Saturday, September 13, 2008

Early Iowa Thoughts

Since Directv has a million sports channels I thought I would take a look at next week's opponents Iowa. That probably was a bad idea in terms of entertainment value because Iowa plays an extremely boring brand of football. I just turned the game off after they put up a big stop inside their 5 yard line. I'm not sure how good Iowa St. is but Iowa didn't look impressive at all. 

Iowa is a very physical team and that is about it. They have a big offensive line which could cause our defensive line the same types of problems that Buffalo did. Their running back Shonn Greene is pretty good but their offense is toothless due to horrible quarterback play. The starter Stanzi played a terrible game and they brought in the backup Christensen who played ok. There offense shouldn't cause us many problems but with their size and focus on the running game we need to see a much better defense line.

I only got to see two defensive series for the Hawkeye's but the defense looked fairly good. They seem to be lacking speed so hopefully we could see Shady get his first big game. 

This game is completely winnable but with the way the season has played out I don't know what to expect. With the style of play this could be a hard football game to watch.

8 comments:

thedanglingconversation said...

just keep one thing in mind: the rain in Iowa today might play a role in Iowa's gameplan and overall speed today...just a thought

Unknown said...

Iowa, in their first two games, obliterated there opponents.

J Jones said...

If we lose to Iowa it will be worse than losing to Bowling Green, in terms of actual on field ability. Iowa is going to lose a bunch of games in a really bad Big Ten. A competent team would blow them out but with what we have it will be either close or a loss.

Our schedule could have more bad teams than any BCS conference team has ever had. It seems ridiculous that a really mediocre Iowa team is coming in here next week 3-0 and we are only 2-1 and I'm convinced we are heavy underdogs.

College football is really just the SEC, USC, and three Big 12 teams right? Everybody else doesn't matter it seems.

J Jones said...

PS Syracuse is the worst team in a BCS conference ever. They couldn't have played worse against PSU today.

johnny said...

After taking in a bunch of yesterday's games and scores, am I the only one walking away with the impression of how terrible so many teams are this year regardless of conference affiliation?

Don't get me wrong, both USC and Oklahoma were doing their best Ivan Drago to tOSU and UW's respective Apollo Creed.

But I keep coming back to a paradox that Brian nailed in a post a few days ago. Regarding Pitt's situation, going into this year, 7-5 seemed like it would be disappointing but acceptable in terms of progress. Now that we have seen how terrible teams like Navy, Cuse, and ND are, we seem to have intuitively elevated our expectations of "acceptable" to 9 wins relative to the poor schedule.

Anyway, hope attendance is 50k+ this weekend. I should be able to catch most of the game at the bar and then off to Doak Campbell to see who is real between the Noles and Weak Forest.

Unknown said...

johnny, no, you're not the only one. So far it seems to be a down year. Same thing was also mentioned on that other popular Pitt blog.

DPJ said...

It's ok to link them.

www.pittblather.com


They are friends of ours.

Unknown said...

Haha, thanks, I figured it was, but didn't to be on the safe side.