Iowa football: Wall Street Journal’s CFB grid of shame is a sham

Wall Street Journal published their annual grid of shame and it’s an absolute sham where the Iowa football team was placed.

If you’ve never heard of the Wall Street Journal’s College Football Grid of Shame, don’t worry I hadn’t either until I saw an egregious screenshot of the grid itself. And this isn’t me just being an Iowa football homer, but this grid is a flat out sham. I’m honestly embarrassed for the Wall Street Journal.

Let me break it down for you. Basically, this is a grid that puts teams in a quadrant that judges teams from Weakling to Powerhouse (presumably by program dominance) and from Admirable to Embarrassing (based on arrests, bad publicity, etc).

The Iowa football team is placed loosely in the top left corner of the Powerhouse/Embarrassing quadrant, which honestly makes no sense, but what is absolutely ridiculous to me is where Nebraska is on this. And for the record, this is not a Nebraska-bashing article, I am bashing the Wall Street Journal here, but Nebraska helps prove my point.

They are nearly smack dab in the middle of the Admirable/Embarrassing and Weakling/Powerhouse quadrants. I don’t mind the placement from a program strength perspective, it’s actually pretty spot on in my opinion, but how do you put Nebraska as less of an embarrassment than the Iowa football team. There have been four players caught with marijuana, two accused of stealing credit card information and don’t even get me started on the Maurice Washington troubles.

Meanwhile, the Iowa football team has had one notable incident this offseason, and that was when star tackle Tristan Wirfs received a citation for being in a bar underage.

That’s my biggest issue with this Grid of Shame, but also, to be honest, why is Wisconsin behind the Iowa football team on the Weakling to Powerhouse scale? Outside of last year, Wisconsin has dominated the Big Ten West, save for 2015.

Again, for a reputable news site, this is just dumb.