Iowa football: Predicting Hawks fall in AP Poll after Michigan loss
By Andrew Wade
Since the start of the season, the Iowa football team has only gone up in the AP Poll. After yesterday though, it’s time to drop. Here’s how far.
Had the Iowa football team come out and won yesterday, I truly thought they would have a chance at a top-10 ranking or if nothing else an opportunity to continue their slow progression towards it.
That is certainly not happening though when the AP Poll does officially drop for week 7. Not after that performance in Ann Arbor.
But how far will they actually drop?
Typically, it depends on two things. First, how bad does the loss itself look to the eyes of the voters, and in this instance, how much do the voters value Michigan and playing in Michigan Stadium. Second, it comes down to what other teams won or lost in the top-25.
And there were a few other teams that suffered defeat in the top-25 yesterday.
#7 Auburn, #15 Washington, #18 UCF, #21 Oklahoma State, and #25 Michigan State all lost yesterday.
Oddly enough though, not many teams behind the Iowa football team in the poll actually won besides #24 SMU, #19 Michigan, and #16 Boise State.
So let’s start with the first piece. I think this game was so ugly, it’s tough to get a read on Michigan still, but since it’s a blueblood program, voters will appreciate the win against a tough Iowa football team. In turn, they won’t hate on the Hawks too much for the loss. After all, many folks expected this to happen (not in this way necessarily but the loss itself) prior to the season.
Furthermore, with only a couple of teams winning their games behind the Hawks, we won’t see Iowa drop below #20.
My projection is the Iowa football team lands at #17 or #18 with the teams directly behind them moving up along with Michigan.
Next. Hawks blitzed out of Ann Arbor. dark
As I’ll be writing about here at some point today, this would be an okay scenario. I wanted to go undefeated just like all of you, but there are still a lot of games left and we have two ranked matchups against Penn State and Wisconsin ahead of us that can look really good in the eyes of the voters come College Football Playoff time.