The New Wide Receivers Coach At Iowa

Hot damn!  Erik Campbell is a Hawkeye coach.  He’ll be coaching the wide receivers.

Erik Campbell managed an 8 year stretch as the Michigan wide receivers coach where each year the team had a 1,000 yard receiver and the year the streak ended there were 3 guys that all caught for more the 500 yards.

Not too shabby.

Of course, there were a lot of ridiculously talented receivers that were just begging to play for Michigan during that time.   The real test will be to see how well he can make the receivers that play for Iowa and whether he has the ability to help recruit some of those types of athletes for Iowa.

The current crop at Iowa showed flashes where they seemed to really get what was going on and the lots of moments where it was clear they were not quite ready for a season in the Big 10.

I’m sure all of the receivers are pumped up about the opportunity to work with a man who has been responsible for so many great NFL careers.  Hopefully, Campbell has a few new tricks to increase the players ability to catch the ball and complete their routes since I am certain that he will have their total attention right off the bat.

I expect with one full season as the full time quarterback under his belt Jake Christensen will have a little better luck getting them the ball as long as Campbell can help get the wide receivers to the spots they need to be and get them to actually catch the ball.

Big Man Handling The Rock

One of the Hawkeyes’ biggest problems this season is their amazing ability to turn over the ball.  The other teams know this and have found ways to exploit this weakness to their advantage especially when they happen to have a full court press in their playbook.  I remember reading about one of the players on the other team (Minnesota I think) saying that his coach said if they applied pressure against the Hawkeyes that they would cause turnovers.  Dirty cheaters.

Some teams resort to trickery when face with a full court press.  They hand the ball to a really fast guy who can dribble the ball really well and send the rest of the team down the court while that good dribbler zigs and zags through the defense.

Iowa may not have one of those really fast, good dribblers on the team this year but they do have Seth Gorney.  He is so tall they don’t even list his height for fear that it might be a violation of an NCAA rule.  He’s rumored to be 7 feet tall and 245 pounds.  He makes his coaches, teammates and opponents nervous when dribbling around the basket.  It just isn’t very pretty.

So, Iowa has Seth Gorney trail behind the guys trying to break the press and act as a release valve.  When they get trapped, they lob the ball back to him and he swings it to the other side of the court.  In the few minutes of games that I have seen this year, it hasn’t worked nearly as poorly as it should.  He seems to catch and pass the ball with reasonable confidence and the Hawkeyes seem to get the ball past half court relatively well.

The other advantage is that when there is yet another turnover, Iowa already has a 7 footer back to guard against the ensuing fast break.

For those of you able to watch the game (and not constantly falling victim to the Comcast - Big 10 pissing constest), are most of the turnovers happening while being full court pressed and just not having a way to break it, or while in the half court, or does the team just excel in turning the ball over in any situation this year?

Is Alford Heading Back To Indiana?

Oh please, please, please let Alford go back to Indiana.

That would be so awesome to watch our coach (who has managed to already get a bunch of players to improve within the stretch of one season) get to beat up on our old coach who never managed to get any player to improve during his entire time at Iowa.

While I’m still not convinced that this year’s team is actually a “good” team, I do think they are playing with a lot more confidence and if they played themselves from back in January the current team would easily win by double digits.  I completely believe that next year should be a lot of fun.

Plus, since Comcast will not carry the Big Ten Network and since Iowa playing against Alford would pretty much be guaranteed to be on ESPN or ESPN2, that would give me a chance to see a couple games every year.