IOWA CITY — Iowa football and the two-point conversion play need to have a talk.
They haven’t gotten along well lately. Frankly, their relationship has been on the rocks for most of the last decade.
Maybe they just haven’t been spending enough time together. Whatever the reason, the Hawkeyes stink at two-point conversions, and it’s costing them games.
A failure on a two-point try with 1 minute, 51 seconds to go wound up being the final margin in an 18-16 loss to No. 9 Oregon on Nov. 8 at Kinnick Stadium. Last season, the Hawkeyes missed a third-quarter two-point try against Iowa State and ended up losing, 20-19. In both losses, the opponent hit a field goal in the final 10 seconds to win a game that directly took advantage of Iowa’s two-point failures.
As a program, Iowa has missed its last seven two-point conversion attempts. Under second-year offensive coordinator Tim Lester, Iowa is 0-for-6. A pair of misses in Iowa’s 25-24 win over Penn State could’ve been costly had the Hawkeyes’ defense not made a clutch stop near midfield.
This has been a program blind spot. After LeShun Daniels Jr. ran for a two-point conversion at Minnesota midway through the 2016 season, Iowa missed 10 consecutive two-point tries — most infamously a Nate Stanley quarterback draw at Wisconsin in 2019 that cemented a 24-22 loss.
Iowa did make four in a row from 2020 to 2023, but hasn’t converted a two since Cade McNamara’s successful pass to Erick All Jr. against Western Michigan on Sept. 16, 2023. So, that’s four makes and 17 misses (19% success rate) over the last nine-plus calendar years as a program.
During the 2024 college football season, the going rate for two-point conversions was 45.8% (226 makes on 493 attempts) at the FBS level.
For a program that prides itself on getting the details right, Iowa’s short-sightedness in this crucial two-point area is startling. It was equally startling to learn that Iowa doesn’t specifically practice two-point plays.