Tuesdays with Torbee

Ambivalence – holding contradictory or competing ideas on a subject – is not an emotion I typically experience when watching Iowa football. 

Sports being a zero-sum game, one is usually either ecstatic about a big win or down in the dumps when the team fails to perform.

Monday’s Music City Bowl – in which Iowa played pretty well for about 50 minutes only to collapse yet again in crunch time – has my ambivalence meter spiking.

Compared to last season’s non-competitive outing against Tennessee, in which Iowa’s anemic offense put an exclamation point on the national narrative that Iowa City is where scoring goes to die, the Hawkeye’s performance against Missouri was encouraging. Without superstar running back Kaleb Johnson, Iowa managed to rush for 166 yards with both Kamari Moulton and Jaziun Patterson serving notice that they can be explosive, game-changing rushers. 

One terribly forced interception aside, Brendan Sullivan also acquitted himself quite well, throwing for 131 yards with a high percentage completion and showing the escapability and scrambling ability many fans have longed for after the recent run of statuesque passers in Iowa City. 

For most of the game, which Iowa led for three quarters, the defense also deployed its bend-but-don’t break strategy pretty well, despite Mizzou having an excellent quarterback and a quality SEC offense. 

So, progress year-over-year was evident. That’s good.

The bad, though, is still pretty bad. This season’s squad will unfortunately be remembered as a team that just struggled to finish and too often could not make key plays late when games between evenly matched teams are decided.

Against Iowa State, UCLA and Missouri the Hawks could not hold on to a double digit lead late, ultimately dropping all three games on late field goals – two of them bordering on preposterously long. If Iowa closes out even two of those games strong, I think fans would be feeling very good about a 10-win team heading into 2025. Instead, the Hawkeyes are a solid-but-not-spectacular 8-5.

My ambivalence also extends to quarterback Brendan Sullivan. For stretches, he looked the part as the QB1 of the future, firing up the team with bold rushes, putting nicely thrown balls on open receivers and generally looking better than anyone under center for Iowa in some time. However, with two chances to orchestrate late, game-winning drives, he failed to deliver. To be clear, blown blocking assignments and a couple drops played a role in that failure, but if we are being honest, Sullivan did not display that “it” factor the best quarterbacks do in late game situations. Can he get there? Perhaps. But I don’t think he did enough to shut the door on a potential quarterback battle this spring, and for Iowa that may be a good thing. 

Overall, if I were to give the 2024 Iowa football season a letter grade, I’d probably go with B-. Seeing some semblance of offense re-emerge under new offensive coordinator Tim Lester is definitely reason for optimism. The defense took a bit of a step back, but expecting it to continue performing at world-class level is probably unfair. I know some feel Iowa is far away from being a potential 12-team CFP candidate, but I don’t think that’s the case. Monday, Iowa went toe-to-toe with a 10-win SEC team and if not for some late gaffes and mistakes, easily could have won. They aren’t that far off. 

My off-season wish list is for Lester to identify his go-to QB1, Phil Parker to shore up the secondary lapses and the entire coaching staff to continue utilizing the portal wisely to bolster its roster. The culture at Iowa feels solid, and that can’t be underestimated as a positive in the current era of college football, where so much seems uncertain and unstable. 

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