Fryowa
Administrator
Had a conversation with a nebraska fan coworker the other day, and aside from the usual crap about 1997, he used the fact that nebraska still has 23 players in the NFL as an argument for their relevancy after I told him that even little ol' Iowa has left them in the dust. I replied with two things...
1) Iowa has 35 players on active rosters, and
2) The quality of Iowa's pro players is WAY higher...
...which he completely dismissed. Can I prove it? No.
Well, I could, but it'd be a bunch of work. And it also got me thinking about how many Iowa players got meaningful numbers of NFL snaps. The 2020 numbers are below and tbh it's fairly surprising. Iowa guys playa buttload of snaps in the NFL, and I'd go so far as to say we punch way above our weight when you consider our teams average W/L record and number of conference championships in the past 15 or so years. Iowa is not a practice squadder factory. There are also a few regular starters here who've been hit with injuries this year...
And yes, I know that NFL talent isn't a predictor of NCAA team success. But I do think it's meaningful at best and interesting at worst.
What I think would be fun is to compare this same data to the rest of the Big Ten, and say, the top 10 RPI schools in the country. But this stat sucks to gather because there's no good tool online (that I've found) to pull the numbers en masse, and I don't want to spend a full day doing it... My guess is that Iowa would be disproportionally higher when compared to other teams NCAA success rate. Which is weird.
1) Iowa has 35 players on active rosters, and
2) The quality of Iowa's pro players is WAY higher...
...which he completely dismissed. Can I prove it? No.
Well, I could, but it'd be a bunch of work. And it also got me thinking about how many Iowa players got meaningful numbers of NFL snaps. The 2020 numbers are below and tbh it's fairly surprising. Iowa guys playa buttload of snaps in the NFL, and I'd go so far as to say we punch way above our weight when you consider our teams average W/L record and number of conference championships in the past 15 or so years. Iowa is not a practice squadder factory. There are also a few regular starters here who've been hit with injuries this year...
And yes, I know that NFL talent isn't a predictor of NCAA team success. But I do think it's meaningful at best and interesting at worst.
What I think would be fun is to compare this same data to the rest of the Big Ten, and say, the top 10 RPI schools in the country. But this stat sucks to gather because there's no good tool online (that I've found) to pull the numbers en masse, and I don't want to spend a full day doing it... My guess is that Iowa would be disproportionally higher when compared to other teams NCAA success rate. Which is weird.
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