L.J. Phillips says he's good to go for Iowa vs. Minnesota

The scare came late in Iowa's win in Seattle, when Phillips came off with a lower-leg issue. On Tuesday he made it sound like nothing.

For a guy whose season has mostly been spent waiting on an ankle, that matters. Phillips came to Iowa from South Dakota State, where he ran for 1,921 yards and 19 touchdowns the year before he transferred. He was supposed to be a big piece of this backfield. Then in the opener, a 40-0 blowout of Northern Illinois, he had 4 carries for 5 yards, limped off near the end of the 1st quarter with a high ankle sprain and never came back in.

He missed 3 weeks. He was back in uniform for Michigan, got his first carry since Week 1 against Ohio State, and then the ankle went again late against Washington. That one stung more than usual because the night was historic: Iowa beat the Huskies 41-24, its first regular-season win on the West Coast since 1965. Watching your big-money transfer back go down at the end of a game like that is about as Iowa as it gets.

The bye week is what saved him. Phillips says the time off did his body good and he feels "great," and the Hawkeyes need that version of him. At 5-1 and ranked No. 15 in one poll and No. 14 in the other, Iowa has a real case for the College Football Playoff if it keeps winning, and there's very little room left to drop a game it should win.

Minnesota is up next, at Huntington Bank Stadium on Saturday at 2:30 p.m. CT on FS1, with Floyd of Rosedale on the line. The trophy is in Iowa City right now, and it has mostly lived there lately: Iowa has won 10 of the last 11 in the series and 5 straight in Minneapolis going back to 2016. The Gophers are 7.5-point underdogs, but rivalry games don't care about spreads, and an Iowa offense with a healthy Phillips is a lot harder to sit on than one without him.

Of course, a player saying he expects to play on Tuesday is not the same as getting carries on Saturday, especially with an ankle that has already gone twice. Keep an eye on the availability report and on how much work he gets early. If he gets through the first quarter without a limp, Iowa's backfield finally looks like what it was supposed to be in September.