The complementary football scorecard: Purdue

The Iowa Hawkeyes took down their near-annual foil in Jeff Brohm’s Purdue Boilermakers many days ago. It was a delight to be in the stands for it for promptly 30 minutes and 17 seconds of game time. It was as thorough a domination as I’m going to see Iowa put on a team.

And then they sat it out.

A lot of these stats would look great if counting the only 30:17. Spencer Petras was well over 10 yards/pass at one point and Iowa was thoroughly dominating every facet. Yet games are 60 minutes long and Kirk Ferentz sims to the end when he’s got a three TD lead. Such is life. An easy win is better than a tense win.

Onto the numbers...

Here are the stats from Saturday via Team Rankings.

Last week in complementary football

(Reminder of the weightings here and stats here)

50% - Win or loss: Iowa did what they needed to do against a bottom 3 or 4 defense on the schedule. The only one of those remaining is Nebraska.

33% - turnovers, time of possession, & offensive touchdowns: The Hawkeyes continue to be very clean with the ball. Petras threw some ducks but they landed softly out of bounds instead of in the arms of defenders like last year’s tryst with Purdue. Time of possession took a hit (28:02) as Tory Taylor punted the ball five times in the second half to let Aidan O’Connell and Charlie Jones shadowbox themselves. Three offensive touchdowns probably could have been more. The rankings are: 1, 90, & 53.

17% - 3rd down conversion, yards/carry, completion percentage, QB sacks: As mentioned above, Iowa punted a lot in the second half which meant third down conversions got ugly (4/14), finishing 99th. Yards/carry were great if going by Kaleb Johnson’s 9.09 (stunning) but other guys got involved including 3 QB sacks (34th & 77th). Completion percentage was 52.2%, which will work if you’re throwing about 20 times in a wind-affected game.

All together, That gets the Iowa’s complementary football score to ... (.50 * 1) + (.33 * .63) + (.17 * .45) = .79.

It was a drop-off from last week’s game but honestly, that’s to be expected. It was a stress-free second half for Iowa and they came away from West Lafayette with a win for the first time since the CJ Beathard-aided victory in 2014.