I wind up saying this at least once every football season: Iowa is consistently an eight- or nine-win football team. Sometimes it does a little better and wins ten or eleven games. Once in a while it does a little worse. Losing seasons are noteworthy because they are so rare. But, in general, if you guess that Iowa will win eight or nine games, you'll be right a lot more than you'll be wrong.
Stating this generally makes a certain breed of fan go a bit nuts, like somehow it's just my opinion, and my stating it becomes the concrete block tied to the ankle of the season, the one that sinks it until it sleeps with the fishes. But it's not an opinion. It's a fact based on forty-plus years of easily observable and verifiable evidence. You can no more credibly oppose my claim that Iowa is an eight- or nine-win football team than you can credibly argue the sun rises in the north.
I mention this because, of course, Iowa lost to Oregon on Saturday. It was a heartbreaking last-minute loss that was only made possible by an early-game safety for the Ducks. Otherwise the Hawks had 'em, just like they had Indiana on the ropes. If you think I wasn't disappointed by the loss, rest assured I was -- even though I had the Oregon game as a near-certain loss for the Hawks before the season started.
The expansion of the College Football Playoff, and the relentless hype of same in the sports media, has made many fans feel that any season which doesn't end in a playoff berth is a failure. This is just a short step away from what fans actually feel, which is that any season that doesn't end with a national title is a failure. It is frustrating to be on the cusp of maybe, possibly touching the grass of that promised land only to have it snatched away by yet another close loss. I don't begrudge anybody their misery. But I cannot bring myself to be overly emotional about the Hawkeyes losing a game I always expected them to lose.
Photo: “Crumpled Frustration” by Aaron Jacobs, CC BY-SA 2.0
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