Duck Tape: Film Analysis of Iowa Football 2025

Special thanks to Tom Kakert of Hawkeye Report for discussing Iowa’s roster with me on this week’s podcast:

The years I’ve been charting Iowa’s offense starting in 2021 represent a local dip and then recovery to the longterm baseline under head coach Ferentz, and talking to Tom for my Summer previews of the Hawkeyes has helped me understand which elements are supposed to be constant, which were part of that recovery, and which the program would like to be better but haven’t yet achieved.

The consistent goal — which Iowa returned to in 2024 and has maintained throughout 2025 — is an effective efficiency run game which allows them to begin series with a 65% rush rate on 1^st downs, stay ahead of the chains, and control the clock on methodical drives. The passing offense is an adjunct to the rushing offense – it’s almost entirely screens that are just extensions of the run game when they’re in their main sequence and a few quick routes for conversions in short-yardage situations. Multiple factors Tom and I have discussed combined for a big jump in rushing efficiency between 2023 and 2024.

The Hawkeyes mostly avoid going downfield otherwise, on 1^st or 2^nd & short/medium because running is a more sure thing, and on 2^nd or 3^rd & long because they don’t operate very well at all when they’re behind the chains. In the recent past when the offense has been truly catastrophic, it’s been because terrible misfortune at QB has turned that reluctance into an absolute non-starter … but in the last two years they’ve gotten relative stability at the position and settled in, though some hoped-for gains in passing explosiveness haven’t materialized.

What this adds up to is that in 2025 Iowa’s offense is operating nominally – when they win on 1^st down and stay ahead of the chains with their rushing offense, they’re hard to stop and operate synergistically with their defense to sit on a lead or hang on to a narrow margin and kick a last-second field goal. But they’re not built to operate from behind, either tactically or strategically – their passing success rate starts out bad and gets worse in later down & distance situations, decaying to a last-in-conference 11% success rate on 3^rd & long.

The main running back this year has been #28 RB Moulton, who’s gotten slightly over half of all meaningful carries with very good per-carry numbers, 60.9% efficiency and 4.97 adjusted YPC. The other highly effective back who I’d describe as the second one in, #4 RB Patterson, has even better numbers at 68.2% and 5.45, though he’s missed some time recently with injury and only returned late during garbage time in their last game against Minnesota. Tom said that Patterson should be available after the bye week to further rest up but we’ll have to see.

Tom and I have had a running debate (no pun intended) about Moulton and Patterson vs 2024’s star back, Kaleb Johnson, on our last couple of podcasts. The points that we agree about are that switching coordinators and therefore the run game design to OC Lester’s midzone scheme has been more effective, that the offensive line in 2024 really hit some maturity that they’d lacked in some senses before, and that the injuries and departures to the tight end unit have held back blocking performance. Tom’s contention is that Johnson had something extra that Moulton and Patterson lack in generating explosive rushing, and Johnson’s departure for the NFL at the end of the 2024 season is why there’s been a fallback to the previous anemic 10% explosive rushing levels.

My observation is that Moulton and Patterson, on fewer reps but more than enough for good measurement, have comparable and even superior per-carry numbers to Johnson in both 2024 and 2025, and the fallback has more to do with bigger blocking issues this year which I’ll discuss below. What’s not in dispute is that there’s a major stair-step to the other three backs in the room, who are combining for 31.5% of meaningful carries (more, if Patterson remains out). Those three are #26 RB X. Williams, #25 RB McNeil, and #8 RB Washington. Cumulatively, their success rate is an abysmal 30.95%, with 3.52 adjusted YPC and just 7.14% explosiveness.

Here’s a representative sample of successful rushing plays:

(Reminder – you can use the button in the lower right corner to control playback speed)

And unsuccessful rushing plays:

The offensive line in 2025 returns three of the senior starters who I thought had really rounded into shape in 2024 after this line had some surprisingly mediocre-to-poor grades on my tally sheet in earlier seasons. They’d lost two of their starters from 2024, at left tackle and right guard, as well as two longtime and — as Tom and I discussed over the Summer, pretty important — starting-level replacement linemen who could fill in at a couple positions.

Tom and I agreed about the returning center and left guard, #65 C Lo. Jones and #70 LG Stephens, maintaining their progress from last year. We also agreed that the new right guard, the sophomore #58 RG Pieper, is still a bit undersized, and that it’s been prescient to talk about the new swing guys because we’ve already seen them both have to go in due to some dings – #71 OT Dotzler and #64 OG Le. Jones (unrelated to the center), although simply for lack of experience they’re not grading out as well as the veterans they’re replacing.

Where we disagreed was about the tackles. Tom felt that this group has been performing at a very high level, but on my tally sheet they just haven’t been grading out as well as 2024. On the left that’s understandable to me, they’ve replaced an NFL draft pick with a sophomore in #59 LT Lauck, though Tom was still much higher on him as I see significant pass protection problems here with a 21.4% per-dropback error rate. On the right it’s more of a puzzle, #77 RT Dunker’s run blocking grades have dropped significantly since last year for no real reason that I can figure out, mainly because he keeps losing his feet. Dunker’s pass protection grades remain solid if unspectacular, he’s big but somewhat stiff and prone to waist bending (Tom and I agreed that he projects as a guard in the NFL).

Tom and I spent quite some time on the podcast trying to figure out why transfer quarterback #11 QB Gronowski — who for four years at FCS South Dakota State was a well above median passer with 93 passing TDs, had won two national championships and the Walter Payton award — has been at best a competent game manager at Iowa. His raw NCAA passer rating this year, 116.2, is three standard deviations lower than it was at SDSU (and it’s even lower adjusting for garbage time, 109.0). The offense operates at only 40% efficiency passing on 1^st down or 2^nd & medium/long, and collapses precipitously in the only down & distance situations when Iowa prefers to pass which is 3^rd & medium/long.

The chicken-or-the-egg problem is that I don’t really have enough good data due to how infrequently and in constrained circumstances to tell if Gronowski isn’t intrinsically an accurate enough passer to push the ball downfield (and perhaps his prior numbers were just on a massive volume of short stuff), if the injury that he struggled with earlier in the year is affecting his throwing motion, or if the surrounding pieces in the offense just aren’t good enough to protect him and create separation so that it’s worth it to try deeper throws.

My suspicion is that it’s a bit of all of those things, but mostly about the surrounding pieces. As mentioned above, my tally sheet shows a downtick in offensive line protection in 2025, and Iowa also has had an unfortunate multiple-year injury problem at tight end which is hampering their extra-man protections as well.

And in watching the high angle this year in reviewing all of Iowa’s games, I see a consistent lack of separation out of any target, which leads to frequent checkdowns and dumpoffs to RBs and TEs that are less productive, or scrambles trying to extend the play which usually end in even less productive outcomes like throwaways or minimal gains. There’s only one receiver who’s well above the baseline in per-target productivity, the starting slot man, but due to the structure of Iowa’s offense he’s thrown to the least of the single main outlets since they really only throw the ball when they have to, and his routes aren’t the longer ones.

This graph shows all of the problems in Iowa’s passing offense at once, if one categorizes passing plays in which the QB takes a sack, runs on a scramble, throws the ball away to no particular receiver, or is intercepted as a “target” for the QB himself, to be compared in frequency and success rate to targets of actual wideouts, tight ends, or running backs:

The ideal version of this graph would look like a matched pair of stairsteps marching from the top left to the bottom right, with the most effective player getting targeted most frequently, the second most effective the second most, and so on all the way to the QB on the far end having few to no broken plays. Iowa’s looks about as far from ideal as imaginable, like an “X” … the QB is all the way on the left, double the baseline frequency of broken plays (which naturally have an extremely low success rate), TEs and RBs are the most frequently targeted but they’re below baseline in effectiveness, and indeed the more effective a receiver is the less likely he is to be targeted!

The unfortunate tight end news this season has been the injury to senior #87 TE Ostrenga, who Tom told me is out for the year. Compounding this, it seems clear from where in the rotation the staff has played returning upperclassman #48 TE Ortwerth that they don’t think he’s ready to fill in – as Tom put it on the podcast, Ortwerth’s performance “I think has got their attention and not in a positive way.” The main two tight ends have been redshirt freshman walk-on #81 TE Vonnahme and NAIA transfer #88 TE Large. However, unlike in past seasons they really haven’t been used extensively in the passing game and barely more than at point-blank range downfield at that. There’s also a shocking disparity in their blocking blocking performance, with Vonnahme grading out twice as effectively as Large and the latter frequently being the chief cause of split-flow run play failures.

Vonnahme went out early in the week 8 game with an injury and was replaced by Ortwerth, then in week 9 Vonnahme was still out and another redshirt freshman was added to the rotation, #80 TE Burt, though that game against Minnesota was quickly a laugher. Tom told me Vonnahme was close to returning and will probably be good to go on Saturday. I haven’t seen anything during his absence to make me think that Iowa has a second effective blocking tight end, or an inclination to start throwing the ball downfield to this unit to someone they’ve been hiding.

The two outside receivers are #5 WR Anderson and #5 WR Gill. The latter has the plurality of the targets, and like last year, is slightly above median in success rate since his hands are pretty good, but the nature of the routes he’s running keeps Gill’s YPC well below average at only 6.52 YPT. Anderson’s numbers are atrocious at 26.7% and 2.71 YPT … Tom keeps telling me the staff thinks he’s a great weapon but I’ve never seen anything close to it or any kind of separation. There’s an intringuing option on the outside who’s just now getting over a foot fratcture in #15 WR Vander Zee; he only has a few targets but one was for a touchdown against Minnesota – he’s a big receiver at 6’5” but Tom said he wouldn’t describe him as having track speed. I’m not sure he solves Iowa’s separation problem but as a redzone option he could add versatility.

The X-factor guys are #2 WR Phillips and #21 WR Wetjen. Phillips is the 5’7” slot man, I don’t really see him creating separation when it’s 3^rd & long and they have to release everyone into the pattern, but on the rare play when Iowa throws it on early downs and surprises the defense he’s been incredible with a 73% success rate and 12.6 YPC … in fact it’s baffling that Phillips only has 15 meaningful targets all season. Wetjen up until this year has almost entirely been a special teams punt and kick returner (and is arguably the most dangerous in the country, under no circumstances should he be kicked to); this year he’s been getting a lot more sweeps, screens, and horizontal throws to the flat though virtually nothing downfield. Wetjen has a couple big plays if he breaks a tackle but mostly his plays have been incredibly predictable and shut down for a sub-45% success rate in both the receiving and rushing games.

Here’s a representative sample of successful passing plays:

And unsuccessful passing plays:

Longtime DC Parker and his staff are fundamentally conservative in their approach – they back out and play the pass in most circumstances, try to take away explosive plays at all costs, don’t overpenetrate or make gambles for havoc plays up front, and reserve blitzes for strategic moments on late downs. The overall strategy is to make offenses go on long drives, eventually get them behind the chains on 3^rd & long, and get off the field with an excellent 77% success rate in that situation.

There are a few under-the-surface elements to Iowa’s defense which may be surprising to those who’ve only looked at their overall ranking. One is the tradeoffs that they make in terms of short efficiency plays vs chunk-yardage gains – because the defense hangs back and keeps the play in front of them, and the line prizes bend and conditioning over raw size, the Hawkeyes routinely give up underneath throws and short-yardage rushing conversions, but then shut those down so they don’t go any farther … so it’s relatively easy to get just under seven yards in the passing game and four yards in the rushing game, but very hard to get much more than that.

Another possible surprise is that the defense generates very little havoc or even penetration into the backfield unless it’s bringing extra bodies, and they only do that selectively. On the podcast Tom was bemoaning that 2025 has seen an even lower rate of pressure from rushing only four than in previous years, but to my view this is in keeping with Parker’s philosophy of avoiding overpenetration and keeping containment.

Blitzing is very rare on early downs, under 10% on 1^st down and 2^nd & short/medium, rising to about 22% on 3^rd & short/medium, and going for the kill at 29% then almost 49% on 2^nd then 3^rd & longs. When factoring in field position (as Tom noted on the podcast, Parker has expanded his blitz utilization from beyond just the redzone recently), opponent disposition, game situation, and other variables in my algorithmic model for predicting the highest leverage moments for when to blitz and when not to blitz, Parker is the single best flesh-and-blood human being at replicating the computer for blitz strategy I’ve ever observed.

The four-down defensive line uses a fairly typical eight-man rotation for a front of this type, two starters and two backups apiece at the tackles and ends, although the body types are somewhat unorthodox in that they’re all built very similarly and are used almost interchangeably with an emphasis on length and flexibility rather than pure mass.

At tackle the starters are returner #95 DT Graves and CMU transfer #91 DT Pace, with backups being the returner #55 DT Pittman and FCS transfer #96 DT Hawthorne. All are between 6’3” and 6’5”, 285 to 295 lbs, and to be honest your film reviewer had to stare hard at the screen every play to check who was in because they sub out at about a 60/40 split and there’s not much difference in their builds or grades on my sheet. The bend is impressive here, linemen keep trying to twist them in half and they get under and through the block regardless.

At end the rotation is a little less free, closer to 70/30, with the starters being #49 DE Hurkett and #48 DE Llewellyn, and the backups #90 DE Allen and #44 DE Merrieweather, all of whom came up in Iowa’s developmental pipeline. There’s a step down in block destruction effectiveness here from the starters to the backups, but per the defensive philosophy there’s not a big effect on the bottom line since the backups play their core responsibility in setting the edge and keeping containment just fine.

The planned rotations in the defense basically stop at this point, Iowa plays ironman at linebacker and in the secondary unless injury forces their hand. I’ve asked Tom whether this is ideological or it’s just how many guys they think are above the line, and he said he thinks it’s how the staff prefers it.

At linebacker, as it happens, an injury did occur, although I think it’s had a silver lining. The starters in the 4-2-5 configuration are #41 LB Harrell and #43 LB Sharar, with #12 LB Rexroth coming in as the SAM when they go to the 4-3 against heavier offensive formations. But in the last two games prior to the bye week Harrell has been mostly held out due to an injury (Tom said Harrell was dressed and played a little, though I didn’t see him during meaningful time) and #36 LB Montgomery has filled in for him. Montgomery — the son of Bengals’ DL Coach Jerry Montgomery who played for Ferentz a quarter century ago — has actually graded out a little better than Harrell and Tom speculated that if he weren’t 5’10” he might have won the starting job.

What I observe about all the backers is how much they trust the line in front of them – rather than immediately sticking their noses in the scrum they scrape to the play, and they know when the line has kept them clean and they can just walk around the trash to make a clean tackle. Where I notice problems in the front is when the complexity or novelty of the play overwhelms the number of assignments they can handle – counters, RPOs, pre-snap motion … anything that thins out the numbers in the box and gets the defense moving in one way then attacks in another has a significantly higher success rate and odds of producing a longer gain.

Here’s a representative sample of successfully defended rushes:

And unsuccessfully defended rushes:

The secondary is entirely comprised of returners who played last year, though many have stepped up roles. #6 DB Lutmer has taken over due to an NFL departure at nickel, and the job is a little different this year, less of a safety than another corner on most reps though he’ll also play on the line and is active in the run game especially if motion in zone has left him no one to cover. Lutmer in the last couple of games has also switched over to relieve the outside corner in some of the 4-3 configurations – in the past they’d also done something like this where they kept the nickel on the field in the 4-3, but it was a deep safety they rotated off to keep the nickel on.

The safeties this year are #4 DB Entringer and #1 DB Nwankpa. The former was a backup last year I didn’t see much; the latter was a starter in 2024 but he was the safety they’d rotate off in the 4-3 then, so in a sense he’s also taking on a much bigger role in 2025 by being on the field all the time as well. By the nature of this defense they’re almost always playing back and keeping everything in front of them so there’s not much opportunity to show off but they grade out pretty well in doing their jobs when I get to see them in action.

The two outside corners are #2 CB Hall and #8 CB Lee. Both were starters last year; Tom and I had some criticism for Lee over the Summer and wondered if the experienced FCS transfer #5 CB Barros was brought in to take his job, though Tom told me Barros has been hurt all year and at any rate I think Lee has shown a lot of improvement playing clean in 2025. Tom argued that Hall might be the most improved player on the team … I find that difficult to evaluate, since the prevailing strategic conditions in the Big Ten make a style of play that would be non-viable in any other conference optimal in this one:

In charting Iowa’s tape for the last five seasons, I noticed a certain pattern for how some offenses approached the Hawkeyes which others didn’t adopt. I then analyzed the play-by-play records from the 10 years prior to that in Iowa’s bowl games against SEC and Pac-12 teams vs other conferences, as well as conference games against Michigan, MSU, OSU, and PSU compared to the rest of the Big Ten, which confirmed the pattern.

While many opponents chose an approach which brought to mind the old joke about getting in the mud to wrestle a pig, that quartet of Big Ten teams plus SEC/Pac-12 bowl opponents took a different approach which resulted in an average margin of victory of 23.26 points over Iowa.

Given what Iowa’s defense allows and when it hardens, the apposite strategy was to take underneath throws on 1^st down to either get another 1^st down or set up 2^nd & short. Because a blitz or pocket pressure is unlikely in short yardage, this is an opportunity for a deep pass to challenge the corners with speed – as Tom relayed, Parker’s adage is that it only takes a three or so 25+ plays to break open a game.

If the deep shot is unsuccessful, the 3^rd & short conversion should still be available because Iowa doesn’t stuff the run well … and now it’s 1^st and 10 again, repeat the process. The important thing had been to score from outside the redzone on an explosive, because the defense usually tightens up there, though this year Iowa has fallen off in that regard, allowing 63% of opponent redzone trips to score touchdowns which ranks 83^rd nationally.

Here’s a representative sample of successfully defended passes:

And unsuccessfully defended passes: