Saturday’s game will have two firsts for Iowa State, not counting the possibility of the Jack Trice Stadium scoreboards registering triple digits for the visiting Horned Frogs.*
The game will start at 6 on ESPN2. Iowa State has never been in a Saturday night game on ABC, ESPN, or ESPN2 in the current “every game on TV somewhere” era. (2011 Oklahoma State was a Friday, 2013 Texas a Thursday.) So this game takes the easiest picking of those off the list.
ESPN’s Beth Mowins will do the play-by-play. Mowins did the radio play-by-play for the 2012 Liberty Bowl, but still to my knowledge this will be the first time a woman has called an ISU football game on TV. Mowins has called plenty of Iowa games, because she often gets assigned the 11 AM Big Ten game, but ISU is almost always on FSN or FS1 in that time slot. (A notable exception is last year’s TCU game, on ABC because there was a light slate of games and TCU was a College Football Playoff contender. TCU proceeded to paste ISU to the point of kneeling in the red zone in the fourth quarter, only to find out that the playoff committee did not look kindly on mercy.)
Whatever happens in the TCU game, Baylor will be looking to surpass it next week when the Cyclones go to Waco…and that game will be on “the ESPN family of networks” at 11 AM. If Mowins is assigned that game too, that’s going to be a heck of a curse to escape from.
*BLOOD. SO MUCH BLOOD. And not just from the eyes of the Frogs either.