{"id":299205,"date":"2025-10-13T06:09:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T06:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/299205\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T06:09:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T06:09:10","slug":"what-is-the-opening-penn-state-iowa-point-spread-the-initial-number-is-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/299205\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the opening Penn State-Iowa point spread? The initial number is out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Penn State football goes on the road to Iowa<\/a> next Saturday for a primetime clash with the Hawkeyes at Beaver Stadium. It marks the Nittany Lions\u2019 second road trip of the season. But, it will be its first game in three years without Drew Allar<\/a><\/strong> under center. The senior quarterback is now out for the year. Redshirt freshman Ethan Grunkemeyer<\/a><\/strong> is taking over for now. And, it is the first time in 12 years that James Franklin<\/a><\/strong> won\u2019t lead the Lions into a game day. He was fired on Sunday. Terry Smith<\/a><\/strong> is the interim head coach.<\/p>\n

While Penn State is fresh off a 22-21 loss to Northwestern, the Hawkeyes are coming off a 37-0 win over Wisconsin. Running back Xavier Williams<\/a><\/strong> scored a pair of touchdowns as head coach Kirk Ferentz\u2019s team totaled four rushing scores overall and held the Badgers to just 209 yards of total offense in the blow out, shut out win.<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, really pleased with the effort from our team tonight,\u201d Ferentz said. \u201cReally proud of how the guys played. Looking backwards I think the guys handled the bye week extremely well, and then when we got back to work getting ready for this ballgame I thought the week of preparation went really well. Happy about that and most importantly the guys showed up at kickoff.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe played really hard. It wasn\u2019t perfect but the guys made some things happen. It was good to see the takeaways; we hadn\u2019t had an abundance of those this year and we got a couple tonight. Most importantly, we made the takeaways turn into points.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is the Penn State-Iowa point spread?<\/p>\n

Iowa opens as a 3-point favorite at BetMGM<\/a>. The betting over\/under total is 38.5.<\/p>\n

It marks the first time that Penn State is a regular season underdog to someone other than Ohio State or Michigan since 2021. The Lions were also an underdog against the Hawkeyes then, too. Ferentz\u2019s team won outright, 23-20, as a 2.5-point favorite, according to OddsShark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Penn State is 6-2 in its last eight meetings with Iowa. Besides the 2021 loss, the Lions also fell to the Hawkeyes in 2020 by a final score of 41-21. <\/p>\n

According to BetIQ<\/a>, the Lions are the only college football team to not yet cover a point spread this season. They are 0-6 against the number. Penn State gave up the spread on the final play of the Villanova game. Otherwise, they have not been relatively close to covering for betting backers this season.<\/p>\n

Penn State-Iowa starts at 7 p.m. ET next Saturday. Peacock will stream the game exclusively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Penn State football goes on the road to Iowa next Saturday for a primetime clash with the Hawkeyes…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":299206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[1318,1317,1315,1316,1718,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-299205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-regwall","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}