Being an Iowa football fan is an emotional roller coaster. Perhaps nothing else epitomizes that up and down ride quite like the trials and tribulations of the quarterback position so far in 2026.
We entered the year in a QB battle between Jeremy Hecklinski and Hank Brown. Through week one, we were still unsure who should win the job. Then Brown dominated the snaps against Iowa State and while the numbers weren’t gaudy, he looked good. He solidified things against UNI. Then came the drive against Michigan
and we had our guy. Hawkeye fans were sold.
Naturally that meant the next week he had to return to Kinnick to face the Ohio State Buckeyes and the doubts crept in. Nobody was expected to look good against the Buckeyes, but Brown looked flatly bad while Hecklinski came off the bench and look very solid against the OSU backups.
Fast forward a week and we had one of the top performances from an Iowa QB in a few years out of Hecklinski while Brown nursed a shoulder injury. Controversy back on.
So of course Hecklinski looked like absolute garbage on the road in a can’t lose game against Minnesota out of the bye, getting benched before halftime for Brown, still nursing an injured shoulder.
The Hawkeyes seemingly went from two viable starters to none in Minneapolis and the alarm bells were going off on the season. It makes plenty of sense, then, that the roller coaster would climb back up the ascent and we would get a near perfect game out of Brown in his return as starter against Wisconsin a week ago.
He completed 20 of his 24 pass attempts for 222 yards and a pair of TDs without a turnover. He finished with 192 passing yards in the first half and likely would have Iowa’s first 300-yard passer since Nate Stanley if the Hawkeyes hadn’t been thoroughly thrashing the Badgers before getting to the midway point.
But does that one game give anyone confidence to believe the roller coaster has come to a stop? Or at minimum, are we done going for insane loops that make Hawkeye fans want to puke?
More than three quarters of the BHGP community says they feel confident in Brown after last week’s performance and are ready to buy in for the home stretch.
That’s a pretty big number given Brown was certainly not the most popular choice to win the job entering the season and his numbers at Minnesota weren’t great either. But that Michigan win bought a lot of goodwill and Brown has genuinely been good enough for the Hawkeyes to be successful during all but one of his starts.
On the season, he’s completing 64.5% of his passes for 1,190 yards and eight TDs with three interceptions. Certainly not lighting things up through the air, but those are winning numbers under head coach Kirk Ferentz and the Hawkeye teams of 2021-2024 would have likely been borderline playoff teams with production like we are seeing from Brown this year.
Where Brown’s Numbers Sit
Brown’s 64.5% completion rate is higher than any completed Iowa season going back to at least 2013. Better than Gronowski’s 63.4 last year, better than CJ Beathard’s 61.4 in the magical run in 2015 and better than anything Nate Stanley did in his time here.
Just as notable, the higher completion percentage hasn’t come at the expense of the downfield passing game. Brown’s 7 yards per attempt are the most for an Iowa QB since Stanley in 2018 and 2019. His 135.3 passer rating trails only Stanley’s 2018 and Beathard’s 2015 among recent Iowa years. And it’s worth noting two of his three interceptions this season came in Minneapolis on a night one bounced right off his receiver’s hands.
Is seven games enough to crown anybody? Of course not, and Saturday night at Northwestern is the next proof point. But the resume to-date is impressive and the history says we should be confident in Brown finishing strong.
History Likes the Guy Who Won the Job First
Hank Brown isn’t the first Iowa QB to win a position battle only to lose the job to injury before coming back and winning it again. In 2021, Spencer Petras hurt his throwing shoulder at Wisconsin and watched Alex Padilla win three straight in his place. Those wins were a bit different than we saw with Hecklinski at Washington and were largely in spite of, not because of Padilla and Petras got the job back in late November and started the Big Ten Championship on a 10-win team.
In 2009 Ricky Stanzi’s ankle injury against this same Northwestern team gave James Vandenberg two starts, a close loss at Ohio State and a win against Minnesota. But Stanzi returned to win the Orange Bowl and give us an iconic Iowa moment.
So what actually happened after those guys got their jobs back? Start with Stanzi, because the arc is instructive. Through Iowa’s 9-0 start in 2009 he was completing 56.4% of his throws with 14 touchdowns against 13 interceptions – beloved, unbeaten and terrifying. He came back in the Orange Bowl and outplayed that baseline: 17-of-29 for 231 yards and two scores in a 24-14 win over Georgia Tech for the program’s first BCS bowl victory. Then he turned in the real payoff, cutting his interceptions from 15 to 6 the following season.
The Petras 2021 comeback cuts the other way. He returned to a sputtering offense and completed 53.8% with one touchdown against three picks, and both of his post-return starts were losses, including the 42-3 night in Indianapolis. If you want the cautionary tale, this is it.
Here’s why I’d bet on the Stanzi version. While it’s still early, Brown’s comeback is already outrunning his own first act, much like Stanzi in the Orange Bowl. His completion rate since coming back is up from 62.9% to 68.9%, his yards per attempt jumped from 6.7 to nearly 8.0 and the first start back was his best game of the season against power-conference competition – 83.3% and 9.25 yards a clip and what could have easily been an end to the 300-yard drought for Iowa if the Badgers had found a way to be competitive.
The history says the guy who wins the job back usually finishes the story. The early returns say this one’s trending the right way. We’ll know a lot more about how this one plays out starting Saturday night in Evanston.
