It’s easy to overreact to one game, because you play a game one day and then talk about it for a week. In this case with Iowa, because of its bye week, we get two weeks to dissect the bitter loss to Wisconsin last Saturday and figure out what it all means.

The big question, of course, is just how good this Iowa team can be. The Hawkeyes sit at 3-1 now, winners of three straight nonconference games where the defense dominated week after week and the offense struggled most of the time.

And then the Wisconsin game came, one that most assuredly will decide the Big Ten West race. Against a first-class quality opponent, Iowa’s defense, especially the linebackers, didn’t hold up as well as we would have hoped and the entire group was disappointing in the fourth quarter.

That’s when Wisconsin quarterback Alex Hornibrook took over. With Iowa leading 17-14, he marched the Badgers 86 yards, completing all five of his passes and throwing a 17-yard TD strike to A.J. Taylor with 57 seconds left to win the game. A late score a few seconds later after an Iowa turnover made it 28-17, a bigger deficit that belied how tight this game really was.

So three things we learned:

  • Iowa’s defense may not be as good as we thought it could be.
  • Iowa’s offense showed it can move the ball against a quality foe.
  • Iowa can beat anybody on any given night, or lose to anybody, as well.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth all over our football team,” Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz said. “But some of it gets hidden (Saturday) because of a couple critical plays that we weren’t able to execute cleanly enough.”

So what lies ahead? It’s entirely possible that the Hawkeyes will be favored to win all of their remaining regular season games with the exception of a trip to Penn State on Oct. 27. If form holds, that’s a 10-2 season that will conclude with a major bowl game.

But there are also no guarantees. They have three road games — at Minnesota on Oct. 6, at Indiana on Oct 13 and at Purdue on Nov. 3 — that might very well be toss-ups. There’s no sure feeling there, that they can win all three of those games, because those are quality opponents looking to make a move in the conference as well.

What’s going to help is that the offense seems to have found something the past few weeks. Quarterback Nate Stanley picked up his game against Northern Iowa in Week 3 and he made a lot of huge quality throws against that great Wisconsin defense. He passed for 256 yards and made some key throws, especially on third down.

So where do we go from here? I won’t overreact to the verdict from last Saturday — a loss is a loss, even against a quality opponent — but I also won’t overreact to some of the positive things I saw from Iowa’s offense.

When both groups play well, they can beat anybody. But if they don’t, there could be a loss or two mixed in there that will seem like a surprise on game day.

So we’ll have to wait and see. This is a big two weeks for the Hawkeyes. They need to get better, and they need to keep getting better.

And if they do, a double-digit win season could certainly happen.