The Iowa Hawkeyes and Todd Lickliter are getting ready to start their 2nd season under the new coaching staff. Last year the Hawkeyes finished 6 – 12 in the Big Ten and 13 – 19 Overall. The 19 losses set a new single season record for losses in a single season for the Hawkeyes. The Hawkeyes are a young team again this year and are picked by most to finish in the bottom half of the conference with no post-season tournaments. Coach Lickliter states he has been impressed on how the Hawkeyes are practicing this season on Hawkcentral.com and on Rivals.com.
From hearing from other fans and reading the forums, the Iowa Hawkeyes showed a lot of competiveness in their closed scrimmage against DePaul. Everything that is discussed from this scrimmage is showing positive outlooks for the Hawkeyes. Since the scrimmage is a closed scrimmage, no one really knows what happened during it since NCAA rules don’t allow any fans or media to attend the scrimmage. The fans and Media will see the first action when the Hawkeyes take on Wayne State in an Exhibition game this Sunday, November 9th at Carver Hawkeye Arena as Iowa starts their season on Friday Nov. 14th against Charleston Southern at Carver Hawkeye Arena.
The Hawkeyes only have 3 regular season games to finish tuning up before they play in the Las Vegas Invitational at the end of November.
Illinois 27 Iowa 24
Iowa lost a heart breaker game last weekend to Illinois after making a comeback. Iowa was trailing in the 4th period 24 – 9 when they started on their comeback. Iowa hit a Td in the beginning of the 4th to get the score to 24 – 16. Then Iowa hit another TD in the last 3 minutes of the game to bring to total to 24 – 22. Iowa went for a 2 point conversion and got it to make the score 24 – 24. On last drive of the game for Illinois, they brought the ball into FG range and made a 44 yard FG with about 30 seconds left in the game. Iowa tried to make up a lot of ground by throwing long passes. With 9 seconds left in the game Illinois Intercepted a pass from Ricky Stanzi to seal the win for Illinois. Greene ran for over 100 yards for the 9th straight game and had a score against Illinois. Greene will have a challenge this weekend to make it 10 straight games with the Penn State with one of the top ranked Run Defenses in the nation.
Iowa drops to 2 – 3 in the Big Ten and 5 – 4 Overall.
They are still 1 game from being bowl eligible. Iowa hosts the 3rd ranked Penn State team that is undefeated at home this weekend with another change to become bowl eligible the following week when a struggling Purdue team comes to Kinnick. Iowa then travels to Minnesota for their last regular game of the season. Last year Iowa lost the change to go to a bowl game by losing their last game of the season. Let hope the close losses this season doesn’t come back to haunt the Hawkeyes.
