This is a week old, but can’t go unchallenged.
ESPN Big 12 blogger David Ubben, who at this point has made not attending a game in Ames a point of pride, says this about ISU’s schedule: “Going 3-0 in nonconference play is always the key, and Iowa State’s scheduling philosophy almost never makes it easy.”
Here’s ISU’s “scheduling philosophy”:
- Iowa.
- A I-AA team that about 75% of the time is UNI.
- A non-BCS/”mid-major” team, usually from the MAC or Mountain West.
That’s it. The nine-game Big 12 schedule hems in ISU more than anything else. There’s no real philosophy.
Twenty-seven BCS teams will play 10 other BCS teams in a 12-game schedule this year (three of those play 11). Iowa State is one of them.
In the first half of the 2000s, when Iowa State would have put Tulsa on the schedule for 2012 and 2013, Tulsa was terrible. It’s not the Cyclones’ fault that they’re winding up playing the Conference USA champions.
Maybe Ubben meant something like this: “Going 3-0 in nonconference play is always the key, and Iowa State’s insistence on scheduling Iowa almost never makes it easy.” But that would still be questionable, because ISU is 9-6 against Iowa since 1998. Or is it that any mid-major that gets on ISU’s schedule has a tendency to get good in the intervening years?
The final possibility would be that he’s criticizing ISU’s willingness to play true road games against non-BCS opponents, in which case he may have something of a point. ISU has a future home-and-home with Akron, for crying out loud.
No matter how you slice it, it’s a puzzling use of phrase.