Iowa football: O-line injury woes continue as Hawks take on MTSU
By Andrew Wade
The Iowa football team can’t seem to shake the injury bug, even on bye weeks. Here is the injury report and the impact it has on the MTSU game on Saturday.
When the Iowa football team takes the field Saturday against Middle Tennessee State, they will be missing multiple opening-game starters and even a few guys who started because of those initial injuries.
For some reason, the Iowa football team just cannot shake this injury bug despite having two weeks off by the time the Middle Tennessee State game comes around this weekend.
Although it is just a 1-2 team from Conference USA, all injuries matter in the grand scheme of things so let’s start with the ones that are old news at this point.
Alaric Jackson, Matt Hankins, and Kaevon Merriweather were all left off of the two-deeps again, and although Brady Reiff was on the two-deeps last week, he was a late-week scratch and will again be a scratch this Saturday.
That’s half of the starting secondary and two of the nine guys playing in the trenches.
Joining them is guard Kyler Schott, who was filling in for Levi Paulsen who is still filling in for Tristan Wirfs who is still filling in for Alaric Jackson. So, the offensive line reshuffle continues. In Schott’s place will be a familiar name in Cole Banwart who was ruled out for the first week but has been available the last two games in case of emergency.
Banwart will be making his first start of 2019 after being a full-time starter last season for the Iowa football team. Schott, an Iowa native who has been a great story through the first quarter of the season hurt his foot according to Kirk Ferentz and will be out a couple of weeks.
I’ll be honest, going into this game, I thought it would be great if we could see Jackson, Hankins, Merriweather, and even Julius Brents get a few snaps to get their feet wet before possibly being thrown back in action against Michigan, but Kirk Ferentz is either truly not optimistic about their chances of playing or he’s holding those cards close to his chest.
During yesterday’s press conference, he had this to say about some of the injured guys being back this week.
"Not this week necessarily. We are getting closer but there is a lot of ambiguity right now."
In typical Kirk Ferentz fashion, we don’t know much from that quote, but it’s all we’ve got to work with.
Next. Tiers of the Big Ten teams looking at the playoffs. dark
Fortunately, Middle Tennessee State should be one of the easiest (if not the easiest) matchup on the Iowa football team’s schedule this year so if they can get a big lead early, hit cruise control and play the second string so they can get out of Kinnick without any major injuries to a starter, that would be ideal.