As much as I appreciate everything Hayden Fry did for Iowa football, I'm really glad he's not coaching the 2016 Iowa Rose Bowl bound Hawkeyes. All 3 of his RB teams always looked un-prepared and not ready to play. We got our butts handed to us in the 82, 86 & 91 Rose Bowls.
Bowl preparation is a tricky thing, as both Fry and Ferentz have learned. OK, only Kirk has had some success on the bigger stages. Still Hayden Fry's best Baylor team won a Cotton Bowl, a pretty heady thing back then. And when it came to bowls other than the Rose Bowl, the only times Hayden lost was when his teams were in a downward spiral anyway (as the team the next season failed to meet expectations - '84, '89, '92 [tie], '94 and '98.
As for the Rose Bowls, both Kirk and Hayden let the spotlight get to them in their first big bowl (Fry-Rose, '82; Ferentz-Orange, '03). Former All-American OL Mike Haight, who was a true freshman on that first Rose Bowl team likened it as a "trip to Oz". As for the '91 Rose Bowl, I thought that, with the talent at Washington, we played as well as could be expected. Miami hammered us far worse that season - we were a good, not great team. And in '86, sometimes you play games where everything that could go wrong does - and it sure did that year. I will not comment further on that game.
But FRY is the coach with probably THE finest bowl win by ANY Iowa team, taking a marginal Iowa team to the Sun Bowl in 1995, after enduring a nasty four-game losing streak, and absolutely blitzing a Washington team that many felt should have been in the discussion for the national championship.
And in terms of being prepared, don't forget that KFz claimed that last December may have been THE finest EVER month of practice for an Iowa team getting ready for a bowl (sure looked like it, didn't it???).
Ultimately, it's still a game played by 18-22 year olds. And after they haven't played competitive football for about a month (more or less, you just don't know how they will respond on game day, no matter how well prepared they were.
