Iowa City Today

The University of Iowa football team lost to Iowa State 16-13 on Saturday in the annual Iowa Corn Cy-Hawk Series at Jack Trice Stadium. The Cyclones had a slight edge in total offense, outgaining the Hawkeyes 238-214 yards.

Quarterback Mark Gronowski completed 13 of 24 passes for 83 yards and threw one interception. He also rushed for 37 yards and scored Iowa’s only touchdown with a two-yard run in the second quarter, marking his second rushing touchdown as a Hawkeye and the 39th of his career. Running back Jaziun Paterson led the team with 60 rushing yards on 11 carries, while Jacob Gill posted a team-high 52 receiving yards.

On defense, Jaden Harrell recorded nine tackles, including six solo stops, setting a career high. Xavier Nwankpa and Karson Sharar each added seven tackles, with Sharar also reaching a personal best. Ethan Hurkett registered 1.5 tackles for loss, and TJ Hall broke up three passes—both career highs.

Kicker Drew Stevens was successful on both field goal attempts from distances of 31 and 36 yards. Stevens is now four-for-four on field goals this season and moved into fifth place in program history with 262 points (88 PATs, 58 FGs). He ranks third all-time at Iowa for made field goals.

Iowa forced the game’s first turnover late in the first quarter when Koen Entringer recovered a muffed punt by Iowa State’s Xavier Townsend at the Cyclone’s 33-yard line. It was Entringer’s first career fumble recovery.

Head coach Kirk Ferentz commented after the game: "Needless to say, just a disappointing outcome for us, and I don’t think it had anything to do with our preparation or effort. Our preparation was good during the week, and our effort was good today.

I think both teams obviously played really hard. In short, we didn’t do enough to beat a good football team on their home field, and give them credit for that. The series has been, for at least the last six years, decided basically at the end of the game and by a close margin. We had our opportunities, several opportunities, during the game, and we weren’t good enough to cash in when we needed to.

The two turnovers are illustrative of that. They came up with a touchdown off a turnover, and we ended up with a field goal. The margins are always slim, and those things are really important, obviously.

I think our guys had a really positive effort out there. I thought they competed, and I saw a lot of good things. We got off to a little bit of a slow start, had a good drive before the half, and then another good drive off the 3-yard line after being down 10. We came back and tied it up, then we couldn’t finish it out. Again, credit to them on that one.

It hurts. It always has and always will. In the locker room, it’s tough. It’s not going to go away for a while here, but we’ll go back to work tomorrow. What I explained to the guys is it’s a 12-week season; it’s not two games. So you know we’ll go through the tape see what we can learn; then most importantly see what we can do moving forward—how we can improve—can we use this to be better football team moving forward? That’s where we are at right now."

The Hawkeyes managed two consecutive scoring drives lasting sixteen plays each in the second and third quarters—their longest such drives since facing Kent State in 2021 (20 plays). The third-quarter drive lasted over nine minutes (9:28), making it their longest under Ferentz by time since November 2003 against Illinois (18 plays).

Defensively Iowa limited an Iowa State offense averaging nearly forty points per game coming into Saturday's matchup; they held them to just sixteen points on only 238 total yards allowed while maintaining an advantage in time of possession (31:08–28:52). Recent matchups between these teams have typically been close contests; twelve of their last fourteen meetings have been decided by ten points or fewer.

Iowa returns home September 13th to host UMass in its nonconference finale at Kinnick Stadium beginning at 6:30 p.m., which will air on BTN.