Oregon has been treated as a program firmly in the Big Ten’s top tier this season, but based on the initial College Football Playoff rankings, the Ducks’ position is a little more tenuous than many may have expected.
Dan Lanning’s club debuted at No. 9 in the season’s first CFP rankings, dragged down by a decisive home loss to No. 2 Indiana and the erosion of the quality of its overtime win at Penn State earlier this year. On Saturday, they travel to face a Big Ten team that is quietly well-positioned to make some noise in the CFP race: No. 20 Iowa.
Kinnick Stadium is a fearsome venue for road teams, even in years where Iowa struggles to put any points on the board. The Hawkeyes offense isn’t great, but they do play complementary football with Kirk Ferentz’s typically strong defense, and the team appears to be peaking at the right time. Saturday marks the first time the new Big Ten foes have faced off as conference opponents, and the first matchup between the two programs in more than 30 years—and the stakes are quite high for both teams.
Let’s take a look at how Oregon and Iowa stack up, and what the game means for the CFP race.
How Iowa, Oregon match up
On paper, Oregon looks like it should clearly outmatch Iowa. But we know that is not how college football works, of course, especially in a road game at a place like Kinnick Stadium.
The Ducks profile as one of college football’s elite programs once again, ranking third in ESPN’s SP+ (and one of just four programs that ranks in the top 10 in both offense and defense). Football Power Index also has OU ranked third, while Pro Football Focus ranks the Ducks all the way down at No. 6 (surprisingly just one spot ahead of the Hawkeyes at No. 7).
This could be a much closer affair than the metrics or the 6.5-point spread (up from an opening line of Oregon -5.5) indicate, though. After a truly dominant opening month of the season, the Ducks have struggled a bit, sneaking by a Penn State team that quickly fell apart in seismic fashion after their double-overtime game in Happy Valley. They followed that game with a 10-point loss to Indiana that didn’t feel particularly close, and after recovering to spank Rutgers, the Ducks were not impressive at home against a Wisconsin team that likely won’t win a Big Ten game this year. Quarterback Dante Moore remains incredibly impressive, but has fallen back to the pack a bit after the Penn State game put him into Heisman conversations for a few weeks.
Iowa, meanwhile, has only gotten better as the season has gone along. An early 16–13 loss at rival Iowa State looked like vintage Hawkeyes, but the team showed more pluck than Oregon in a 20–15 loss to Indiana that came down to a Hoosiers touchdown pass with 1:28 left in the fourth quarter. The Hawkeyes have evidently used that game as a launching point, blasting Wisconsin 37–0 and a solid Minnesota team 41–3, with a tight win over Penn State in between. The defense is among college football’s best as expected, ranked in the top six nationally by ESPN’s pair of advanced metrics. The offense isn’t flashy, and the Mark Gronowski experience at quarterback isn’t quite what many expected when Iowa landed the South Dakota State superstar. He is yet to eclipse 1,000 passing yards on the season and has just four touchdowns (and interceptions), but he is a huge part of an effective rushing attack that has given teams fits over the last few weeks, with 313 yards and 11 touchdowns on the ground. With the forecast looking cold and rainy on Saturday in Iowa City, ground-and-pound could be the way to go.
If Oregon can jump on the Hawkeyes early the way they did Penn State, Tim Lester’s Hawkeyes offense is unlikely to have the firepower to fight its way back. Let them hang around, however, and we’ve seen the scare that Iowa put into Indiana—a game that proved more of a challenge for the dominant Hoosiers than their trip to Eugene the following week.
If Iowa wins...
Iowa’s playoff path is narrow but realistic, and would get a massive bump if the Hawkeyes can take down the Ducks on Saturday.
The most direct way for any team to reach the CFP is to win its conference and take the decision out of the committee’s hands. Right now, Ohio State and Indiana are hurtling towards a showdown in Indianapolis for the Big Ten title game, but Iowa is in the group of four teams with just one conference loss below the undefeated Buckeyes and Hoosiers, who do not meet in the regular season. A win over Oregon would bump the Ducks out of that group.
Iowa also faces USC—another 4–1 team in Big Ten play—down the stretch. The Hawkeyes lose a tiebreaker to Indiana, so they would need the Hoosiers to drop two games to jump them, very unlikely. If Ohio State loses to Michigan at the end of the season, however, both the Buckeyes and Wolverines (who lost to USC) would have one loss in their common opponents with Iowa. Because neither team faces Indiana, a 10–2 (8–1) Iowa would win the tiebreaker and advance to face the Hoosiers in the conference championship.
Even if Iowa can’t finagle its way into the Big Ten title game, at 10–2 riding a seven-game winning streak with victories over Oregon, USC and Nebraska down the stretch, and two losses to an elite Indiana team and a solid Iowa State squad by a total of eight points might be enough to jump the Hawkeyes into the field as an at-large, depending on how things shake out ahead of them. ESPN’s FPI currently gives Ferentz’s team a 7% chance to reach the playoff, the 25th highest percentage in the country and sixth in the Big Ten.
Iowa’s 2025 football schedule
All rankings listed are from the College Football Playoff Top 25 after Week 10.
If Oregon wins...
The time for Oregon to build its quietly underwhelming résumé begins now. This is, of course, not really Oregon’s fault beyond its 10-point defeat to Indiana. Penn State had looked shaky, but was a top five team considered a preseason playoff lock when the Ducks went to Happy Valley and overcame a late Nittany Lions comeback to send the home fans home with another “white out” loss in double-overtime.
Win on Saturday, and Oregon is poised to climb the rankings as an at-large team, and put itself in position to jump Ohio State, should the Buckeyes stumble along the way (with the season finale against Michigan as the most likely spot). As with the Iowa scenario outlined above, the Ducks would lose a tiebreaker to a one-loss Indiana, but could slide in past Ohio State if they drop their game to the Wolverines.
Oregon would certainly like to play for a second consecutive Big Ten championship, but if the Ducks go 11–1, they are a virtual lock to make the field. As things stand today, FPI gives Oregon a 75% chance of reaching the field, and remains very bullish on the Ducks’ chances even if they drop a game to Iowa, USC or Washington and finish 10–2. Outside of computer projections, that feels like a much more dangerous game to play. All three of those programs could finish 10–2 and 7–2 or better in Big Ten play and could be put in over Oregon thanks to a head-to-head win, so it is certainly a scenario that Lanning and his staff would like to avoid.
Oregon’s 2025 football schedule
All rankings listed are from the College Football Playoff Top 25 after Week 10.
Sports Illustrated’s postseason projections for Iowa, Oregon
SI’s Pat Forde was higher on Oregon than the selection committee in his CFP rankings filed after Week 10’s games, slotting the Ducks in at No. 7—two spots above where they wound up. In his last ranking he had them set to face projected ACC champion Virginia, his No. 10 seed, in the first round, with the winner slated to face Indiana in the second round at the Orange Bowl. He had Iowa on his list of bubble teams.
In his forward-looking projections after Week 10, Bryan Fischer also had the Ducks at No. 7, facing a different ACC representative at No. 10, Louisville. He has Alabama ultimately jumping up to No. 2 and facing the winner of that game at the Sugar Bowl.
Fischer has the Hawkeyes missing the playoff, and heading to the Bronx to take on Pitt at the Pinstripe Bowl on Dec. 27.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Iowa vs. Oregon Impacts the College Football Playoff Race for Both Programs.
