed only by a 21-yard scamper by LeShon Williams later in that drive. Iowa would finish the drive, naturally, with a punt.
We'll stop the parade there; there's plenty more bad out there, but it's the mundane kind of mediocrity that we as fans have been inured to for decades by now.
The ineptitude above, though? This is a different type of bad, one we had been shielded from since the doldrums of the transitional years between Hayden Fry and Ferentz -- if not even longer, in the dark ages of the 1970s.
Spencer Petras: We cant keep doing this. It sucks scoring six points. We have to get better.
— David Eickholt (@DavidEickholt) October 9, 2022
This is a team that cannot move the ball at a level that competitive teams do. Kirk and Brian can talk about team efforts and complimentary football and the 2021 win total all they want. None of that moves the ball forward. None of that keeps the defense off the field. None of that punishes opponents for their mistakes.
Kirk Ferentz has already told us no midseason coaching changes will be coming; to expect or hope for otherwise is to willingly choose to suffer. As a wiser man once said, you may not like it, but accept it.
But as long as The Worst Show On Turf continues — and the coaching staff seems all too eager to assure us it will — it's going to continue hurting the team's wins and losses, draining the excitement from Kinnick Stadium and setting the stage for some extremely difficult offseason discussions.
We can't predict what those discussions are and how they'll go; Kirk's preference is obviously "change nothing." But that stubbornness does nothing for the program, nothing to drag it into the 21st century. All it does is burn through decades of goodwill, and force the fans — the ones who sold out the season in August, only to feel like they've been sold a bill of goods with what's been put on the field — to start focusing their attention on what's next for the program, not what's happening now.
The players on the field deserve better, and doing right by them starts by putting them in position to succeed for once. Anything less is coaching malpractice, and we've seen enough of that this year.
