MILLER: While things look better, Iowa still has a QB problem

First things first: you play to win the game. Iowa beat Troy 38-21. They gained 462 yards of offense, which is just 30 yards less than they had in their week one win against Illinois State. Both of those totals are certainly a breath of fresh air after what Iowa fans have had to endure since about midway through the 2021 season.

However, Iowa fans have also had to endure below-average play at the most important position in sports since midway through the 2021 season, if not before that.

For most teams, their fortunes rise and drop with the play of their quarterback.  At Iowa, that has been more on the shoulders of the defense and their punter, as Iowa has had at least a two (plus) year stretch of some of the worst quarterback play I have ever seen from a Power Conference school, with last year’s being the absolute worst I have ever seen.

While Cade McNamara is playing better than Deacon Hill from one year ago, things are not right.  First, let’s look at some outright statistics from other Big Ten quarterbacks, realizing that Iowa has played a bad Illinois State team and a Troy team, while winning 10 games a year ago, is in a total rebuild mode.

That’s not where you want your quarterback to be.  Granted, Iowa hasn’t had elite QB play for a good stretch, but I bet some of you who were not big fans of Nate Stanley would beg to have his level of performance back and under center..but he has been gone for five years.

CJ Beathard has been gone for nearly ten years.

Ricky Stanzi has been gone for nearly 15 years.

Drew Tate has been gone for nearly 20 years.

Children born when Brad Banks finished second in the 2002 Heisman Trophy battle can legally buy alcohol now.

So yeah, it’s been a minute since Iowa has had steady play at the position, and it’s not a straight-through line.  Developing quarterbacks has not been a hallmark of the Ferentz era, and the quarterback room right now is not inspiring.

Even though McNamara’s numbers are not the worst in the Big Ten, let’s dive deeper.

His 6.3 yards per attempt is not good..it’s not as bad as we have seen in the past, and Iowa has rarely been among the leagues best in this category.  You want to be at at least 7ypc, and shoot, that might even be archaic thinking. 

2016: CJ Beathard was at 6.4 and was last in the league

2017: Nate Stanley 5th in the league at 6.9

2018:  Stanley 7.2

2019: Stanley 7.4 (8th in the league)

2020: Spencer Petras 6.4

2021: Petras 6.5

2022: Petras 6.1

2023: Deacon Hill 4.6 and are you even serious with that?

It’s not an end-all, be-all statistic, but it’s an important one to put a quarterback’s completion percentage into context.  

While McNamara is completing 63.9% of his passes (it’s been since 2015 since Iowa has had a QB complete more than 60% of his passes), where is he completing them?

Against Troy, McNamara attempted 23 passes and completed 19 of them.  Hey, that is pretty nice, except he threw for fewer than 180 yards. Of his 19 completions, 12 were in the less than five yards area.  Against Iowa State, McNamara was 13-of-29 for 99 yards.  Ten of his 13 completions were less than five yards.  He was 2-of-9 on passes between five and 14 yards and 1-of-6 on passes beyond 15 yards.  Against Illinois State, he was 21-of-31, but 12 of his completions and 17 of his attempts were in the five yards or less area.

I have been saying and or writing the following for close to 20 years: Iowa’s offensive style invites more defenders to be closer to the line of scrimmage, and that area five to 10 yards behind the LOS is where Iowa likes to play…but when you are barely a threat to hurt teams with intermediate to deep passes, they have little disincentive to NOT stack the box.  This then makes it much harder for Iowa to do what it would prefer to do. It’s a negative feedback loop.

Compound all of this with Cade McNamara’s throwing mechanics to start this year, and you have a big-time problem. Maybe it’s rust. It’s probably rust, and after back-to-back seasons where he tore an ACL, you’re not going to be sharp.  It seems like Kirk Ferentz believes in the upside, that Cade will shake off this rust and return to some semblance of his former self.

That could happen. I hope this will happen for Cade, the coaches, his teammates, and Iowa fans. However, I remain skeptical.

McNamara seems hesitant to lean into his plant leg on throws.  He is often throwing while fading backward, even if just slightly, and that ‘just slightly’ will lead to underthrown balls and incompletions at best, and interceptions at worst.

Other times, he rushes his mechanics and does not get both feet beneath his center of gravity, which leads to errant throws.

From my very distant seat, it appears that from a health standpoint, he is not all there below the waist, and if that is the case, then he won’t be all there above the shoulders because nobody will know his limitations better than he will.

Again, I sincerely hope that Ferentz will be proven right, and Cade is just shaking the rust off. 

But after the last three-plus seasons of atrocious quarterback play, can I be blamed for my skepticism? Or more recently to be fair to this season, McNamara has played 12 quarters of football.  I probably wouldn’t give him a good grade in half of them, per perhaps even eight of  of the 12…and the four came against Illinois State and Troy.

This leads to a final question: if not Cade, then who?  The answer may be more unsettling than the bird in the hand.

Expect to see a myriad of blitzes the rest of the way, but then again, that’s what I would have been doing to Iowa for much of the past five years.