[bears9]

It now seems painfully obvious that Kirk Ferentz is faced with rebuilding the Iowa football program for the second time since he replaced Hayden Fry as head coach in 1999.
You keep waiting for the situation to turn for the better, but based on Saturday's 31-6 loss at Purdue, it could be a long, frustrating and depressing wait.
In fact, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight at the present time.
The Hawkeyes are still in bowl contention, with records of 3-5 overall and 1-4 in the Big Ten, but so was lowly Minnesota until it lost to North Dakota State at home on Saturday.
It's ridiculous to speculate about the bowl scenarios right now when Iowa is in 10th place in the Big Ten and struggling just to make first downs.
This team has to learn how to crawl before it can do anything else.
The days of Dallas Clark and Brad Banks and Eric Steinbach and Robert Gallery are long gone, and to borrow a line from Rick Pitino, none of them will be walking through the door to help fix things.

Long road of rebuilding ahead