Week one of the college football season kicked off on Thursday night with a bang as rutger decided to lay an absolute egg and then throw it all over the face of the Big Ten conference.
In case you missed it, the Scarlet Knights paid $1.55M to bring in UMass to take a beating. Rutgers was favored by 29.5 points over on FanDuelwhen things kicked off. It was a big number, but not big enough thought some people.
The Scarlet Knights scored first, taking a 7-0 lead, but the Minutemen tied things up almost immediately and then proceeded to take the lead early in the second quarter. They would never look back, jumping out to a 30-7 lead midway through the 4th quarter.
At least rutger had celebratory fireworks.
Why do we care?
Well, aside from the schadenfreude aspect of things and the whole “when the Big Ten looks like garbage it reflects on Iowa in some respects” angle, the Hawkeyes open their season on Saturday as even bigger favorites over a smaller school coming in for a pay game.
Iowa is favored by a whopping 31.5 points over NIU in the opener according to FanDuel Sportsbook. And while that should be a red warning siren for most Hawkeye fans who have watched Kirk Ferentz coach football even a little over the last 28 years, more than half of fans responding to this week’s Reacts poll expect Iowa to COVER!
While the Hawkeyes have long been successful in season openers, going 101-33-2 in game ones all-time (officially – this excludes vacated wins, including one in 2023 – sigh) and 22-4 under Ferentz, they’ve struggled a bit more to keep up with Vegas optimism. Iowa is 75-60-6 against the spread over the last decade and was an impressive 9-3-1 against the spread a season ago. But those numbers get uglier when you look at bigger spreads.
The Hawkeyes are just 6-10 against the spread in home openers dating back to 2010 and an abysmal 2-5 when favored by 20 or more in such games. A season ago, Iowa went 1-1 against the spread when favored by at least the 31.5 they’re favored by in week one. They covered the 34.5 against the same UMass team that just embarrassed rutger, but failed to cover the 38.5 in last year’s opener against Albany, winning 34-7.
Thankfully, the spread only matters for us degenerates and Iowa does much better straight up. The Hawks haven’t lost a season opener since the COVID season in 2020 when they fell to Purdue to kick things off. The last time they lost a home opener?
Back in 2013 when they lost to… Northern Illinois.
Here’s hoping 55% of the fanbase is on to something and history doesn’t repeat itself. Iowa and NIU are set to kick off at 3:15pm CT on Saturday. Anyone looking to avoid the 106 degree heat index can follow along on BTN.
