Kirk Herbstreit put Iowa back into a national playoff conversation on The Pat McAfee Show, saying Kirk Ferentz’s team could be a dark horse in the 2026 season. He framed the Iowa Hawkeyes as a program that keeps knocking on the door, but only if it can prove it belongs with the sport’s best.
“I always look at Iowa with Kirk Ferentz as a team that’s knocking on the College Football Playoff door,” Herbstreit said, adding that it all comes down to whether they can play with the big boys. That is why the comment landed now: Iowa enters a stretch that will tell the story, with Ohio State, Michigan and Washington on the schedule over the next four weeks.
The optimism is not coming out of nowhere. Iowa has been consistently good under Ferentz, finishing with eight wins or better in a non-pandemic year every season since 2015, and it has had only one season in that span when it was not in the top 25 at some point. That kind of steadiness is what makes a 10-win mark feel almost routine around the program, even if the ceiling has usually sat lower than the discussion now suggests.
That is also where the pushback lives. Iowa has not had a top-20 scoring offense in nearly 25 years, and it has not sniffed College Football Playoff eligibility since 2015. So the case for Iowa is not built on reputation alone; it rests on whether a team known for getting by can suddenly win enough of these games to matter when the brackets start to take shape.
The next month will answer the only question that really matters. If Iowa survives the first half of the schedule with no more than one loss, the final six games should give it room to keep building momentum as the postseason approaches. If it cannot hold up against Ohio State, Michigan and Washington, Herbstreit’s dark-horse label will read more like hope than forecast.
