For those living under a rock, Brian Ferentz's contract adjustment stipulates:

1. The team must average at least 25 points per game, and
2. The team must win at least 7 games, including a possible bowl game.

Given that the team must win at least 7 games, we can assume they will play at least a 13th game. If they make it to a championship game, that would be an additional game not shown here. I'll cross that bridge later if it comes to it.

What I wanted to do was get a better feel for an opponent adjusted weekly target, as opposed to a simple "25 points a game" look that makes the Utah State result look a lot better than it actually was. I also wanted to get a feel for how Iowa's 2022 season would have looked against these targets, and just how big of a gap he needs to close.

Ed. note: I was supposed to push this to the front on Friday or Saturday morning -- got busy. Thanks, BantheDH! Please keep doing it! --MNW

Here's what I came up with.

This all passes the eyeball test to me. Smaller targets when going against better defenses and on the road. My main take-away is that Iowa is already off to a really bad start. Utah St was possibly the easiest opponent on Iowa's schedule this year to score points on. They didn't even hit 25 points, let alone the 34 point adjusted target.

If you care about the method used - given my limited access to data and to keep things simple, I used 2022 opponent points per game, courtesy of sports-reference. I then added a +/- 3 point home/away adjustment and calculated a weighted target for each opponent. Then for looking at how 2022 results compared, I took last year's scores against the same or similar opponents and did a + 6 point adjustment if the game flipped from away last year to home this year, and a -6 point adjustment vice versa. In the cumulative chart, the 2022 equivalent forecast resets from the 2023 actual points total.