On the contrary...they should be closely tied. That's precisely my point.
Jon posted a recent story which included a look at NFL placement to season W-L record showed IOWA to be one of the most under performing teams, based on it's NFL talent level.
Betting on College Football Coaches: Iowa
Stats can sometimes be deceiving, but in this case are quite clear. Iowa had the talent...but couldn't win with it on the field.
The thing is... If you look at the number of players Iowa sends to the NFL you might think "well we should be winning like [insert consistently dominant football team here] with talent like that!"
However, IMO, all that really seems to be saying is: Iowa has some of the best players in the country (at their respective position) each year, but we are leaving out a lot of important factors that affect our Wins/Losses.
Position: This is more of a question, as I do not know the answer--but how many QBs has Iowa sent to the NFL in the past few years? How many RBs? How many WRs?
I can think of a few RBs (Greene being the most obvious), but when it comes to QBs... I can only come up with Stanzi and Banks off the top of my head. WRs- Well we have McNutt now, but I don't think we have sent to many WRs to the NFL in the past few years, if any.
Could our lack of elite talent (or the ability to keep the elite talent playing for the Hawkeyes) be a factor? I'm thinking it is, but I'm not really sure--I could be wrong.
This brings me to my next point:
Aside from the NFL-talent type players, how good are the other guys?
In football, you might have the 3 best players in the country on your team, but that doesn't mean you are going to win any football games. I think there have been a few years where we have had noticeable weak spots. If the other team is smart... they attack the weak spots and play away from our strengths.
That is why teams like Alabama, LSU, etc. are consistently elite teams in the nation--even if they don't necessarily produce more NFL players... they have a better TEAM as a whole. They usually don't have "weak spots" like Iowa and they have the depth to plug in the next guy and in most cases not see a big gap in ability/production/talent--Iowa doesn't have this luxury in most cases.
And don't get me wrong, when I say "weak spots" I'm not saying Iowa has "bad" players. My point is: you have to have a GOOD TEAM, not just 7 or 8 good/great individuals. You have to be solid across the board.
And I could be wrong, but that is one of the few explanations I can really come up with. Obviously we are probably better at almost every position than the Gophers and they still managed to beat us... so this clearly can't be the only factor, but I think it could be a big factor that gets overlooked often and lost behind all of the "Iowa sends x number of players to the NFL" talk.