The 2025 Hawkeyes Season: 9-4, Four Losses by 15 Points, and a Bowl Win

Iowa finished the 2025 season at 9-4, and if you have spent any time around Hawkeye fans, you know exactly how that sentence lands. It gets described as frustrating and successful in the same breath, and honestly? Both are accurate. I have been watching games at Kinnick long enough to know that a 9-4 season can feel like a championship or a disappointment depending entirely on how the losses arrive. This year the losses arrived the cruellest possible way — close, against very good teams, over and over.

So let me walk through the season the way I would explain it at a farmers market booth between sips of coffee: what happened, why the record undersells what I watched, and what I am actually taking away from it.

The final tally, all in one breath: 9-4 overall, 6-3 in Big Ten play, No. 23 in the final rankings. And all seven home games sold out for a fourth consecutive season.

I love that last stat for a reason that has nothing to do with football. Selling out Kinnick Stadium seven straight times, four years running, means tens of thousands of people keep choosing to show up no matter what the record says. That is a kind of loyalty my own little company would kill for — people coming back, season after season, win or lose. I try to earn that kind of repeat business one freeze-dried strawberry at a time.

The Number That Defined the Season

Iowa lost four games during the regular season by a combined total of 15 points. All four losses came against opponents ranked in the top 20.

Do the math with me: that is an average margin of under four points per loss. In football terms, that is one bad snap, one dropped pass, one questionable call away from a very different season. Every one of those games was winnable, and I do not think that is a consolation prize. I think it is the whole story.

I will be honest about the flip side. Four losses to ranked teams also means Iowa could not quite finish. If my freeze-drying runs came out slightly short of perfect four separate times, I would not walk around calling that a foundation. I would call it a to-do list.

What keeps me from calling it a failure is who the losses were against. Top-20 teams, every single time. Losing by a field goal to a juggernaut is a different animal from losing by a field goal to a team you should have handled. Iowa was playing the kind of opponents where "we almost had them" is a legitimate sentence and not an excuse.

The Late-Season Run

Here is where my nerves settled down. On November 22, Iowa beat Michigan State 20-17 at Kinnick in front of 69,250. On November 28, the Hawkeyes won at Nebraska 40-16 in front of 86,410.

Forty points in Lincoln, on the road, in front of 86,410 of the least neutral spectators in college football. When I watch a performance like that — and yes, I am the kind of CEO who gets emotionally invested in November football while my husband Bryon patiently explains down, distance, and personnel groupings to me for the hundredth time — I see a team that figured something out late and then refused to give it back. That is the same arc as a production run where everything finally clicks and you ship clean.

The Michigan State win at home mattered too. Twenty-seventeen is not a comfortable score, but it is a win in the column, and wins at Kinnick in November feel different. The cold helps. So does the noise.

The ReliaQuest Bowl

December 31, Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, against No. 14 Vanderbilt. Final score: 34-27, Iowa. Attendance: 35,382.

A bowl win to close the year is exactly the note I wanted to end on. I have said before that I am deeply suspicious of finishing anything on a sour note, whether that is a blog post, a production run, or a football season. Ending at 9-4 with a W instead of an L changes the entire emotional texture of the offseason.

A win over a ranked Vanderbilt team in a bowl game does two things. It proves the late-season version of Iowa was real and not a fluke. And it gives the program something to build on instead of something to explain. Tampa in December, I will admit, is not Iowa City in November — I already missed the cold by then.

The Kicker

Drew Stevens made a career-long 58-yard field goal in Week 11 against Oregon, tying an Iowa and Kinnick Stadium record. He finished with 76 career field goals, tied for fourth-most in Big Ten history.

I am fascinated by kickers, mostly because they are the closest thing in sports to what I do for a living. Everything is preparation, precision, and nerve — and then one attempt, alone, in front of everyone, decides whether the week was worth it. A 58-yarder that ties a Kinnick record is not luck. That is a career of small correct decisions paying off in one very loud moment.

And 76 career field goals, tied for fourth-most in Big Ten history, is the kind of number I respect even more than the highlight. The highlight is fun. The career total is the resume. In my world, the resume is every batch we have ever shipped, not the one that photographed well.

What It Means Looking Forward

Here is my honest read on the whole thing. Nine wins, a bowl victory, and four close losses to good teams is a foundation. Not a trophy. Not a national title. A foundation — the kind you pour concrete over before anyone else can see what the building will become.

The good news is real: the record, the rankings, the sellouts, the bowl win, a kicker going out as one of the most prolific in Big Ten history. The frustrating news is equally real: four games where Iowa could not quite close. I am not going to pretend that part away, because I do not do that in my own business either. Every close loss is information. The question is whether you treat it as information or as a scar.

As a small-business owner in Iowa, I recognize the pattern well. We do not survive on the big wins. We survive on the close ones we turn into wins. Iowa did that twice in November and once in December, and that is the lesson I am carrying into next season — the margin is everything, and the margin gets built in the boring weeks nobody claps for.

Next year I will be watching the same way I watch every season: in the stands or on my couch, yelling at the television, with Bryon quietly explaining something I already half-know. Go Hawks.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC