A number of things ...
- Iowa always will try to defend the run with as few hats in the box as possible.
- The Gophers had pretty wide splits ... and featuring an RPO game where the QB can run the ball too ... that means that the D has to defend an extra gap.
- The Hawkeye front 7 had trouble squeezing down the gaps ... hence Mo's patient running allowed him to essentially always find a hole. It's not like Iowa's play was too bad ... the Gophers younger backs didn't have the same skill/patience to find the hole ... and they didn't have the same success.
- I was a little disappointed by Iowa's DE play ... the DEs didn't do as good of a job as usual of setting a hard edge. Our DEs often got caught in the wash.
- Iowa's aggressive D was flowing to the direction of the play REALLY hard ... and Mo completely gashed us with the cutback.
- There PROBABLY was plenty of holding going on ... but credit to the Gopher O-linemen ... I mostly saw their hands on the inside ... so it wasn't terribly egregious (at least from my first-pass watching).
- I could be wrong ... but I think that Iowa was mostly flashing their safety in order to take away the pass-option of the RPO. Presumably, the hope was for the front-7 to clean up against the run. The problem was that we likely needed more hats in the box if we truly wanted to squash the run.
Conventional wisdom is that you try to force a young QB to beat you with his arm. However, the problem with that logic in this case is that the read for the crosser in the RPO-game is so brain-dead easy ... that if you leave it available ... that Gopher O will eat you alive with it. I think that it was a wise move to make those "easy throws" harder. However, it came at the cost of getting gashed against the run.
My bet is that neither Phil or Kirk thought that we'd get gashed that bad. It's all about trade-offs. Your willing to give up some of those gains. But they definitely didn't want us to give up as many long runs as we did.