Iowa football: So just how bad was the offense vs Michigan?

Yesterday’s offensive performance by the Iowa football team was absolutely abysmal, but just how bad was it compared to past seasons dud performances?

There weren’t a lot of positive takeaways from yesterday’s 10-3 loss by the Iowa football team to Michigan, and probably the least positive of them all was how bad the offense looked.

Just a week removed from a record-setting performance where the rushing attack ran for 351 yards and the passing attack added another 293 for a Kirk Ferentz-era high of 644, the offense looked like a completely different unit.

Nate Stanley threw three interceptions for the first time in his career. Hard to believe, but he actually only had even one two-interception game before this.

The 1 yard of rushing offense only looks good when compared to last year’s Outback Bowl performance where the Iowa football team actually finished with -15 yards. In fact, outside of last year’s Outback Bowl, it was the lowest rushing total by an Iowa football team this decade.

As far as sacks go, I honestly cannot remember the last time the Hawkeyes allowed eight (yes you are reading that right) sacks on the quarterback (and unfortunately, it’s not the easiest stat to look up either).

Turnovers wise, the Hawks stunk there too. Considering how bad Michigan had been coming into this game at taking the ball away, getting four turnovers should have been much more difficult, but nope, leave it to Iowa. The four turnovers were the most since the Wyoming game in 2017, and including the Wyoming game and yesterday’s game, there have only been four four turnover games this decade.

And the penalties were getting ridiculous. For the day, Iowa had 8 penalties for 60 yards. There have only been 12 games this decade that have been worse, and a few of those were against non-conference schools where Iowa was breaking in new guys early in the season.

Finally, to put the icing on the cake for just how bad this offense was, the three points scored matched the lowest total scored this decade. Prior to today, it had only been done twice from 2010 until now.

I think based on the stats above, it’s pretty safe to say, this was arguably the worst offensive performance we’ve seen from a Kirk Ferentz squad.