Iowa football: Five observations in crazy win over Cyclones

Nate Stanley played well

For the first half of the game (until the second delay), I was watching it from the Denver, Colorado Sports Column amongst a bunch of Iowa football fans, and one thing, in particular, stood out to me. As I was walking into the bathroom, an older (and pretty drunk) man was complaining about how terrible Nate Stanley looked and why we need to put Tyler Wiegers in the game.

There are two things wrong with that so let’s start with the really obvious. Wiegers hasn’t been with the team for two seasons now.

But more importantly, Stanley wasn’t playing a bad game.

He had a few missed throws, which I’ll chalk up to the excitement, but considering the weather conditions, he played a fantastic game and came up clutch when needed.

I’m not sure how many of you have played quarterback before, but throwing the ball into 20-25 mile per hour winds while the playing conditions are also wet is not an easy task. We should honestly be thankful we have a quarterback like Stanley who has a strong arm and can still zip it in there as he did on third and long with a huge completion to Ihmir Smith-Marsette.

It wasn’t just his arm that did a good job, Stanley used his legs to pick up a few key first downs for the Hawks basically showing Iowa football fans everywhere, he will do whatever it takes to win the game against Iowa State.

Was it a perfect game? No. Was his accuracy as good as Kurt Warners? Probably never if we’re being honest. But people need to relax on Nate Stanley. He’s playing some great football right now.