Iowa sports right now are at an all-time high, and low, at the same time. Three major sports are all very competitive in some big goals for their seasons. I’m writing this on November 17 and the football team has yet to play Illinois at Kinnick Stadium. I will be attending that game as the stakes are high and it should be a very fun game. If the Hawks can pull it off they will clinch the Big Ten West Championship and will have clinched a spot in Indianapolis for the second time in three years, they would play the winner of Ohio State vs. Michigan. The last time Iowa had a division-clinching game at Kinnick, they got beat up by Nebraska on Black Friday of 2022. This team is very different from the 2022 team, as this more or less earned the right to play for a Big Ten Championship, and the 2022 team got a lot of help from other teams just to have stakes for the game against Nebraska. A weird similarity between this game vs Illinois and the game against Nebraska in ‘22 is that the Hawkeyes won’t have Cooper Dejean, he was knocked out (literally) of the game last season and he broke his ankle in practice this week. Although I think this is different because now Phil Parker, Lavar Woods, and the rest of the team have a few days of practice to prepare for a game without the Hawks’s best player. All in all, this is a big game and one the Hawks almost need to win because this one should be much easier than playing at Nebraska next week.
The Woman’s Basketball was ranked second in the country but with the recent loss at home to Kansas State, that ranking will change. They didn’t play very well, actually they played pretty bad by their standards, and still almost won in the end. Kansas State should be a pretty dangerous team and with the defense they play, they can beat a lot of teams. At the end of the day, this loss doesn’t mean that much as they lost to Kansas State last year and still found themselves one win away from a national championship. It’s just a team that has their number in the last two seasons, it’s not a season-ender by any means, but it’s an unfortunate loss, especially at home.
The Men’s basketball team has looked alright so far this year. They currently sit at 3-1 as I’m writing this and just beat Arkansas State, I wasn’t able to watch it as it was on BTN+ but I don’t think it was anything crazy to watch. The more interesting game was against eighth-ranked Creighton where the Hawks lost 92-84. That game was interesting as to me it seemed like we couldn’t play much better in the first half but we went in tied, and in the second half Creighton couldn’t miss and Iowa cooled off. They showed a lot of potential in that game and it gave me some hope for this season.
All in all Iowa sports is really interesting these days and I’m looking forward to seeing how the seasons pan out.