"Special Season" ruined by "Special Teams"

[I0WA]

Wow. I witnessed the miscues yesterday in Kinnick. The offense played great. In part of the offensive line who arguably had their best day IMO. Defense didn't look the best but played enough for us to have a win, which we should have had. We had soo much momentum on offense. Wisconsin couldn't stop us AT ALL. We scored a TD on a great long drive and took a 3-6 lead and of course had a blocked PAT. I was telling my cousin the whole time that it would come back to haunt us. Then the muffed snap. Wow. Kudos to Mike for making another field goal and all the other PAT's but both losses this year have been on Special teams. As an Iowa fan we all know it should be 34-31 Iowa. If anything we should have been playing in OT but everything went right for Wiscy and things went wrong for us. I knew Bielema was desperate when he had to fake the punt, and to his luck his team converted a 4th and 5 and won the game even though Iowa should have won easily. It is clear to me that the better team lost yesterday and that the Rose Bowl is now out of hand, and we will be lucky to make it to the Capitol One Bowl. I see us now ending the season at 8-4 or 9-3. It sucks to think if we had a decent special teams we'd be a top 4 team right now.

 

[homerHAWKeye777]

I think that is only part of the story. I also think that tackling hasn't been up to Iowa standards. Furthermore, our back seven haven't been as good in coverage this year as they had been the prior few years.

On the flip side, I really think that the game-plans that the coaches have designed have been very good.

 

[IowaNYYfan]

Hard to say that the losses are only on special teams: yeah, we should have had 4 extra points from the kicking game, but that changes the dynamic in which Wisconsin plays the rest of the game.

 

[Xerxes]

Special Teams haven't done the job this season but neither has the defense. We give them credit for all of the fires they put out last year, its time to look to them when opponents have scored 8 TDs in 2 games.

 

[AHawk1]

. I knew Bielema was desperate when he had to fake the punt, and to his luck his team converted a 4th and 5 and won the game even though Iowa should have won easily.QUOTE]

That wasn't desperate, that was to easy. I could have crawled for that first down. That has been wide open all year. Wisky isn't the only staff that has seen this major flaw in our punt coverage.

 

[kicker22]

I'm not sticking up for the special teams what so ever, but we tend to forget its a team game. Did you forget that when the defense finally makes a huge pick that our offense fails to move the ball 30+ yards with a 3 point game and we can only get a field goal out of it to stretch the lead to 6 when a touchdown would have made it a two possession game. Or the fact that even after the converted 4th down attempt allowed by special teams our defense allowed them to roughly 50 yards and convert numerous 3rd downs and a fourth down as they marched down the field. Lets face it, our special teams were bad, but they don't deserve to be the one's taking all the blame when it was a team loss.