Those wete poor Florida and SC teams. That was proven in later beatdowns we suffered
The talent on those teams was pretty undeniable. Some of the years we've owned advantages in terms of coaching ... others (like against South Carolina) we benefitted from their QB being a head-case. However, the common denominator was that none of those teams lacked talent. Here's a little reminder ... because you presumably need it:
2003: Iowa thumped a talented Florida team (poorly coached though)
2004: Iowa beat a loaded LSU team (coached by Saban, no less)
2005: Iowa narrowly lost to a talented Florida team (coached by Urban Meyer, no less)
2008: Iowa beat a talented South Carolina team (their QB was bad - but Spurrier still had a few good years left in him)
2013: Iowa narrowly lost to a loaded LSU team (coached by Miles ... Odell Beckham Jr was on that squad)
2014: Iowa infamously got taken to the woodshed against a talented but grossly inconsistent Tennessee squad (Butch Jones was the coach - a really young Volunteer squad that year)
2016: Iowa infamously got taken to the woodshed against a decent Florida squad (McElwain was the coach)
Frankly, I think that this nicely illustrates why O'Keefe's style of O was generally a bit more successful for the Hawks, compared to Davis's style of O. Davis focused much of the passing game to the edges of the field ... and that opened up more of the center of the field for the running game. However, against defenses with excellent team speed - it was a little easier for them to flow to the edges and limit the yardage gained on the edges. Their DBs then also had less area to have to defend ... and that made the windows that the QB was passing to even smaller.
In contrast, O'Keefe's style of O relied upon using as much of the entire field as possible. We'd work the edges, we'd work between the hashes, we'd tap the screen game to WRs, TEs, and RBs, and we'd go deep ... usually on double-moves (and deep posts) off of play-action. When a defense has to defend the whole field - they need to be disciplined and execute their assignment. If they don't, then that usually opens up exploitable tendencies. Furthermore, forcing the D to defend the whole field nullifies some of the team speed of the D.
