Iowa football: Five observations from win over Miami

Nate Stanley looks real good

I saw some rumblings on Twitter about Nate Stanley’s performance last night not being great, and that’s garbage.

Where there times he didn’t play? Absolutely, but I came away really impressed by the senior quarterback of the Iowa football team.

He showed good mobility and solid pocket awareness. He delivered well-placed balls with great touch throughout the contest, which is something we hadn’t seen much of from him before, and he did a great job of reading the coverage and making the right read.

The only two plays I was a bit annoyed by was the ball he threw when getting drilled by a defender that just sort of floated in the air. Fortunately, the ball got knocked out, but Stanley probably should have had better spatial awareness to know that ball wasn’t getting off. The other play was the intentional grounding play where Stanley moved around well in the pocket and when all reads were covered, he chucked it out of bounds. Problem is, he was not even close to being outside of the tackles.

I’ll chalk both of those to season-opener jitters and be happy with the rest.

Stanley threw for 252 yards and 1 touchdown on 30 attempts and his completion percentage was 70%. And the completion percentage could have been higher had there not been a few drops by the Iowa football team. For comparison’s sake, Stanley has had a completion percentage greater than 67.7% just once before in his career (last season against Northern Iowa). It’s just one game, but accuracy was a big concern, and he looked much better last night.

This team still has a lot of work to do, but I was pretty happy with what I saw unfold last night against Miami, and I am already pumped for next week’s game against Rutgers.