re: Is Iowa a better CFB program than Nebraska?

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Nebraska has been arse for the last 15 ish

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Try for the last 25 years or so. Ever since the arse whooping Nebraska took from Miami in the 01 national championship game, they haven’t been remotely close to that good since

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Iowa has had Kirk Ferentz that whole time. They've had some down years, but they've also been a top 10 program at times.

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Im convinced if this dude let someone like Joe Brady or a younger version of the Bears coach come in and install whatever whacky offense he wanted to in support of the talent he had access to at Iowa they would have at least lucked into one title game. Ferentz is a freaking genius at coaching defense and he just doesnt shoot himself in the foot. ive admired this program for some time just for the consistency to their approach. Even watched the game on saturday with some guys from Iowa and they called, to a T, what would happen to end that game and sure enough it did.

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I think you’re using the “sit in” pretty liberally here. There really isn’t much D1 talent 2.5 North, East, or West of Norman. It’s 2.5 North of DFW metro area and that’s its hotbed. As a poster responded too, OU was smart enough to stick with UT to maintain that talent pipeline.

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A 250 mile radius is considered localized recruiting turf. For OU, that includes DFW, and it is essentially their back yard. DFW is a massively fertile recruiting ground. Oklahoma is a true blueblood and could recruit DFW if they were in the big ten with Nebraska and Texas were in the SEC.

DFW is full of transients. This isn’t Louisiana where LSU dominates the popularity. Texas and OU are the two most popular brands in town. Go into any sporting goods store and the stuff on the shelves will demonstrate this.

Phil Parker replaced Norm Parker, who Ferentz hired to run a base 4-3 zone that rarely blitzed. Phil took his D and fine tuned it to a well oiled machine. Ferentz puts every bit of strategic focus on the defense and has since he arrived. Very rarely do they have horses to compete nationally on offense. It’s maddening considering how they roll out top 10 Ds every fricking year playing a base zone scheme to perfection.

Nebraska's ceiling went from OU to Iowa overnight when they left the Big 12.

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Third fold would be the abolition of Prop 48 and non qualifiers. Osborne made a living off those types. Many of those hood kids he got were limited to where they could actually go play.

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I will never understand why a coach with a losing bowl record, a .500 record against his archrival (losing almost all the meaningful games), and only one outright national title (playing thugs like Christian Peter and Lawrence Phillips in that one) is so revered here.

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Both are strong programs with great fans. Good old American Big Ten West football the way God intended

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Great background noise for a nap

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Iowa

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Iowa state

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same shite

Did you know Mount Everest only gets measured to 3 feet high by a yardstick?
Let's do this with Saban: only won 62.5% of games vs. Gus Malzahn, 50% vs. Dabo Swinney; 3-3 in CFP Championship Games; 7-6 in 2007, officially 2-6 after wins were vacated, and one of the 7 losses was to Louisiana-Monroe; only won 59% of games with Michigan State.
Of course there are the 7 National Championships, rebuilds with LSU and Alabama, the best dynasty in the history of college football, etc. But that's obviously something that gets ignored for the purposes of distorted framing.

You don't need to cherry-pick for a distorted narrative to make the point that Osborne would've faced different challenges in a different era. Swinney is going through a version of that now.
We don't know how good Osborne would've been in the 2000s. But I think it's a mistake to just presume he was too old-school for changing times. For one, we have the example of Iowa here in this thread that a lot of the old-school stuff has continued to be effective. Then you have the aspect of option football. Some people underestimate how hard that is to slow down when it gets rolling, and that led to one of Saban's most well-known media rants.
Georgia Southern rushed for 302 yards against that 2011 defense. A defense that allowed an average of 183.6 YPG for the season.
It creates a lot of issues for defenses in being sound in assignments. But it also creates potential matchup issues with those types of big defenses that were built to shut down the run between the tackles. Because the option gets them thinking and moving horizontally. If you go smaller and faster on defense, then those guys have to play the run between the tackles, and they're going to have to take on a fullback. That will take a physical toll on a defense. And we don't know how Osborne might have added to the offense playing in a different era.