Absolutely agree with that. Play or you don't get the benefits.
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The "other TE" is a 1st Team All-Big Ten player and just won the Ozzie Newsome Award and is also a finalist for the Mackey Award. He's a 6-5 255lb sophomore. Actually, both TE's were 1st team All Big 10 but Hockensen got the majority of the snaps this year. He's a better blocker and pretty dangerous downfield. Fant is a freakish athlete who will test well at the combine. 41" vertical leap type of guy.
Why is that? They don't exactly have a stellar bowl record. After having looked it up, they had a recent Rose Bowl but lost it in style to Stanford, and it looks like they've lost most of their other bowl games in the 21st Century. Maybe I don't keep up with them much, but I never really think of them in the same breath as Ohio State, Michigan, and Michigan State.
One of the guys I play golf with is originally from Iowa. We'll have to get a little bet going on the game. And one of my roommates at MSU back in the dark ages was from Iowa, but he went into the Air Force so we've totally lost touch.
Iowa State (ISU) is the land grant school in Iowa with the agronomy, vet med, dairy, beef, swine, ag biz admin etc. programs. Iowa has the medical school, law school and so on.
Purdue, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Illinois, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers and Maryland are the land grant Big10 schools, much like Miss State.
Iowa hasn't lost to Michigan much lately. Pretty even with MSU but we've laid some eggs in recent bowl games. Early in Kirk's tenure Iowa beat Florida, LSU, South Carolina and should have beaten Florida a 2nd time. Iowa's been up and down as of the last few years but always seems to put a fair number of guys in the NFL. Consistent QB play and being one dimensional on offense have been Iowa's weakness over the last few years. They just haven't put it all together, but when they do, they're tough to beat. This year's team lacks senior leadership (young team) and that has hurt them in close games. The defense is pretty good, especially in the secondary and DL. We have 3 DE's that will make an NFL roster in the future and our LBs are young, we lost two from the '17 team that are on NFL rosters but they're mobile and will hit. The secondary is pretty deep and disciplined but had a couple bad outings, including the Purdue game in with a true FR corner got torched for a couple long TDs.
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We're better than Michigan on defense, especially on the edges. Michigan got demolished by an OSU team that's probably the fastest in the country. They're just a schizo team and don't always show up but when they're on, they are tough to stop. OSU reminds me of Oklahoma with a better (but undisciplined) defense.