By DARREN MILLER
hawkeyesports.com
IOWA CITY, Iowa -- C.J. Beathard was sleeping when news broke that the University of Iowa football team accepted a bid to play Stanford in the Rose Bowl Game on Jan. 1, 2016. When he woke, Iowa’s quarterback and captain might still have felt in a dream.
Playing in the Rose Bowl was on Beathard’s “Bucket List” years before he imagined quarterbacking the Hawkeye football team in a Big Ten Championship Football Game. When Beathard was 15 years old, he attended the 2008 Rose Bowl -- a matchup between Southern California and Illinois, where his uncle, Kurt Beathard, was on the coaching staff.