Express Points After: Iowa loss

Points After is GoldandBlack.com’s traditional Purdue football’s post-game blog, an analytical platform to complement our standard on-site game coverage. Today, Purdue’s 20-14 loss at Iowa.

You know, the Blueprint for beating Iowa really isn’t all that complex.

It’s not always, or ever, easy to do, but it’s not all that complicated.

There are a bunch of tenets to the Blueprint, but one non-negotiable:

Do.
Not.
Beat.
Yourself.

Is that a ground-breaking concept? No, it is common sense, but that guiding principle has eluded so many Hawkeye opponents over the years, as Iowa has been maybe college football’s No. 1 program at turning 27-10-type wins into six-point final margins, simply by curling up in a ball, just being solid and physical and letting you screw it all up.

And so it goes.

That was the spiderweb Purdue stepped into on Saturday, knowing full well what trap was being laid.

When you open the game with two consecutive trips into Iowa territory and don’t score, you’re begging to get beat. When you turn the ball over twice — not an unreasonable number, but everything tends to be amplified in games like this — and miss field goals, you’ve pretty much already lost.

When you let big plays slip through your fingers, as Purdue did often today, that’s going to haunt you.

It all added up to Saturday’s closer-than-reality loss to the Hawkeyes. Purdue had a chance to win it at the end, but its chance to win it at the end never had a chance.

Purdue was on the wrong end of one of the most Ferentzian outcomes you’ll see. Iowa’s quarterback was 6-of-21 passing. That none of his throws wound up in the river, that was a miracle.

That was a stark contrast between these teams coming in. Iowa needed to hide its quarterback. Purdue needed to feature its quarterback.

PDF: Purdue-Iowa statistics

Hudson Card was up and down and to that end, looked to be trying to do too much, a not-uncommon trap talented QBs sometimes fall into. Drew Brees took too many risks at times, especially as a sophomore; Kyle Orton thought he could throw footballs as if he was trying to break his receivers’ wrists. You see it all the time in college football, even the NFL. Arm talent is an intoxicant.

Card held the ball too long on a few plays and accounted for probably half of Iowa’s six sacks. That said, if he throws the ball away at the first sign of trouble every time today, Purdue gets shut out.

He’s holding the ball trying to extend plays after everything crumbles around him, as it did a lot today. He needed help today from his protection and the sort of play-calling that helped them against Illinois, though there aren’t a lot of perfect calls when you can not compete on the edges, which Purdue could not today. The Boilermaker front got destroyed on the edges today.

And, yes, Card needs help from his receivers. Purdue’s success against Iowa in recent years came via the vertical pass. The way to beat defenses like Iowa: Throw it over the top, albeit often into pretty small windows. The same plays Purdue made last week against Illinois, it did not today. At least three very catchable downfield throws to receivers open enough to make the catches, all incomplete. Two of them — the sideline throw to Deion Burks and the third-and-30 (right?) ball to Abdur-Rahmaan Yaseen — were clear drops, very atypical of the Boilermaker receiving corps this season.

That group of receivers is missing something. Do they have a true modern downfield guy? That big, rangy type with a vast catch radius who can high-point footballs down the field against man coverage? No, they do not. There’s no Anthony Mahoungou or David Bell on Purdue’s roster, let alone in its rotation. Elijah Canion got a look earlier in the season, a clear reflection that Purdue sees a void there. He’s disappeared. Maybe there’s a reason that Jaron Tibbs is kind of in the rotation; perhaps Purdue hopes it can get something out of him later in the year.

There’s no waiver wire, though. You can’t pick up players during the season. At least not yet. That’ll be in the next wave of transfer reform now that UNC is gonna mess around and get the whole rulebook thrown out.

Purdue’s got to make the most of what it has, at receiver, on the offensive line, at kicker, etc. And it needs to help the quarterback and for that quarterback to be better. Both are true.

It has to take advantage of opportunities.

Today, it didn’t do that or much else of what you have to do to beat Iowa, the Big Ten West-iest of the Big Ten West. The Big Ten West is dead; long live the Big Ten West.

Again, the Blueprint isn’t rocket science. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.