Interesting food for thought ... in Iowa's games against our perceived toughest opponents thus far, all the turnovers have afforded the Hawks the opportunity to mostly only show what they WANT to show.
The misdirection, back-side TE screen has long been in our playbook ... but how we set it up against Maryland was pretty perfect. Too bad the Maryland DT was smart enough to hold LaPorta in order to prevent the TD.
Really good set-up (given what the D was showing) for the pass in the flat to IKM toward the end of the game ... that series only ended in a FG ... but the calls did a pretty good job of setting things up. Sometimes the D just makes a really impressive play ... definite cred to the Maryland defender for making that play in space. If IKM doesn't get tackled there ... he's likely walking into the end-zone.
Brian has been obviously showing a good bit as it relates to setting things up with our red-zone O ... because we HAVE been making a concerted effort to cash the turnovers in for TDs and not just FGs. So far, the results in that regard have been decent.
However, apart from that ... the Hawk O was able to mostly go into "turtle-mode" against IU and ISU in the second half ... just to protect the lead. Against Maryland, while the announcers were talking about how "aggressive" Iowa was being ... it looked more to me that Brian was trying to force the Maryland D to change coverage. Maryland kept on stacking the box and playing man coverage ... so the Hawks kept on going after the man-coverage match-ups that they felt they could exploit. Honestly, I believe that had Maryland sat back more in a zone ... and didn't dedicate so many hats to run D ... Brian probably would have happily switched our focus more to the run game. However, man-coverage is part of the defensive philosophy of Maryland ... so they left us no choice but to go after it.
Anyhow, it seems pretty straight-forward that the Hawks haven't been forced to show all their cards through the first 5 games. Against IU, ISU, and Maryland all the turnovers afforded us to stick to more of a base game-plan based upon what the D was giving us (and based upon what we could execute ... given our blocking ... or lack thereof). Against Kent State and Colorado State ... those game were mostly self-scouting games where we were largely focused upon fundamentals and execution.
When looking into the "game within the game" ... Brian has shown a number of things so far this season ... and I'm willing to bet that most of those "reveals" were wholly intentional. The idea being to get the opposition to prepare for certain things - only for the O to exploit them if we see certain things from their D.
For instance, the very fact that we did the fake WR-screen ... and then caught LaPorta in the seam for the TD ... opposing Ds are going to be extra-careful against Iowa for the rest of the season because of that. Consequently, I'm willing to bet that we see the WR-screen with increasing frequency as a result. Similarly, if the D cheats ... we might see extra wrinkles [like the TE down the seam] to "catch" them.
One thing that is worth noting is that Lachey has mostly been playing the role of the in-line TE. Based on the opponent, match-ups, and how the D defends us ... I could see the Hawks exploit this. Lachey has been doing some good work for us blocking ... so I wouldn't be surprised if the Hawks try to "sneak" him out as he releases from the line-of-scrimmage ... and catch the D sleeping.
