1. Iowa doesn't control it's own destiny. At least three teams in front have to lose before Iowa controls it's own destiny, not including MSU and tOSU. They need help.ND needs to lose once more, the Big 12 scools each need to lose once, and Alabama needs to lose to LSU or Ole Miss needs to win out and beat Florida in the sec championship game. Then Iowa can control it's own destiny.
2. It matters because the talking heads (a subset of them, anyway) decide who can play for a championship, who gets on T.V., how much money your program gets from T.V., and all those money-making things feed facilities, coach salaries, and other recruiting resources.
3. It matters because what recruit would choose a school, where the school was having the best season in its history, and had the third best resume in the country that season, and STILL can't make the playoffs as the undefeated champ of the best conference in the country? It's like being an ISU football fan, you are setting yourself up for major disappointment. The talking heads have already made that decision.
The strange thing to me is that Hayden's teams never got this garbage. Partly because he was not humble when he was winning.
The truth about success is that it rarely pays to be humble. To be perceived as great, you have to get others to talk about you as being great. To do that, they have to know what you've done, what you plan to do, and you have to then do what You told then you planned on doing.
It doesn't have to be bragging. But Kirk has to say "we have a pretty good football team here. I believe that we can execute better than our opponents on the schedule and compete in the conference championship game.
All we have to do now is keep improving, keep preparing, and go do it on the field. Time will tell if we can do those things, but right now I think we've earned everything we've gotten and have our minds set on more, obviously.
We'll take it one game at a time, and I don't think you want to get caught up in who's better than who according to the experts, but uh, I don't think these guys deserve to hear some of the things that they're hearing right now and it just adds fuel to the fire for us, certainly."
That's as close as I can get to Kirk saying - we're better than you think we are in coachspeak. You have to risk it, if you want them to talk about you in a positive light. You are talking, mostly, about convincing a bunch of has-been or wannabe alpha-male athletes who get paid to have strong opinions and to say I told you so that your opinion has merit.
Stats won't do that - they are leaders and see the world as a competitive environment. Stats are used to back up their arguments to lower people, not sway they're opinions. They care about attitude and how something looks. It trips their instinct alarms.Iowa looks good. But they don't have the attitude of success.
