Iowa Football: Bye week more effective than quality opponent

For the second consecutive week, preseason rankings guide the fate of the Iowa Football team. This week, Iowa moves up without playing a down.

I’m not complaining about the Iowa football team moving to 14 in both polls. Right now, 14 is about where the Hawkeyes should be.

In fact, outside of fellow Big Ten members Wisconsin and Penn State, Iowa is the highest-ranked team that hasn’t earned a berth into the College Football Playoff or the preceding era’s BCS National Championship Game.

Considering that both Wisconsin and Penn State have won the Big Ten recently, this is a pretty nice compliment to the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Look at this week’s AP Poll.

The first big observation is that three of the top four teams are in the SEC. Alabama has been consistently elite, so I don’t think there are many valid complaints to them being at #2.

Georgia won a close game at home to fellow top 10 ranked (at the time) team Notre Dame. Compare this to what Wisconsin did to Michigan. Which team looks better?

LSU is the next ranked team. While they beat perennially overrated Texas, they haven’t done much of anything else.

The narrative surrounding LSU is that they finally have an offense. The problem is that they don’t have a defense now.

They have now played two Power 5 teams and given up 38 points in each game. I want to remind you that one of those games was to Vanderbilt, who virtually no one would consider to be an offensive powerhouse.

Ultimately, a lot of the teams at the top play each other. This should provide some resolution to the issues with the current rankings.

However, what happens when a one-loss Big Ten Champion is again competing with a couple of one or two-loss SEC non-champions? My fear is that the storylines that have been created in the preseason will be held with more importance than what has actually happened on the field.

Let’s put this into perspective. If LSU and Iowa traded resumes and results, the Iowa football team would still be #14. LSU would still be #4.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a team’s history counts, despite how the current players have nothing to do with, for example, LSU’s last national championship team.

We’ve spoken about how Iowa should be considered a playoff contender. They should be, but they aren’t Michigan or Ohio State. For Iowa, this means that the margin of error is still close to zero.

A loss puts Iowa’s fate into the hands of the playoff committee. If the committee takes the polls into account, Iowa will miss out on the CFP without a lot of help from other teams.

In the meantime, let’s hope that by not losing – even when Iowa does not play – Iowa continues to rise in the polls.