The Iowa football tyeam will host an open scrimmage on Saturday in Kinnick Stadium but that won’t be the end of spring practice for the Hawkeyes. Coach Kirk Ferentz says they will have three more workouts to conclude the spring.

Ferentz says they decided to make this the final spring scrimmage for the public because of the Olympic wrestling trials that are going on as those will cause a lot of traffic in the area. Ferentz says it has been a productive spring for the Hawkeyes.

“Our team’s working hard, you know we’ve got a relatively young football team and we have some system changes, staff changes, things like that, so we’ve got a lot of new elements to the program right now and I think that’s made it that much more interesting for everybody,” Ferentz says.

Spring practice has been an adjustment for the Iowa offense under new coordinator Greg Davis. “We are in our fourth week now and it seems like it has flown by probably faster this year than any other year before. We’ve had eight practices so far and we look forward to finishing off the spring right,” according to senior quarterback James Vandenberg.

Vandenberg says while there are plenty of changes on offense it is not a completely different look. He says having a new play caller gives you some new tendencies compared to the previous coach and he says while they are looking for balance, the passing game has probably expanded a little bit.

Vandenberg says under Davis the Hawkeyes are playing at a faster tempo. “He comes from a system that has kind of done it all and in recent years has been an up tempo, almost predominately no huddle offense, so that is something that we are experimenting with,” He says. Vandenberg says the up tempo play is probably the hardest part of the new offense to learn.

The Hawkeyes struggled with consistency in posting a 7-6 record in 2011 and Vandenberg says to get to where they want to be the Hawks need to start winning on the road. “We knew we could play good football and we didn’t do it consistently enough, and I think that started with road games, Vandenberg says.