Iowa football: Three things that went wrong vs Purdue Boilermakers

Penalties hurt Iowa dearly, especially late

This could be recency bias, but I don’t remember an Iowa football team that committed so many penalties along the offensive line. Last week, we noted in our three players who struggled that the entire offensive line struggled with not only the snap count, but containing the Penn State defensive line without inappropriately grabbing their jerseys.

This week, for the most part, the Hawkeyes offensive line played a pretty clean game. There were no holding penalties on the offense until the fourth quarter. When the Hawks needed a clean game the most though, that’s went the penalties started rolling in.

With that being said, I’m still sitting here wondering what in the heck the referees were actually watching because neither of the holding penalties on Iowa’s final drive looked like holding penalties to me. Kirk agreed. He had a few tidbits in his post-game press conference about the penalties.

On the two holding penalties on Iowa’s final drive:

"We go 55 minutes without a holding call, got two of them there."

On Julius Brents phantom pass interference call that gave Purdue a first down in the drive that would eventually result in Purdue’s winning field goal:

"Looked like a clean play to me, looked like a ball overthrown."

He even addressed the lack of pass interference calls on his receivers who were being held consistently throughout the game including on the last two-point conversion by noting that he feels his receivers are pretty good, but weren’t able to get open today after making a junior-high reference towards Purdue.

At the end of the day, the Iowa football team needed to play better to put them in a position where bad judgement calls could be the determination in the game, but it’s still frustrating that the game came down to that.