[stupac2]

One of the first things you need to know is that Iowa is Iowa, no matter who we play you're going to get the same schemes and the same personnel.  I've wondered at times why we don't come up with just a few things to take advantage of a given opponent or situation, but that's just not what Kirk Ferentz is about.  We are built to do what we do better than you do what you do.

KF wants to develop an NFL ready, complete football player who can take on anything they face.  The system favors experience over raw athleticism and works great when you have a mature/developed player, but really suffers when you don't. [...]

Also worth mentioning that Iowa's approaches on offense/defense and special teams are all geared to complement one another.  O is possession to keep the D off the field, D is prevent the big play to keep the offense from having to do too much and STs geared to win the field position battle.

Holy crap it's like looking in a mirror.


So, yeah, that's basically Shaw's approach too, which he typically summarizes as  "run the ball and stop the run". We try to run efficiently and then use play action to get big chunks of yardage. On defense we tend to be okay allowing short completions, figuring that very few college QBs can get the 10+ completions you need in order to keep a drive going 5 yards at a time (which is true!). We try to take away big plays, which has mostly worked but really good QBs with fast skill players have sometimes given us issues this year (ND, Oregon) but other times haven't (USC, UCLA sort of?). We also generally have solid special teams, this year our punting and FGs have been solid, but kickoffs are an adventure (lots of OB kicks, very few touchbacks).

[stupac2]

One of the first things you need to know is that Iowa is Iowa, no matter who we play you're going to get the same schemes and the same personnel.  I've wondered at times why we don't come up with just a few things to take advantage of a given opponent or situation, but that's just not what Kirk Ferentz is about.  We are built to do what we do better than you do what you do.

KF wants to develop an NFL ready, complete football player who can take on anything they face.  The system favors experience over raw athleticism and works great when you have a mature/developed player, but really suffers when you don't. [...]

Also worth mentioning that Iowa's approaches on offense/defense and special teams are all geared to complement one another.  O is possession to keep the D off the field, D is prevent the big play to keep the offense from having to do too much and STs geared to win the field position battle.

Holy crap it's like looking in a mirror.


So, yeah, that's basically Shaw's approach too, which he typically summarizes as  "run the ball and stop the run". We try to run efficiently and then use play action to get big chunks of yardage. On defense we tend to be okay allowing short completions, figuring that very few college QBs can get the 10+ completions you need in order to keep a drive going 5 yards at a time (which is true!). We try to take away big plays, which has mostly worked but really good QBs with fast skill players have sometimes given us issues this year (ND, Oregon) but other times haven't (USC, UCLA sort of?). We also generally have solid special teams, this year our punting and FGs have been solid, but kickoffs are an adventure (lots of OB kicks, very few touchbacks).