More photos » by Charlie Neibergall - AP

Browse more photos »

This loss was as ironic as it was inevitable.

You may or may not remember Northwestern's 1995 season, in which they (however briefly) metamorphosized from perennial Big Ten doormat to Rose Bowl participant on the back of, among other people, Nagurski and Bednarik Award-winning linebacker Pat Fitzgerald.  You might also remember that Northwestern team, undefeated in conference play after surrendering no more than 20 points to any Big Ten opponent, folded like a house of cards against Southern Cal on New Years' Day, losing 41-32.  There was one key element missing from the Northwestern defense on that fateful day: Fitzgerald, who broke his leg against Iowa on November 11 and missed the rest of the season.  Northwestern would again take a share of the Big Ten crown in 1996, Fitzgerald's senior campaign, but was relegated to the Citrus Bowl.  Fourteen years ago, Fitzgerald's Rose Bowl dream was effectively dashed with a leg injury.  In the second week of November.  Against Iowa.

It might have been 10-0 when Stanzi faked the handoff and rolled right in his own end zone, but the game was as good as Northwestern's -- and the conference title as good as Ohio State's -- three seconds later.  The oft-cited Ferentz mantra of "Next Man In" has served the Iowa offense capably throughout the year, but Rick Stanzi was the immovable block in the Hawkeye offense's Jenga tower (I wish I could take credit for that metaphor, kudos to Doc Saturday).  By the time Stanzi went down Saturday, Iowa was playing their fourth starting halfback since August 1, their second starting tight end, their fifth incarnation of an offensive line.  One receiver missed a significant chunk of the season with nagging injuries, and another is now on the shelf.  Adam Robinson, frontrunner for Big Ten Newcomer of the Year just two weeks ago, was in street clothes.  Tony Moeaki, arguably the best tight end of the Ferentz era when healthy, had long since disappeared in fact if not in theory.  Dace Richardson, declared a mid-season first team all-American at guard by Phil Steele, was injured and had been replaced by Julian Vandervelde, who has been a shell of his former self since -- wait for it -- missing all of August camp and the majority of the first three weeks due to injury.  Bulaga was improving from his own illness but not yet his former dominant self.  Calloway was positively innocuous.  And, yet, the offense continued to do what little was required of it because Rick Stanzi, for all his flaws and screwups and inexplicable decisions, was at the helm, always there with the play this team needed.  There were answers -- inferior answers, to be sure, but answers nonetheless -- for the earlier personnel losses.  This time, there wasn't one, and the offense, and Iowa, and we, suffered the consequence.

For all the talk of this staff's ability to adjust on the fly to conditions on the field, there is a significant difference between minute adjustments to blocking assignments or pass routes and changing the entire playbook; to illustrate that difference, just remember the discussion of the MSU-game-winning slant pattern from Stanzi to McNutt, where Ferentz admitted he and O'Keefe "went to the briefcase" for a play they hadn't run in a couple of weeks.  The telling part of that exchange: Not that the slant/shoot pattern wasn't in that week's playbook, but that so much was made of going off the script.  So rare was it that KOK called a play not in his script (which I get the feeling mimics the Bill Walsh method of play scripting) that it became a serious plot point in the wake of Iowa's most improbable victory to date.

In other words, this loss is not on O'Keefe.  In a game where the coaches get 20 hours a week to install an offense and improve execution, a massive playbook simply doesn't make sense.  The gameplan KOK brought to Kinnick Saturday was ready-made for Rick Stanzi, and it was effective for 15 minutes as Iowa jumped to an early lead.  It was far from ready for James Vandenberg, though, heavy with deep passes he had neither the experience nor the touch to complete.*  There was no time to implement an entire new offense, as some have suggested should have been done, and so Vandenberg and the passing game were essentially fed to the wolves.  Open receivers were missed when bombs were released in laser-like form.  Without that deep threat, the running game -- predicated all season on the deep threat, and also headed by a freshman -- ground to a halt, and the offense died a thousand small deaths at the hands of a thoroughly mediocre Northwestern defense.  The results were obvious the moment Stanzi went down.  Barring a serious miracle in Columbus next week as the Hawkeyes field an all-freshmen backfield and that less-than-vaunted fifth derivation of the line, the dream is as dead as Pat Fitzgerald's fourteen years ago.

* -- Where I think we can lay some blame on the coaches is in Vandenberg's preparedness.  Since August, the staff has refused to name a backup, and instead listed Vandenberg and John Wienke as co-second team quarterbacks.  That almost surely limited Vandenberg's practice time even more than the typical backup, as a portion of his usual practice snaps had to be doled over to Wienke.  The cynic would say Vandenberg clearly won the backup position in the spring, but the co-backups were named to keep Wienke on the reservation, as the McNutt receiver transformation left Iowa with only three scholarship quarterbacks.  The cynic would be correct.

It's NERDwestern week, so your hosts get crunked with Rodger Sherman, founder and editor of SBN just Northwestern blog Sippin' on Purple.  We discuss the meaning of existentialism and whether Berkeleyism is the true order of the just kidding it's all about football and stuff.  Listen below or on iTunes.

BHGPodcast 11

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Texas	1
2	Florida	2
3	Iowa
4	TCU	2
5	Alabama	4
6	Penn State	2
7	Boise State	2
8	Oregon	1
9	Cincinnati	4
10	Miami (Florida)	5
11	Pittsburgh	1
12	Southern Cal	3
13	Arizona	1
14	Georgia Tech	3
15	Ohio State	1
16	Wisconsin	4
17	Virginia Tech	5
18	Oklahoma	6
19	LSU	1
20	Houston	5
21	Oklahoma State	4
22	Texas Tech
23	California
24	South Florida
25	Notre Dame	4
Last week's ballot

Dropped Out: South Carolina (#19), West Virginia (#22), Mississippi (#23).

---

Tackle Eligible:  West Virginia, Ole Miss, Boston College, BYU, Utah

There are certainly some interesting results in this week's blogpoll, not the least of which being Oregon's downward movement despite its victory over Southern Cal.  Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the recent predictiveness of the BlogpLOL; last week's poll had Oregon already in place two spots above USC, and expected the victory far more than traditional predictive voters (it's as ironic as rain on your wedding day).  Getting Oregon and USC to their proper post-Pac-10 Apocalypse positioning took far less heavy lifting than most others.

But Oregon is also a victim of internal consistency.  Part of what distinguishes BlogpLOL from a pure computer ranking is a respect for head-to-head results and a desire to reflect those results whenever possible.  By this point in the season, that possibility is rare; 94% of Division I squads have lost a game, and the transitive property would leave us grasping at straws:  If you account for Ohio State's victory over Wisconsin, you then need to factor in Purdue's win over Ohio State, and then Wisconsin's win over Purdue, and then you need to lock yourself away like Salinger because the illogical world has finally driven you to hermit-esque madness.

Where that logic has yet to break down, however, is where an undefeated team is involved, and therein lies Oregon's dilemma:  As long as their sole vanquisher remains undefeated, the Ducks are inexorably tied to Boise State.  I won't bore you with the specifics of the calculation, but the BlogpLOL rule for head-to-head adjustments is to split the difference.  In other words, if Team A is ranked 20 points ahead of Team B, who is undefeated with a win over Team A, 11 points are deducted from Team A and 11 points are given to Team B.  By this standard, no win this season was bigger than Boise's win over Oregon on opening night, as the Broncos and Ducks swap a staggering 60 points on top of adjustments for quality wins and losses, moving Oregon down four spots and Boise up seven.  And yet, Boise's strength of schedule is so incredibly poor -- at 12 games under .500, the worst of the top 35, by a wide margin -- that it creates a glass ceiling for Oregon through which the Ducks cannot pass.  Barring a catastrophe at the top, Oregon couldn't move higher even if they had beaten the 49ers Saturday.

The other odd result is Alabama, which places fifth despite their clear positioning in the typical voter's top three.  The reason for Alabama's fall from grace is far simpler: Their schedule blows.  The Crimson Tide is the only undefeated squad whose vanquished opponents have all lost three or more games.  In fact, Alabama's schedule (Virginia Tech, Ole Miss, Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas) is precisely the type of schedule BlogpLOL is designed to destroy: Big on names, light on wins.  Alabama's "premiere" wins so far, ostensibly against Virginia Tech and Ole Miss, are worth less with every passing week as those teams continue to fade.  Florida has one-loss LSU (discounted severely by the poll, as their schedule is even worse than 'Bama).  Texas has Oklahoma State (with its two losses each against top 20 opposition).  Iowa has Penn State (whose powderpuff schedule improves with each passing week).  TCU has that curbstomping of BYU. Alabama has nothing that stacks up, and so their fall is inevitable.

There is little else of note inside the poll this week.  Cincinnati, while remaining the lowest-ranked of the unbeatens, gains back some ground as its wins over South Florida and Rutgers look better (and teams like Virginia Tech keep imploding).  Georgia Tech and Notre Dame take 'Bama-like dips as their quality wins lost quality (or, in Notre Dame's case, their conquerors lost badly to Illinois).  Houston continues to gain ground as Texas Tech and Okie State remain afloat on little more than the staggering mediocrity beneath them.

I woke up this morning thinking of an old episode of The West Wing and how it applied to Iowa fans.  This is not normal behavior, but this season has sapped me of all my former ability to focus on normal things.

The context of the episode is convoluted and generally immaterial, but a key section toward the end featured a discussion of ignoring big, important, Death Star near-term threats in order to focus on remote, unlikely, obscure long-term problems.  It included this quote:

"You guys are like Butch and Sundance, peering over the edge of the cliff to the boulder-filled rapids 300 feet below, thinking you'd better not jump because there's a chance you might drown.  

"It's the fall that's going to kill you, stupid."

For two weeks now, on this website and elsewhere, there has been much discussion of Iowa's chances of a mythical national championship.  We've gamed out every scenario, from SECpocalypse to inexplicable losses by Texas to mid-major leapfrog.  We've analyzed the computer rankings for signs of weakness.  We've gnashed our teeth and run gravel through our hair at real and perceived slights from the national media.  We've spent countless hours of time and inches of virtual newsprint on this, all with a "there are still games left to play" disclaimer.

Essentially, we've been peering over the edge of the cliff to the rapids below, talking about nothing but the chance we might drown.  It's time we forget about the long-term BCS possibilities and talk about the plunge.

Just Northwestern is just Northwestern, to be sure, but that's not stopped the 'Cats from beating superior Iowa teams in the past.  Just look at 1999.  Or 2005.  Or that horrendous loss in 2006.  Or last year.  We haven't beaten Northwestern in Kinnick Stadium -- excuse me, Legendary Historic Kinnick Stadium -- since Brad Banks was under center.  Given that track record and our current struggles with lesser opposition, I'm not so inclined to chalk up a win and move on to the next week.

We close at home with Minnesota, Tourette's-addled and banged up, but now suddenly capable of posting 42 points on a Michigan State defense that allowed Iowa just 15, and fueled by the intoxicating mix of embarrassment and rage that comes from losing last season's final game -- the last game in their stadium -- by 55 points to a hated rival.  Given that Floyd of Rosedale is up for grabs, and that Minnesota will likely be playing for a bowl trip, this is certainly not a lock.

Sandwiched in between those, of course, is Ohio State; if you were hesitant to jump, Columbus is always willing to give you a nudge.  Forget for a moment that OSU derailed Iowa's last national championship run (1985) with a November 2 win in Columbus.  Forget that, if the Hawkeyes' last win in the Horseshoe were a person, it would now be old enough to vote.  Forget that Iowa has won twice in Columbus in the last 50 years.  Forget the sound, the fury, the sheer terror of Ohio Stadium as the cold November sun disappears and the grey sky turns black (not that Joe Tiller could) and focus on this fact:  Kirk Ferentz has never done this.  He has had better squads -- make no mistake because of their unblemished record; this is not yet Kirk's best team, and no circumstance short of a Rose Bowl victory will change that fact -- with a chance to reverse history against Ohio State, and they have fallen short.  Were it not for one blowout victory in Kinnick, as Drew Tate's windmilling arms signaled the zenith of the first incarnation of the Ferentz juggernaut and Tresselball reached its nadir-to-date, we would be discussing Tressel's hold over Ferentz in the same way we discuss Ferentz's ownership of Paterno.  We are coming to the completion of arguably the greatest decade of football in the history of the University of Iowa, and we're 1-4 against this opponent, this opponent who we now look past merely because their quarterback makes some bad choices, as if we had room to talk.

I'm committed to this team in ways that are bad for my physical, mental, and emotional health.  I watch every play, read every press clipping, write word after word after four-syllable word for 8 months of the year about this team, to the point where friends and family are no longer angry or disappointed by my negligent maintenance of relationships from August through December.  On Friday night, I helped a stranger change a tire on her minivan in the hopes that the positive karma would buy us a couple more wins.  I wake up thinking of old West Wing episodes and their tangential connection to Iowa football fans.  I'm as frustrated by the disrespecting masses as anyone else here.  But I'm here to tell you this:  At this point, we don't deserve the level of respect that some are demanding.  We've had our opportunities, against Northern Iowa and Arkansas State and Indiana, to put a stake through the heart of the "lucky" myth, and we have failed so many times that the myth has become fact.  No team has won its first nine with a total margin of victory under 100 since 1994 Alabama, and they were two years removed from a national championship and still got no respect.  We are what we are, just one of the second-tier undefeateds, waiting for the season-defining blowouts we got in 2002 and 2004 to confirm our legitimacy, perhaps waiting for something that will never come.

There are three games to play.  The BCS talk starts when they're done.  Stop worrying about drowning.  Start worrying about the fall.

Ah, Indiana football.  It would be so quaint if it didn't beat us so regularly.  I need not remind you of Kellen Lewis and The Receiver Who Will Not Be Named, but in a week where Iowa is 8-0 and Indiana is mired in its usual mediocrity, the fact that neither will play this week is probably the best news we can get.

For this week's podcast, we're joined by the helplessly professional John M., creator of the Hoosier Report and now managing editor of Crimson Quarry, the SBN Indiana blog.  We'll discuss the inexplicable recent vote of confidence in Bill Lynch, the current status of Kellen Lewis, and the state of Indiana football with 4 weeks left to play.

BHGPodcast 10

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama
2	Texas	1
3	Iowa	1
4	Florida
5	Boise State
6	TCU	6
7	Oregon	1
8	Penn State	5
9	Southern Cal	1
10	Pittsburgh	4
11	Georgia Tech	2
12	Virginia Tech	2
13	Cincinnati	6
14	Arizona	1
15	Miami (Florida)	4
16	Ohio State	1
17	Oklahoma State	1
18	LSU	1
19	South Carolina	1
20	Wisconsin
21	Notre Dame
22	West Virginia	1
23	Mississippi	1
24	Oklahoma
25	Houston	1
Last week's ballot

Dropped Out: Texas Tech (#18), Nebraska (#21), Michigan (#25).

---

Tackle Eligible:  Kansas, Cal, Central Michigan, BYU, Texas Tech

Not much movement in the poll this week; TCU gets the requisite bump after pummeling Brigham Young, Penn State continues to roll through a schedule that is significantly better than we initially thought, and Pitt is strangely intriguing.

So let's talk Cincinnati.

Long-time followers of the poll know I have no problem with Cincinnati; they held the #1 spot for a couple weeks early on, and on style I give them high marks.  But they have played absolutely nobody.  The Bearcats' top three wins, in order of quality:

Oregon State, 4-3 and middling in the Pac-10.  With that said, their three losses are all to teams in the top 14, and they hold wins over Stanford and Arizona State.  Their record belies their talent, in direct contrast to the next two teams.

South Florida, 5-2 after getting curbstomped by Pitt this weekend.  USF's two losses are by a combined 44 points.  Their five wins are against two I-AA opponents, Western Kentucky, and two "names" (FSU and 'Cuse) who are shells of their former selves.  Those five wins are against teams that are 10-26 on the year.

Rutgers, who is 5-2 against a schedule that might be even worse.  The Knights have the same two losses as USF (by a combined 39), but have beaten two I-AA's, Florida International, Army, and the worst team in a BCS conference (Maryland).

Not only does Cincinnati have the worst opponents' record of all the teams in the top 25, but that record might actually be overestimating the quality of the opposition; USF and Rutgers might well be the worst 5-win teams in the country.  Is 13 low?  Yeah, probably, but not egregiously low given the body of work we have to rely upon, and I can't find a reason to put Cinci higher than any of the teams listed above them.

More photos » by Al Goldis - AP

Browse more photos »

Despite squeaking out a last-second victory over a .500 team and dropping a spot in the Harris poll, Iowa moved up two places in the newest BCS rankings.  The Hawkeyes are now fourth, behind Florida, Alabama, and Texas, and ahead of four teams (Southern Cal, Cincinnati, Boise State, and TCU) ranked above them by the human voters.

If the Hawkeyes filled out an eHarmony profile this week, the computer would probably keep it for itself.  Iowa ranks first in five of the six computer polls (the only holdout is the notoriously flawed Billingsley poll, which places Iowa fourth).  It stands to reason that Iowa's eight methodical, workmanlike, borderline ugly wins would look better to the machines than they do to the sports information directors and retirees who vote in the human polls, especially given the fact that the computers cannot consider margin of victory.  There is no rational argument for any of the other undefeateds playing a more difficult schedule than Iowa: The Hawkeyes' schedule-to-date is 18 games over .500; the next closest (Florida) is 2 over.  That statistic, combined with four BCS-conference road wins, is enough to win over nearly every unfeeling electronic device.

Southern Cal and TCU move up in tandem with Iowa.  Ironically, the big drops of the week are Cincinnati and Boise State, who convincingly beat their opponents this weekend (or at least more convincingly than Iowa, Florida, and Alabama) but are crucified by the computers for soft schedules.  Cincinnati's slate, in particular, gets worse with every passing week; the Bearcats' opposition-to-date is now 21-29 after going 2-5 over the weekend, the worst mark among the remaining undefeated teams.  Boise, at 23-28, is not far off.

We are still a long way from this having any long-term meaning; the Hawks have four more games to play, including that November 14 trip to Columbus.  Should they run the table, they'll need some help from the human voters to move up further, but don't count out the possibility of Iowa leapfrogging Texas.  Barring an unexpected loss by Florida or Alabama, the SEC champion will likely top both polls at the end of the year.  Texas would certainly be second, and a 12-0 Iowa with wins in Columbus and Happy Valley is likely third.  But the Longhorns are hated by the computers; they currently rank fifth, and there is little left on their schedule (including the Big XII championship game against whichever of the paraplegics wins the North) that will improve their standing.  Should Iowa finish third in the polls and win the computers, they would likely rank ahead of #2/#2/#4 Texas.  But, yeah, we have a long way to go.

Today's mission: To boldly go where no Iowa football team has gone before.  The only thing standing in the way of 8-0 is a 3000 year old green guy on HGH.  It's time we throw a wrench into the BCS standings.  It's time we made some history.  It's time we fuck some shit up.

You know the rules.  Comments below.