The Drop, Week 5: Pain Samples

“Pain Relief” by Kurtis Garbutt, CC BY 2.0

A not-insignificant portion of my readership are Iowa fans, just like me. And we all saw that game on Saturday. Well, you might have seen it; I have a limit to how many streaming services I'm willing to sign up for, and it's fewer than I am already signed up for. If you just discovered over the past few days that a flapjack is not necessarily a pancake, you might feel some of my pain.

Pain is our topic today. How do Iowa fans feel about Iowa losing to Indiana 20-15? Well, this Iowa fan who predicted a final score of Indiana 48, Iowa 7 feels pretty not-too-bad about playing the Hoosiers 48 points closer than Illinois did the week before. I am convinced there are two more losses on the schedule (Penn State and Oregon) but I think the Hawkeye can win every other game left on the schedule, which would have them finishing 8-4, which is exactly what I predicted they would do before the season started.

Still, the Hawkeyes had a chance to win, and that is frustrating. You know who is more frustrated right now? 

Georgia fans. They just got run by an Alabama team that isn't supposed to be good enough to beat the likes of Georgia, though I would guess now that "Kalen DeBoer buyout amount" is a less popular Google search than it was last week at this time. It's not just that the Tide broke their spirits; it's that Kadyn Proctor scored a touchdown against the Bulldogs ... in the first half. That is a bigger insult than Indiana's game-ending intentional safety was, and that was less of a diss than Kirk Ferentz laid on Joe Paterno in the infamous 6-4 game. (Shut up. I'm right. Kirk told JoePa "you won't get in field goal range," and he didn't.) Georgia fans have every right to be as upset as Bama fans are giddy.

They're having a worse week than Iowa fans are, but there's one fanbase that has it worse, and that's Penn State.

Why? Because "it" happened again, a close loss at home against a highly-ranked team in a winnable game, one that clarifies the Nits aren't as high on the Big Ten food chain as they imagined themselves being.

So while you're licking your wounds, Iowa fans, whom would you rather be? Yourselves, Georgia fans, or Penn State fans?