Iowa football: AP Poll looked much better after week 3

After an interesting week 3, the Iowa football team moved up in the AP Poll and for unrelated reasons, the poll looked much better this time around.

Nobody expected Michigan to need two overtimes to knock off Army or Maryland to put up 63 on #21 ranked Syracuse or ranked Washington to drop a game to Chip Kelly’s UCLA team. But all of those things happened in addition to the Iowa football team making sure Rutgers realizes its place in the Big Ten and Nebraska managing to drop a non-conference game to Colorado on a game-losing kick.

All of these things caused quite a bit of shakeup in the Week 3 AP Poll, and I like it.

Last week, I was a bit annoyed. Not that I think the Iowa State Cyclones aren’t good, but they didn’t deserve to be ranked after barely beating an FCS school in triple overtime.

Now, they are gone.

So is Nebraska, whom I didn’t think should have been ranked to begin with, simply because they didn’t even win 5 games last season, and lost a few key players.

And one game most people probably weren’t watching, Stanford vs USC, resulted in a 45-20 win for the Trojans. After a week in the AP Poll after beating Northwestern, Stanford drops out again.

Most importantly though, the Iowa football team did move up one spot to 19th and are ranked just one spot higher in the coaches poll at 18th.

With Iowa State dropping out though, the much-anticipated first CyHawk Trophy game between two ranked teams is no more.

Leave it up to Iowa State to blow an opportunity to do something cool. Regardless of their ineptitude two weeks earlier, partly as a result of Syracuse’s loss to Maryland, Ames is getting ESPN’s College GameDay this weekend for the first time in school history.

In addition to GameDay coming to Ames for the first time, another first could happen here as well. For one of the first times, a loss to Iowa State isn’t going to be seen as disastrous to the Iowa football team’s season because of the high expectations for Iowa State.

Meanwhile, for Iowa State, this is a chance to get a signature win against a ranked opponent and get back in the AP Poll.