Thanks to Minnesota’s win over Wisconsin on Saturday, Iowa football has one more game before it goes bowling — the Big Ten Championship.
IOWA CITY — After losing in resounding fashion at Wisconsin on Oct.30, the Iowa football team lost control of its Big Ten West Division destiny. The best the Hawkeyes could do from that point forward was to win their final four games and hope to get a little help — one Wisconsin loss, primarily — along the way. On the final game of the Big Ten Conference season, the Hawkeyes got the help they needed. With rival Minnesota’s 23-13 win Saturday evening against Wisconsin, Iowa earned a trip to the Dec.4 Big Ten Championship Game in Indianapolis, where it will face 11-1 Michigan — an upset winner over Ohio State earlier in the day. The Hawkeyes (10-2) and Wolverines will battle at 7 p.m. CT in a Fox-televised game. This will be Iowa’s first trip to Indy since 2015 and Michigan’s first, period, since the Big Ten went to a divisional format in 2011. It was a weekend of unlikely outcomes in the Big Ten. Michigan and Minnesota were both 7-point underdogs at kickoff Saturday; Iowa trailed,21-6, late in the third quarter at Nebraska on Friday. At Memorial Stadium, Kirk Ferentz’s Hawkeyes scored the game’s final 22 points to produce a 28-21 road win and clinch at least a tie for the West Division title at 7-2 in league play. That capped a four-game winning streak since the loss in Wisconsin, all the wins coming by 10 points or less — against West foes Northwestern, Minnesota, Illinois and Nebraska.
