North Tama’s football season started last week with a 34-6 home opener victory against Belle Plaine (complete with converting a 3rd-and-goal at the 38!) and plays at Ackley tonight.
The IHSAA, like the IGHSAU, has outsourced all statistics to the website formerly known as Varsity Bound (and the website poached North Tama’s athletic director to work for it) so all the scores and standings are there. The now-“Bound” notes that North Linn is “Celebrating 50th year of North Linn football” but the district is older than that. A headline at the Linn News-Letter of Central City says it’s the 50th anniversary of the field at Troy Mills.
A notable change in the Iowa media scene, based on what happened last week, is that KWWL is no longer dedicating a half-hour to “Friday Night Heroes.” Instead, it’s 10 minutes of news followed by 20 minutes of sports, which puts a time crunch to get in game reports and final scores, especially if a pass-happy team is involved. WHO isn’t doing an extended features show either. Interestingly, last Friday multiple entertainment news outlets reported NBC might just kill off its third hour of prime time. (The possibility of pushing the news to 9 PM Central, of course, factors not at all. And while I’m on the subject of NBC, “Days of Our Lives” is being shuffled off to a nice farm upstate, I mean to Peacock.)
The day after the little Redhawks play, a bigger team of Redhawks comes in, with Southeast Missouri State playing Iowa State. For the first time since October 30, 2010, ISU will have a home kickoff at 1 PM. That was the last home game that wasn’t televised. Now, we’ve come full circle; Saturday’s game is kicking off at 1 PM because it won’t be televised. It will only be on ESPN+, which I have ranted about before and doubtless will again. In 2011, the last Big 12 game ever against Missouri was at 1 because Missouri wanted that even though it could not be televised at that time, and one writer thought that was cause enough to go to the SEC. Theoretically, games at Texas on the Longhorn Network counted as television.
Meanwhile, the Big Ten’s new contract is enough to provide everyone with private islands (except for Michigan and Ohio State, which get private continents) and robot butlers. As for the Big 12’s next contract, maybe they can find a place for us in the “90 Day Fiancé Universe”.
In another of the gratuitous slaps at Iowa State we’ve come to expect in realignment sagas, CBS’ Dennis Dodd said, “The Big 12 wants to be hipper, younger, cooler. There’s not much that’s hip, young and cool about an Iowa State-Cincinnati game.” Not even if we wear black outfits?