Like many other things, I never got around to commenting on the Iowa Hawkeyes’ win over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the Orange Bowl last Tuesday. It certainly deserves comment; it was UI’s biggest bowl victory in fifty years. I didn’t realize we’d had that big of a drought in “major” bowl games, but there we were on the BCS stage, shutting down the supposedly formidable GT triple-option.
I didn’t have any idea what to expect, since Iowa hadn’t faced anything like Tech’s offense. But DC Norm Parker had the defense well coached and ready to go. Shocked me, really, how ready we were for them. It really did cap a season that might have been, as Yahoo Sports’ Matt Hinton wrote last week, Kirk Ferentz’ best coaching job ever. And at #7 in the AP poll, it’s Iowa’s highest season-ending rank under Ferentz. If the ridiculously-early-2010-preseason polls are to be believed, we’ll start out next in the top twelve. CollegeFootballTalk has us at #5. And that would give us a real shot at a national title run, given our number of returning starters and a more favorable schedule.
In the meantime, we can just bask in an 11-win season, and be comforted that, unlike some people, Ferentz seems to know what Tony Dungy said on NBC the other night. It’s a lot harder to coach 25-year-old millionaires than broke 19-year-olds.
