Game Story: Hawkeyes Can’t Finish What They Started

IOWA CITY — Daviyon Nixon said it is all about how you finish, and it was a point he stressed in a fiery speech to his defensive teammates late in Iowa’s 21-20 loss to Northwestern on Saturday.

Two weeks into the condensed Big Ten season, the Hawkeyes are 0-2 because of second-half disappearances that look quite familiar.

Three second-half points to start the year — none on Saturday — isn’t going to lead to wins.

“It’s basically the same thing after two weeks,” Nixon, a junior defensive tackle who had 11 tackles. “We’ve got to finish. Iowa is a big team on finishing, and we haven’t been able to do that the last two weeks. We’ve got to get back to being Iowa football, finishing every game out strong.”

Which is why Nixon was fiery in the huddle as the Hawkeyes were trying to slow down the Wildcats (2-0).

“That’s exactly what I was telling them,” Nixon said. “We’ve got to finish.”

Oh, the start was just fine — the Hawkeyes scored on four consecutive possessions to build a 20-7 lead in the second quarter. But Keith Duncan’s 47-yard field goal through a swirling wind with 7:09 remaining in the second quarter provided the last points of the days for Iowa.

“They certainly played hard and played a better second half than we did, and that really was the story of the game,” Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz said. “I thought our guys came ready to go. We got off to a fast start, did a lot of good things in the first half and then the second half was a whole different story.”

It’s a story that was told last week in the 24-20 loss to Purdue, and it had the same ending this time in a virtually empty Kinnick Stadium.

“We’re really close,” said quarterback Spencer Petras. “It’s just (about) better execution.”

Iowa was left scrambling in the second half even though the Hawkeyes had the lead until Northwestern’s Jesse Brown scored on a 2-yard run with 6:05 left in the third quarter to provide what would turn out to be the final margin.

The way the Hawkeyes were throwing the ball all over the field — Petras had 50 pass attempts for the game, with 25 in each half — it felt like they were having to come back from a much bigger deficit. Iowa had just 11 carries for 35 yards in the second half.

Petras had all three of his interceptions in the second half, two on Iowa’s last three possessions.

“Well, it’s never easy to say what caused anything,” Ferentz said. “But an obvious thing is we had a couple picks, our first four possessions, five possessions — looking down it was our first five possessions (of the second half), two of them were picks, so it’s not a good thing. We just didn’t run the ball effectively and didn’t throw it effectively enough, either.”

Petras was left throwing into eight-man coverages, with the Wildcats smothering what seemed to be every pass route.

“Basically they’re forcing you to earn it, all the way down the field,” Petras said. “We were successful here and there, but not enough to get the win.”

“All I can say is they tightened things up,” wide receiver Ihmir Smith-Marsette said. “It was a tough second half. They fixed what they had to fix.”

It’s becoming a consistent problem for the Hawkeyes dating back to late last season — they haven’t scored a touchdown in the second half of the last five Big Ten games, and have just 15 points in those second halves. Three of those games were wins, but those were last season.

That was then, this is now. The stories are the same, just with different endings.

“The most important stat is winning — so as long as we’re winning, we’ll live with that,” Ferentz said. “But to that point, they outplayed us in the second half today. And again, a lot of that is we turned the ball over a couple times, I’ll drop that last one, but the two times prior to that, that’s not a good thing.

“And you know, it was a team loss. We didn’t really do anything well enough consistently today to expect to win in a Big Ten game. That’s two weeks in a row, so those are the things we’re going to have to focus on.”

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The Hawkeyes had 293 yards of offense for the game, 20 more than the Wildcats.

“I think it was a contrast in the two halves,” Ferentz said. “You throw a couple picks in there and that makes a difference, too. Tipped balls, those kinds of things, that’s never good. The bottom line is we just didn’t have much consistency in that second half offensively.”

Iowa seemed in control, taking a 17-0 lead in the first quarter. Petras threw a 7-yard touchdown pass to Brandon Smith, Tyler Goodson had a 15-yard touchdown run, and Duncan had a 22-yard field goal.

But Northwestern’s offense put together back-to-back touchdown drives — one of 16 plays for 75 yards and one of 14 plays for 79 yards — to take more than 12 minutes off the clock in the second quarter.

“We’ve got to be more efficient at the fundamentals, and we’ve got to finish our plays,” Nixon said. “That second quarter was literally on the defensive line, and on the linebackers, and on the defense. If we shut them out in the second quarter like they did us in the fourth quarter, we would have won.”

“We’ve got to be tighter with our fits,” said linebacker Seth Benson, who led Iowa with 13 tackles. “We have to be better with our communication.”

All the Hawkeyes can do, Petras said, is keep working.

“It comes down to us being more detailed,” he said. “Better preparation, everything.

“We’re really close. We want to keep pushing.”

“We started hot,” Smith-Marsette said. “We didn’t have a way to finish it out.”