Iowa football: After loss, here’s where Hawks will fall in top-25

The Iowa football team dropped their second game in a row, but that won’t drop them out of the AP Poll. Here’s where I project they will land.

If you didn’t watch the game consider yourself lucky. Similar to last week, the defense played outstanding, the offense looked bad, and special teams struggled. Just go read this article recapping the Iowa football team’s performance instead of watching the game.

Now the Hawks sit at 4-2, and a #14 ranking and 4-0 seems so far away right now.

As expected with any loss, the Hawks will drop, but given the nature of the AP top-25 yesterday, they won’t fall too far. Seven ranked teams lost this weekend (not including Iowa) including four that sit right behind the Hawks.

Here is a quick rundown of the teams that lost: #3 Georgia, #7 Florida, #11 Texas, #19 Wake Forest, #20 Virginia, #23 Memphis, and #24 Texas A&M.

Behind Iowa, here are the only teams that won: #18 Arizona State (in a close game against Washington State), #22 Baylor (who isn’t very good, to begin with, but needed 2OT to beat Texas Tech, and #25 Cincinnati (against a depleted Houston team).

That bodes well for the Iowa football team not dropping too far in the polls, although at this point, I think we have bigger concerns than poll positioning.

At this point, I expect Iowa to come in at #18, just one spot lower than last week. Although it’s been ugly, the games they’ve lost have come to ranked teams (one on the road) and they’ve lost by less than one score. On the surface, that’s actually not that bad.

Furthermore, the teams below Iowa didn’t do enough (or anything in the case of the teams losing) to justify jumping ahead of a 4-2 Iowa football team.

One sleeper team that will certainly jump into the polls, and theoretically knock the Hawks down a notch is Minnesota, who is coming off a huge victory over Nebraska and currently remains undefeated. Last week, they were the highest vote-getters not in the poll, and they’re the only team that put on a truly impressive performance out of the teams ranked #17-#25. It just depends on how much the voters value Nebraska at this point.

So at the worst, the Iowa football team is going to be #19 and the best would be #18. I’ll detail this later, but there is still hope for this team as long as they can fix (and do it quickly) some of their biggest weaknesses.