"Gave up" is tough. From the sounds of it both Purdy, Hall and Kolar are dinged up. Based one what we had shown on offense there was no chance we were coming back. ESPN's "win probability" had Iowa at 98.8% when Dekkers came in. Then if you are going to put in a new QB who has had extremely limited snaps, do you just sit him back in shotgun and throw 3 times in a row, especially against a really good defense? Developmentally that probably doesn't make sense.
I guess he just decided getting meaningful snaps for some guys we may need this year trumped the extremely, extremely small chance we had at a comeback. I'll trust coach on this one.