Hawkeye Blogger Roundtable - Around the B1G

We had originally planned to do the roundtable every 2-to-3 weeks during the off-season. But we got a little over-zealous and kicked out another one in just a week. This week's questions are a little more focused around the conference, instead of just on Iowa. We have Ed from HawkeyeKoolaid joining us this week. And of course, Rick from PlannedSickDays and Mike from The Hawkeye State are still around.

Again, to see the entire roundtable, be sure to visit HawkeyeNetwork later today.

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Question 1: Tre$$elgate. What should happen to Jim Tressel?

He should just man up and resign. The evidence keeps mounting against OSU and it doesn’t sound like that’s going to end anytime soon.

What will happen?

I do think he will ultimately resign. Sports Illustrated is supposed to be dropping a bomb next Tuesday and with everything that has already come out, that seems pretty plausible. Then in August the NCAA will be laying down the law. I think it’ll come to a point resign or be fired, and Tressell will step down.
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Links For Iowa kicks off at 11

Two 11 AM games announced

Both the Nebraska game on November 25 and homecoming against Indiana on October 22 will kick off at 11:00 AM. The Nebraska game will be nationally televised on ABC. The TV for the Indiana game was not announced (though I'd bet on ESPN2 or BTN).

At 11 on ABC, the Nebraska game should be the only show in town early on Black Friday (there are 11 other games that day, but half are MAC and the others will likely be later in the day). I imagine that game will have more eyes on it than any other Iowa game this year, especially if the two teams are playing for a spot in B1G title game.

I am a little surprised that this game didn't get a 2:30 kick, but ABC already had decided to do Miami vs. BC.
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Iowa vs Northwestern - A night game

Unless you are like my parents and your only source of Iowa Football news comes from this blog (hi Mom and Dad!), then you already know that Iowa will play in one prime time game this upcoming season against Northwestern. I do have some thoughts on the matter though, so I'm posting about the old news.

First the important stuff:

What: Iowa vs. Northwestern
When: 6:00 PM, October 15, 2011
Where: Kinnick Stadium, Iowa City
TV: BTN

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Some site stuff

I've been meaning to do a post like this for a while. A couple of months ago when I added some more support for mobile I thought I'd post. Then, last month on April 4th marked the 2 year anniversary of the first post on Fight For Iowa...a perfect time to post. Finally over the weekend I noticed that the comments weren't working properly. I fixed them and that's what prompted me to finally post.

Two years old

This is somewhat belated, but back in April was the two year blog birthday of Fight For Iowa. It's hard to believe that I've been doing this for two years already. Year two was drastically different than the first. A good part of that had to do with the fact that the two football teams had very different seasons. It was much more difficult to write about the disappointing losses last year than the thrilling 9-0 start to the 2009 season. But I feel last year was still more successful.

Unlike after year one, I don't have a lot to say about my journey this past year. Some small things though--this past year I was more focused on what I wanted to do and more organized. And, as a result I was able to spend more time on some of the more fun things, like updating the design and adding extra functionality to the site while hopefully still providing good content.
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Hawkeye Blogger Roundtable - And so it begins

Over the past couple of years the number of Hawkeye blogs has been rising rapidly. A few of us in the community decided it was time to start collaborating more. One thing I've always wanted to do, but never had the time to organize it, is have a Hawkeye blogger roundtable where each week or two each blogger weighs in on a number of shared topical questions. Then we can all link out to each other and help spread the wide range of opinions.

Well, we are finally doing it. A big thanks goes to Rick of Planned Sick Days for really organizing this whole thing. Also involved are Mike (@MikJones24) from The Hawkeye State and MikeHawk (@Hawkize). Be sure to check out the new site Hawkeye Network to see a summary of all of our answers later this morning.

Question 1: Adam Robinson’s dismissal isn’t a surprise, it was Hawk Central, or more specifically his mom, that kept the door open, at least for the general public. What do you think happened there to close the door for good? Care to speculate?

I think while Robinson was still on scholarship, Ferentz was just kind of stringing us along. He never really gave us any indication that he was seriously thinking about giving Robinson a second chance and always gave us the "nothing has changed" answer. My guess is A-Rob decided to leave after the semester and Ferentz thought that was a good idea.
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Is Iowa's slow pace a key to victory?

Football Study Hall, which is an excellent blog if you are a statistics nerd, had in interesting post the other day on Adjusted Pace. The basic idea behind Adj. Pace is to look at how many offensive plays a team runs during a game. Adj. Pace is defined by the author using these terms:

A simple regression formula was used to determine how many plays a team would be expected to run given their run-pass splits. The teams were then ranked according to the difference between their actual plays and their expected plays.

You would probably expect this watching Iowa's rather methodical pace...Iowa clocks in as the 5th slowest team in the country (the post has a full rundown of all FBS teams). Given Iowa's pass/run split, you would expect the offense to run about 69.3 plays per game. In reality Iowa's average was just 61.6 (FCS games weren't included, i.e. against Eastern Illinois) and Iowa only broke the 69.3 mark three time (against Iowa State, Ball State, and Northwestern). Against Minnesota Iowa didn't even reach 50 offensive plays.

On the flip side, I took a look at the pace of Iowa's opponents and if it changed against Iowa. For the most part it was pretty close...the Hawkeye's opponents averaged 70.2 plays per game against Iowa versus a season averaged of 68.8 plays. In 8 games of 12 games Iowa kept opponents on pace or below with their season average. The glaring exceptions were Michigan, Northwestern, and Missouri who each ran about 10 more plays against Iowa than their average. These three teams really exploited Iowa's bend-but-don't-break cushion on defense and were satisfied moving down the field in small chunks.
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2011 Predictions: Defensive Breakout Player

It has been a little while since I made my predictions for the offensive and special teams breakout players for 2011 and I'm now just getting around to defense.

Jordan Bernstine

Bernstine was heavily recruited out of high school and came to Iowa with some big expectations. Every year I have thought, "okay, this is the year" for Bernstine only to see him on the sidelines for one reason or another. As a freshman he was beaten out by Amari Spievey. As a sophomore he broke his ankle during camp and missed the season. As a junior was suspended the first game of the year for public intox and spent the rest of a year as a backup. But now he's a senior and this is the last chance for it to be his year.

Bernstine was listed as a second string corner back at the conclusion of spring. However, during the spring game, and from all accounts all of spring practice, he played both corner and strong safety. Safety is probably his best bet at playing time with both starters from last year now departed and both starting corners returning (even though Micah Hyde may end up at free safety).

Helping Bernstine's cause at safety is that Norm Parker recently said that the position could be handled by committee this year. So even if Bernstine doesn't win the starting spot he'll still likely see playing time as part of a rotation. Additionally, we saw Norm really mix up the personnel packages on defense during the Insight Bowl. With a relatively inexperienced front 7 I would expect that trend to continue and that we will see more nickel and dime on passing downs. So again, if Bernstine isn't a starter, he'd be a likely candidate as the nickel back.
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Links For Iowa is crazy about recruiting

B1G in-state recruiting

Recruiting has been the topic du jour around the blogosphere. A poster on mgoblog has a post on in-state recruiting around the B1G. The numbers for Iowa are very interesting.

Iowa is 9th in the conference in percent of recruits that from in-state. Between 2002 and 2011 only 50 of the Hawkeyes's 221 recruits have come from Iowa. Compare that to OSU who had 123 of 204 in-state recruits. However, the Hawkeyes were actually the top school in terms of keeping kids in state even with a very low number of actual recruits.

Iowa has gotten over 90% of all in-state kids who were B1G bound, which was top in the conference. Wisconsin was the next highest with 72.16%. As the poster said, "Ferentz may fill his roster with non-Iowans but only after he makes sure virtually every Iowan who can play for a Big Ten team will play for his."

I think a couple things are going on here. First, yes, Kirk Ferentz & Co. do a great job of recruiting the state of Iowa. Not only do they get most of the top kids on scholarship, but they also get a ton local kids to walk-on and contribute. An advantage the Hawkeyes have in this B1G-only view is that they are competing for kids in Iowa largely with non-B1G schools. Iowa State is the main competition, but Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, and Notre Dame sometimes also make waves. However, even when Iowa does go head-to-head recruiting with other B1G teams, they do very well (except against OSU).

Again, very interesting stuff, so check out the original post.
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An Early Look at Iowa vs. Tennessee Tech - 2011

The Game

Event: Iowa vs. Tennessee Tech
Location: Kinnick Stadium, Iowa City, IA
When: September 3, 2011

The Basics

Location: Cookeville, TN
Head Coach: Watson Brown
Mascot: Golden Eagles
Conference: Ohio Valley Conference (FCS)
2010 Record: 5-6 (4-4)

The Offense

Returning Starters: 11 (TTU lists 13 starters on offense)
Key Players: RB Jocques Crawford, QB Tre Lamb, WR Tim Benford
Key Losses: QB Cass Barnes, WR Henry Sailes

The Golden Eagles employ a run-first spread offense. The two quarterbacks used last year, Tre Lamb and Cass Barnes, accounted for roughly 1/3 of all rushes, but the main ball carrier was tailback Jocques Crawford. Crawford ran for 625 yards on 118 carries and had 9 TDs. The other main tailback was Dontey Gay who started the first 9 games of the year before going down with an ankle injury. Gay had 63 carries for 429 yards.
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Links For Iowa: It has begun

Power Rankings

The pre-season power rankings are starting to pour out around the blogosphere. He's a sampling:

• Adam Rittenberg released his post-spring rankings and Iowa comes in at #7.
• Jon Miller has his rankings separated by the Leaders and Legends divisions. He as Iowa as #3 behind Nebraska and Michigan State in the Legends.
• The National Football Post has Iowa at #5 in the post-spring power rankings.

Pretty much everyone caveats Iowa's low-ish ranking with "but Iowa always does better under the radar." Still, after a year of some people predicting a national championship run, 7th in the B1G doesn't sound so great. Still it's probably fair. Iowa returns the least number of starters of any B1G team, has lost 12 players to the NFL draft in the past 2 years, and was just a mediocre team last year.

Kirk Ferentz thinks everyone is tremendous

Ferentz was on 810 WHB in Kansas City on Friday talking about a few of the drafted Hawkeyes. The primary focus was on Stanzi since he was recently selected by the Chiefs. The segment was podcasted, so can listen to the entire interview.
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2011 B1G: Recruiting Rankings

Fans often like to discount recruiting rankings (especially fans of teams that don't have very high rankings) citing things walk-ons turning into pros and Appalachian State beating Michigan. Sure, those things happen. But more often than not recruiting rankings do matter. So, in keeping with my goal of looking at data to make B1G predictions I wanted to take a look at recruiting rankings.

Mostly just for fun, but also to justify using recruiting rankings as a predictor, I took at look at just how good they are at predicting. This is definitely not a very original thing to do. BHGP just had an excellent player development post that compared recruiting rankings to NFL draftee. More in-line of what I'm looking for though, is this study that's from the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. The study concluded that "up to 45% of the variances in the end-of-season ratings and total wins" could be predicted by the recruiting rankings. That sounds pretty nice, but it's from a few years ago and I still wanted to run the numbers myself.
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Links For Iowa develops talent

Iowa develops NFL talent: confirmed by numbers!

A poster over on BHGP (UpUpDownDown) put together a pretty amazing post that compares recruiting rankings to NFL draftees and confirms what we've all know for years: Iowa is exceptional at developing players. There is a ton of good information in the post (some breakdowns by conference and offense vs. defense), but the part most exciting is that since 2002 Iowa has been the 3rd best program at developing players.

The analysis is quite interesting, but it boils down to what the poster call the Development Ratio. It takes the actual number of draftees divide by the expected number of draftees based on recruiting rankings (read the post for a better explanation). Based on Iowa's mix of 2, 3, 4, and 5-star players they would have been expected to have 13 draft picks, but in actuality Iowa has had 22. So, Iowa's program essentially doubles a player's chance of becoming a NFL draftee than an average BCS program. Compare that to Iowa State, whose expected number of draftees comes in just slightly lower at 12.6. However, the Cyclones have had just 5 players drafted. They are actually the third worst BCS program.
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2011 NFL Draft Recap: 6 Hawkeyes Drafted

I think I watched more draft coverage in the past 3 days than in my entire life. This year's group of departing Hawkeyes was rather likable and I wanted to see where they would land. I'm not a big NFL guy and don't really have a team, but this draft was still very entertaining.

Iowa matched a Kirk Ferentz high with 6 players selected in the NFL draft. There were also six Hawkeyes drafted in last year's draft. There were just 4 schools (USC-9, North Carolina-9, Miami-8, and Nebraska-7) that had more players drafted. And, coming the past two years, Iowa's 12 draftees comes in behind only USC and North Carolina (via @HawkeyeReport). Perhaps most impressive to me though, is that the Hawkeyes had 3 defensive linemen selected in one year. Give Coach Kaczenski a raise, because that is truly an amazing feat.

Still the draft was not without its disappointment. Both Ballard and Stanzi were predicted to go in earlier rounds but slipped to the 4th and 5th round respectively. Friday's second and third rounds were frustrating to watch as each team skipped over the former Hawks. Ballard's drop can likely be attributed to his alleged failed drug test at the combine, while Stanzi's is more of a mystery. The best I can guess is that not too many teams were need of a backup quarterback this year.
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