2026 Preview: Iowa

Last season Iowa landed a moderately high-profile quarterback (Mark Gronowski, Walter Payton Award winner) via the transfer portal, generating lots of excitement over what Iowa might be able to accomplish if its always top-notch defense and special teams were augmented by a credible passing attack. 

In my preview of last season's Hawks I wrote: "I'm just not sure it ever really matters who's playing quarterback for Kirk Ferentz." That wasn't a cynical statement. That's just my observation of the entire Ferentz era. His goal is for victory to never come down to one player's performance across an entire game. That's a lot of what "complementary football" is all about. I'll admit I thought adding a seasoned quarterback was a good move, but I was not sure it was going to be the difference-maker some thought it would be.

I'm not saying I was right ... but Iowa finished the regular season 8-4 like it usually does, so yes, I was right. It really doesn't matter who is playing quarterback for Iowa, because Iowa's offense is designed not to depend on any one person's performance. It's exactly what one might expect from a coach who raised his profile with the mid-Nineties Browns and Ravens and thus once had a QB room with Vinny Testaverde and Eric Zeier in it.

This is not to dismiss Gronowski. He played well enough, improved as the season progressed, helped Iowa start tearing down the legend of Diego Pavia in the Hey Google What Do They Call That Bowl Game In Tampa That Iowa Always Winds Up Playing In? Bowl, was the MVP of the Shrine Game, and is (at least right now) on the Miami Dolphins roster.

But I digress. Experience has taught me that me being spectacularly right about something is just a prelude to me being even more spectacularly wrong about something else. Thus, we move on to ...

The Big Question: Where will the Hawkeyes be at, mentally and physically, on the morning of Saturday, October 10? The season starts with home games against Northern Illinois, Iowa State, and Northern Iowa, a/k/a "the three closest possible opponents to Iowa City." 

Don't @ me about Drake. The last time the Hawkeyes and Bulldogs played was in 1985. Iowa won that game 58-0 and Drake was still awarding football scholarships back then. Also don't @ me about Wisconsin. DeKalb is 16 miles closer to Iowa City than Madison is.

Then Iowa travels to Michigan, hosts Ohio State, and travels to Seattle to face Washington ... on October 9, which is a Friday night. I don't know that I have ever seen a tougher three-game stretch for this team, and I've been following it since 1979.

My guess at the answer: The Hawks will find themselves 3-3 on October 10 and not receiving votes, but they won't be particularly distressed. The back half of the season is not a gimme but it is a lot less difficult.

Key games:

• Iowa State, Sept. 12. This is always a key game for Iowa, but this year with Jimmy Rogers new on the sidelines in Ames, knowing that nothing will get him in Cy's good graces faster than beating Iowa in Kinnick, this game is unusually dangerous, no matter how little respect Rogers and his Cyclones are getting in the presason. And brother/sister/sibling, they aren't getting very much.
• at Michigan, Sept. 26. Of the three-game gauntlet, I think this is the one the Hawkeyes have the best chance of stealing. Normally I'd give the Hawks a slightly better chance of beating Washington, but the Hawks will be playing on a short week, traveling two times zones west, right after a game that I have penciled in as a near-certain defeat. I don't know if Iowa can actually win in the Big House, but this is a team that played Indiana to within five points last season, and the Wolverines aren't the 2025 Hoosiers.

AI-Generated Joke about the Hawkeyes:

Why did the Iowa Hawkeyes bring a stopwatch to the pumpkin patch?

Because they heard they were great at running out the clock with zero offensive output!

When my daughters were little -- real little, like 4 or 5 years old -- they loved to make up jokes and tell them to us. Problem was, while they understood the structure of a joke, and how to deliver one, they had yet to realize that jokes have punchlines. They also didn't realize those punchlines are supposed to be funny. So they'd come up with "jokes" like "Why did the teddy bear fall down? Because his mommy forgot to take the clothes out of the dryer!"

This joke about the Hawkeyes isn't even that good. The only way it makes sense or serves any purpose is as an example of two grammatically correct sentences. I rate it (sawdust)/10.

My Prediction: Y'all, I swear I tried to come up with a different number, but based on my belief that any Iowa team will win one game it shouldn't and lose one game it shouldn't, I come up with ... 8-4.

2026 Preview: Illinois

 

As literally anyone could have predicted, the Illini came back to Earth a little bit last season once the Schedule Gods withdrew some of their love. Still, Bret Bielema managed to finish the regular season at a respectable 8-4 (I am an Iowa fan; I am allowed to call 8-4 "respectable"), adding a victory over Tennessee in the Music City Bowl to finish 9-4. It's really true: Bret Bielema can beat SEC squads so long as he's not coaching one of them himself.

The Illini managed that feet despite having a defense that didn't distinguish itself in any positive way. If that side of the ball doesn't get better ... well, it may not make a whole lot of difference, given the relative dearth of tossups on the slate.

The Big Question: With a significantly more favorable schedule this season that holds only two all-but-guaranteed losses (at Ohio State and hosting Oregon), can the Illini hold serve and get to ten wins with at least a slight chance of making the playoff? In other words, can Bielema finally turn Champaign into Madison South?

My Guess at the Answer: No, because there's a lot of parity in the B-tier Big Ten teams, which is where the Illini find themselves. Also Madison South would be Stoughton, and there aren't enough Norwegians in Champaign to pull off that transition.

AI-Generated Joke about the Illini: 

"Why did the Illini offense cross the road?

They didn't—they got flagged for holding, pushed back five yards, and had to settle for a 50-yard field goal attempt!"

This isn't a terrible joke, given that it's topical and on-point, but it's not a good one either because it's overly detailed. If you have to explain the joke, it didn't work. Would have been much funnier as "Why did the Illini offense cross the road? Actually ... it didn't." 2/10.

My Prediction: The Illini do get to ten wins, but only by sucker-punching another SEC team in a bowl game. They'll finish the regular season 9-3.

It Happens Every Year, 2026 Edition

And what is "it," you wonder? It's the point when the doldrums of late July start washing over me and I realize that it's time to start thinking about college football again. Every time the traveling hands of time swing in that direction, I start talking myself into just one more year. Just one more year of writing about a sport I love and hate at the same time. I love it because it's college football, a love that needs no justification. And I hate it because sport in general and college football in particular keeps acquiring unwelcome cultural baggage.

I could quit writing a Big Ten predictions column at any time. Some might say I already have, considering I focus on only 27.5% of the conference's teams. I am also well aware that this is a labor of love for me. My most-read post of all time on this blog has, as of this writing, all of seventy-four views. I used to get more accidental clicks than that when I worked at FanHouse. This means, in all likelihood, that the number of actual readers I have is somewhere between twelve and twenty.

Do you understand now why my writing isn't paywalled on Substack?

I'm not complaining. If there's only, say, twelve of you who read most of what I write, that's fine with me because I'm sure you're the right twelve.

But the world around college football keeps changing. The usual culprit is the growth of NIL and the granting of sovereignty to student-athletes, who are less strictly bound to their programs than back in the olden days when coaches actually had to develop their players. Clutching one's pearls over the fact that the players get paid now and are free to transfer if they want to marks a person as a throwback to ... I don't know, the feudal era or something. 

Now, of course players were getting paid before NIL became permitted. If that weren't true, then the SEC's run of national titles wouldn't have dried up about the time NIL came along. But I digress. It bothers me not one little bit that the players get paid now. That should have been the case forty years ago. 1986 being shortly after the NCAA's stranglehold on TV appearances was broken, of course.

The rise of televised college football has, unfortunately, empowered the sport's ultimate villain: ESPN.

The World Wide Leader doesn't just broadcast college football, it is attempting to own it. You can't blame it. Live sports are the most valuable properties in the television portfolio because people will actually sit down and watch them live. That's good news for advertisers, who are increasingly finding it difficult to reach the likes of you and I. ESPN wants to own as much of the thing called "college football" as it can, largely because it will never own very much of what it really wants (the NFL). The network uses its bully pulpit to push for playoff expansion (it'll reach 32 teams in a couple seasons, I'm sure) and to push the narrative that the playoff is the only part of college football that really matters anymore. For the good teams, there's a playoff, for everyone else, enjoy Birmingham in the week between Christmas and New Year's.

I'm being a bit unfair, of course. Just like everybody else who remembers The Days of Yore, I wouldn't want to go back to only two games per week on live television, or having to try to avoid hearing the Hawkeyes' score so I could watch the game on Iowa Public Broadcasting at 10:30 on Saturday night. ESPN helped push for more of us to have more of what we wanted, and now no matter which Power 4 team you follow, you can watch all of its games.

You might need six streaming subscriptions to make that happen, but hey, at least it's possible.

Still, there are two things that I can't forgive ESPN for. The first is Pat McAfee; he annoys me to no end, because everything he does winds up being about him rather than what he's ostensibly talking about. I went through this with Jim Rome back in the day. I gave him two weeks, like he asked, then I gave him another two weeks, like he asked everyone to do after the first two weeks. After four weeks I still thought he sucked, but I will admit his callers sucked even more. If he'd stopped taking phone calls maybe I would have become a listener. Except he would probably still talk about himself and his show all the time.

The other thing is gambling. ESPN didn't create it and I'm sure they would say they're just responding to what the audience wants, but honestly, it doesn't have to do that. Gambling is no bloody good. It's the addiction you don't want because it's the only addiction you can get out of (theoretically) just by leaning into it harder.

Okay, you can get out of drug addiction with an overdose, I suppose, but you know what I mean. The worst part of gambling isn't that you lose; it's that sometimes you win, and that's what causes all the problems. 

The effect that gambling is having on young men in particular is distressing, and even if the NCAA and NFL did the right thing by putting Brendan Sorsby's head on a pike as a warning to student-athletes that they'd better not bet on their own teams, that's not much help to the thousands of young men who don't play college sports but are sliding deeper and deeper into debt, convinced that just one good parlay will get them out of it. And the worst part of that ... is that they're right, at least from a financial point of view. But breaking the addiction is much harder. 

That's why I don't like seeing gambling content as part of the broadcasts, even just as advertisements. I thought it was funny back in the day when Brent Musburger would subtly imply that a late-game field goal attempt might be of particular interest to some viewers, meaning he was aware of the point spread. That was subversive, because sports gambling was illegal in almost all of the country. (That law wasn't particularly well enforced, of course.)

Now any wink-wink, nudge-nudge reference to gambling comes across like watching an old Cheech and Chong movie does since pot is legal in so much of the US. Wow. So edgy. 

Anyway, fear not: season two of The Sweep and The Drop are coming. Soon.

Photo credit: “Groggy” by Jon-Eric Melsæter, CC BY 2.0

Let's Remember A Car: Chevy Beretta

By Greg Gjerdingen - https://www.flickr.com/photos/greggjerdingen/48135407066/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146639929

I can never figure out if General Motors was really brilliant or really stupid during the 1980s.

You can make a case for either point of view. I admit that "really stupid" has a lot more likelihood of being true. I've owned several GM cars from the Eighties and every last one was a hot mess mechanically, except for my 1987 Chevy Nova, which was a Toyota Corolla cosplaying as an American car. My memories of the General are pretty simple: the cars will run as long as anyone else's will, but t, here will always be something wrong with them. And that's why I haven't owned a GM anything since the very early 2000s. 

Our subject today is a car that makes the Spinal Tappian case about the fine line between clever and stupid. The Chevy Beretta was a warmed-over collection of the same semi-adequate parts that GM had been relying on since about 1980. Same engines, same transmissions, same basic platform, and everything. The Beretta and its utterly forgettable 4-door housemate the Corsica were meant to replace the dorky, unreliable Citation, despite the fact that much of their mechanical bits were pure Citation. Either GM was stupid, or it thought its customers were stupid enough to buy the same parts in a new body with a new name.

Then again, it was a pretty nice body.

I'll grant that, on paper, the Beretta replaced the 2-door Citations (there were two, a hatchback and the rather uncommon Club Coupe), but the car it really replaced was the older rear-drive disco sled Monte Carlo. If you wanted to look cool, the Monte was past its prime by 1988, but here's the Beretta, with about the same room inside, better looking, and you got a lot better gas mileage. The Beretta wasn't a sporty car, but neither was the Monte Carlo. 

Unsurprisingly, it sold pretty well at first; Chevy sold 275,000 of them in 1988 and another 180,000 in 1989. After that, it's best not to investigate. By 1990 it seems that everyone that would ever want a Beretta already had one. Naturally that's when Chevy started improving the Beretta's sportier models, the GT and GTU/GTZ. And, in typical GM fashion, it's when the base model Beretta started to get stripped down to sell as cheaply as possible.

A Z26 model arrived for 1994. It was as sporty as a Beretta would ever get, but because of persistent noise, vibration, and harshness problems with the Quad 4 engine -- and a shift away from 2-door cars in general -- it didn't goose sales very much. The Beretta went away after 1996, and I can't think of a once-ubiquitous car that disappeared from the roads faster than it did. I still see a Corsica or two running around but I can't think of the last time I saw a Beretta, even up on blocks in somebody's yard.

Have I ever driven one?: I've never even been a passenger in one! I have driven a friend's Corsica. It was adequate. Can't imagine the Beretta would have been any better.

The Drop, Week 14: First Year Debriefing

It's been a season now since I pared Pickin' On The Big Ten down to just five teams. I don't know how anyone else feels about it but for me, it made writing fun again. Life is simply too short to have to try to analyze and say something intelligent about eighteen teams for 14 straight weekends.

Now as we prepare for the postseason I'd like to take a look back at the things I got right and the things I got wrong along the way. Let's start by looking at my preseason picks for each team's final record and how that compares to what really happened

• Illinois: I prediced 9-3; it finished 8-4.
• Iowa: I predicted 8-4; it finished 8-4.
• Minnesota: I predicted 7-5; it finished 7-5.
• Nebraska: I predicted 9-3; it finished 7-5.
• Wisconsin: I predicted 4-8; it finished 4-8.

So that's three direct hits, one prediction of one too many wins, and one of two too many wins. No team outperformed my expectations from back in August. I'll take that.

I'm also proud of having predicted that, despite finishing 4-8, Luke Fickell would return for 2026. I think that has as much to do with what a bad hiring environment it wound up being as it does with any patience and/or love being shown to Fick.

And I offer this from Week 0, when Iowa State and Kansas State squared off in Dublin:

"The other nightmare scenario is that the winner gets massively overhyped (because, after all, these are two teams that figure to be pretty good this season) only for the loser to wind up going 6-6, making all the petals fall of this precious August flower of a publicity stunt conference game."

While I was wrong about who would win -- I picked K-State -- the Wildcats lost the game, finished the season 6-6, and neither team is ranked.

That said, while I am proud of my macro-scale predictions, some of my game calls were a little ... off. Like how I predicted the Indiana-Illinois final score would be IU 34, Illinois 31, and it wound up IU 63, Illinois 10. I followed that up one week later guessing the Hoosiers would paste the Hawkeyes 48-10. The final in that game wound up Indiana 20, Iowa 15. Indiana is enigmatic, or the Hawkeyes are the best 8-4 football team in the country.

And lastly I slipped this into my Minnesota preview about the California game: 

"Taking on the moribund California Golden Bears will let the team get its travel legs without suffering a humiliating, confidence-destroying loss on the third weekend of the season."

This was a blatant attempt to put the whammy on the Gophers so that they would lose to the Golden Bears, and it worked. The Gophers were undefeated in Huntington Bank Stadium this season, and winless everywhere else.

Photo credit: “The amazing Zoltar” by Nan Fry, CC BY 2.0

The Sweep, Week 14: Every New Beginning ...

And so this is it, the end of the road for the 2025 regular season, on a weekend when all of Sweep Country is stuffed to the gills and most of us (but nor me, thankfully) are under some sort of winter weather advisory. It has been a disappointing season for literally every team in our purview; let us all go off to our mid-tier bowl games and turn our thoughts to basketball. But not before we pick the big rivalry games, of course!

Northwestern at Illinois (6:30 pm, FOX): Northwestern wound up performing significantly better than I thought it would this season; it's bowl-eligible and thus bowl-going. Illinois probably should have expected a slight return to earth after its great season last year, simply because the schedule was a lot tougher this year. I've not seen Northwestern play but I have seen the Illini; they are a solid but unexceptional team with a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot. This game will probably be played in a cold, miserable rain, so the team that makes the last mistake will probably lose. I think I like Illinois here, but I wouldn't be shocked if Northwestern took it. Illinois 24, Northwestern 20.

Wisconsin at Minnesota (2:30 pm, FS1): Gonna guess Minnesota would have preferred playing this game back in October when Wisconsin was still The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. This game is literally meaningless as Minnesota has already won 6 while Wisconsin has already lost 7. (This would be a dangerous observation to make if anyone young actually read this column.) I think Luke Fickell has more to play for here, with a need to show that the bad stretch this season doesn't define him as a coach. Like I said before the year started, I don't think Barry Alvarez himself could have done much better than 6-6 against the Badgers' 2025 schedule. And Minnesota still can't really play offense. Wisconsin 20, Minnesota 17.

Iowa at Nebraska (11 am Friday, CBS/Paramount+): I'm not sure how many people thought both teams would come into this game with identical records. Husker faithful were confident that This Is Our Year, but the 'Skers couldn't quite break the rock. Iowa fans varied between "this team could make the playoff" and "this is a 4-8 football team" well into September, and neither faction was right. I don't love how dramatic the Michigan State game was for the Hawks, but after losing four close games, it was nice to win one, and to slay the dragon of "Kirk Ferentz teams can't come back in the fourth quarter." This may sound heretical to a lot of people, but I think Kirk is a better coach than Matt Rhule, and I think Iowa wins this game. Then they need to beat it on home before the snow flies. Iowa 17, Nebraska 16.

I am not going to pick any extra games this week, it's a holiday weekend and I just don't want to.

Photo credit: “DC Snowstorm Feb” by Al Jazeera English, CC BY-SA 2.0

The Sweep, Week 13: As The Bird-Flavored Popsicle Thaws

Don't mind me. I just learned that my family, which contains two vegetarians out of five total people, is doing a Sidesgiving. There will be no turkey. Technically there will be no main dish of any kind. And thus no leftover turkey sandwiches.

I am not okay with this, but a turkey split amongst three people is a disaster. I am at least hoping there will be stuffing, even if it's made with vegetable broth.

Then again, looking at this week's slate of games amongst our five teams, there may be enough turkeys for everyone.

Michigan State at Iowa (2:30 pm, FS1): This is the get-back game Iowa needs after failing to hold on last week against USC in the southern California rain that they say never falls. Michigan State has not looked good at any point this season, and I don't think this is where Sparty will start to figure it out. The Iowa system should swallow up the Spartans. Iowa 31, Michigan State 17.

Minnesota at Northwestern (11 am, BTN): After having spent last season looking moribund, and still stuck in the quaint but inadequate My First Stadium by Fisher-Price, Northwestern has ... actually looked decent over the past month? So I'm going to take the Wildcats here as P.J. Fleck once again cements his status as "not quite bad enough to fire." Especially not this season, but maybe Minnesota will luck out and he'll bumble his way into an ACC job or something. Northwestern 24, Minnesota 21.

Nebraska at Penn State (6:30 pm, NBC/Peacock): Well, here's a dilly of a pickle. Back in August I had this as an almost-certain loss for the Huskers, because I thought Penn State was not going to drop off from where it ended last season. Welp. I'm not sure I can say Nebraska is sure to lose this game any more -- but I am quite convinced it can. I just can't quite pull the trigger on that, though, but my confidence in this pick is extremely low. Nebraska 33, Penn State 27.

No. 21 Illinois at Wisconsin (6:30 pm, BTN): The Wisconsin team that beat Washington back on November 8 can certainly beat Illinois.

The Wisconsin team that played in the other nine games this season probably can't. Illinois 20, Wisconsin 13.

BONUS GAME: Kansas at Iowa State (11 am, FS1): I really thought Lance Leipold was going to get over the hump this year in the Big 12 but it's turned out another thoroughly mid year for the Jayhawks. Iowa State is in its all-too-familiar position of almost, but not quite, being a top team in the conference. I think there's something about the state of Iowa that just condemns its football teams to also-ran status. But that means those teams win the games they ought to win, and Iowa State ought to be beat the Jayhawks. Iowa State 27, Kansas 14.

Photo credit: “pumpkins in the rain” by liz west, CC BY 2.0