Jan 27

Mother Nature, you’re mean when you’re drunk

Posted on Monday, January 27, 2014, at 1:59 PM by Jeff

At least it’s above zero.

jan14_24hrtemp

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Jan 26

More than half of football teams will qualify for the postseason

Posted on Sunday, January 26, 2014, at 12:48 PM by Jeff

Lost in the concern about potentially losing a regular-season game and excitement about the new high school football districts is a simple fact and reminder of the state’s expanded playoff system: More than half of the football teams in Iowa will be in the playoffs. The actual number is 192 of 340, or 56.47%.

With a 32-team bracket in all classes, 70% of the teams in Class 4A will qualify; 57% (four-sevenths) of Classes 3A/2A/1A will qualify; and half the teams in A and 8-player will qualify. (Class A will be 32 of 62 — close enough — and 8 will be 32 of 64, exactly half.) So 2-7 Des Moines East gets another game, but not 3-6 Stanton.

Changing to a 24-team bracket — top three teams in each district, champion gets a bye — would still mean that 42% of the state’s teams play in the postseason. In Class 4A, the number of participants would be one more than half (24/46 or 52.17%); in the next three classes, 42.86% (three-sevenths); and in A and 8, more than a third. There would be fewer first-round blowouts and being district champion would mean a little more.

Are the classes themselves too small? Not necessarily. In 4A, the population discrepancy is already huge (Valley’s fault). If we look at the other 11-player classes, configuring four classes into three would mean about 77 teams per class. Class A did in fact have 77 teams in 2004, and 82 in 2000 — but the district population variances in this scenario would be larger.

About 42% of teams in those three classes would make the playoffs. However, cramming them into eight districts would mean five 10-team districts and three nine-team ones. That would mean the first group has NO non-district games and the second group only gets one in a nine-game schedule. The current setup allows for three non-district games in 3A/2A/1A and two in A/8, giving schools more flexibility with continuation of rivalries or close geographic matchups.

As the small schools continue to shrink, the elimination of Class A in the future is a possibility, but a long-term one. Right now, there are enough teams to sustain the existing setup, and a whole lot of them will be playing the first Wednesday after the regular season is over.

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Jan 24

Further notes on the new football districts

Posted on Friday, January 24, 2014, at 4:51 PM by Jeff

Odds and ends of observations.

  • The redesign of the IHSAA’s website completely bollixed up links to anything older than a couple years. Fortunately, with the Internet Wayback Machine, it is possible to recover old district lists.
  • Number of teams/schools by class (private): 8, 64 (5); A, 62 (4); 1A, 56 (6); 2A, 56 (3½) (West Burlington and Notre Dame are sharing); 3A, 56 (4); 4A, 46 (Dowling). Class 4A now has districts like everyone else.
  • In 2000, the first year of the six-class era, 82 teams played in Class A. For each two-year period since, here are the numbers for that class: 2002-03, 67; 2004-05, 77; 2006-07, 68; 2008-09, 58; 2010-11, 52; 2012-13, 63; 2014-15, 62. Numbers may have differed slightly in odd-numbered years because of programs sharing/dropping out.
  • In Class A, districts 3 (north-central) and 4 (northeast-central, NT’s district) have seven teams and the rest have eight.
  • In all, by my count, 35 teams went down a class and 23 went up a class. Clarinda Academy had a double-drop from 2A to A.
  • West Marshall got hosed. After a drop from 2A to 1A, it’s the northwesternmost school of a southeast-Iowa-ish district that includes defending champion Iowa City Regina. On the other hand, West Marshall could be just the team to end Regina’s 56-game win streak.
  • South Tama fell to 2A and will now be in the same district as Aplington-Parkersburg, Union, and East Marshall. (That’s kind of weird to me.)
  • Class A now has private schools Council Bluffs St. Albert and Le Mars Gehlen (which now includes Granville Spalding) in addition to Algona Garrigan and Mason City Newman. The latter two are in the same district.
  • A quasi-reconstituted North Union, which is Armstrong-Ringsted plus Sentral with North Kossuth sharing (it’s complicated), and Easton Valley, which is Preston plus East Central (it’s legally complicated), will also be in Class A.
  • English Valleys dropped to 8-man football, in the same wide-ranging district as both Don Bosco and Des Moines’ Grandview Park Baptist. Meskwaki Settlement School is there too.
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Jan 23

Old playoff foes pepper North Tama’s new football district

Posted on Thursday, January 23, 2014, at 2:37 PM by Jeff

(Of course the new enrollments and football districts would drop within 24 hours of each other. Looks like I have a whole bunch of new numbers to play with.)

The IHSAA has released the football districts for 2014-15. The Register has a list; class by class PDFs are on the association’s website. North Tama’s district is pretty geographically compact, with a couple “new” faces that haven’t been seen often but haunt the Redhawks’ playoff history.

Denver is dropping down to Class A for the first time. The last time the Redhawks faced off against the team north of Waterloo was the first round of the 1995 playoffs, when the Denver Cyclones and future Iowa State Cyclone Ben Bruns trucked North Tama 35-6 on their way to a Class 1A state championship.

Wapsie Valley is back on NT’s schedule. Back-to-back season-ending losses to the Warriors in 1996 and 1997 kept the Redhawks at home those years despite having 7-2 records. (That’s back when there were 16-team playoffs and not the current monsters that let 3-6 teams squeak in.) The two teams have met twice in the postseason: in 2007, when the Warriors trucked North Tama 47-0 on their way to a Class A state championship, and 2012, when the Warriors trucked North Tama 46-20 on their way to a Class A state championship.

And just for completeness’ sake, Grundy Center trucked North Tama 40-0 in the first round of the 1988 playoffs on its way to a Class 1A state championship.

(Anyone else get a sense of deja vu just now?)

Five of the seven teams in the new Class A District 4 — BCLUW, Gladbrook-Reinbeck, Grundy Center, North Tama, and Wapsie Valley — played in Class 1A in 2000 and 2001; AGWSR and Denver were in 2A then. North Tama has never played a unified AGWSR in football.

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Jan 22

Update on Council Bluffs interstate work

Posted on Wednesday, January 22, 2014, at 3:00 PM by Jeff

Article in the Omaha World-Herald. There’s a public meeting next week. The big takeaways from the story are that some of the flyover ramps will be finished this calendar year, and parts of the project along I-80 may be sped up (although note that the 29/480 interchange is not scheduled at this time).

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Jan 22

Snakebit

Posted on Wednesday, January 22, 2014, at 11:29 AM by Jeff

Iowa State, Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Oregon started 58-0 this basketball season. They are a collective 0-13 0-14 since. Not one of those teams has won in two weeks. ESPN blogger Eamonn Brennan calls the plunge “fascinating.” That is not the word I would use. Luke Winn’s Magic Eight? Try Magic 8-Ball.

Scary parallel: Iowa State was undefeated and #9 in the country at midseason heading into Norman…just like the 2002 football team.

Ohio State has the best slump-busting opportunity tonight Thursday at home vs. Illinois.

(As for the ISU women, we may have to move up to full-fledged exorcism.)

UPDATE: I erred on Ohio State’s next game date, and Wisconsin lost again.

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Jan 21

What Girl Scout camps have in common with school consolidation

Posted on Tuesday, January 21, 2014, at 11:50 AM by Jeff

Today, a trial starts in Scott County to stop the Girl Scouts of Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois from selling four camps in the state, reports the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa also intends to sell one of its camps, says the Sioux City Journal. These attempts to sell off long-held properties are not unique to Iowa, although the Eastern Iowa lawsuit may be one of the more prominent such cases in the country.

Much like a school closing, there are two factors at work: Consolidation and declining enrollment. Each Girl Scout council used to operate its own camp. Now that 312 councils nationwide have been turned into 112 (as mentioned in the Daily Beast link) — Iowa went from nine to two — the argument can be made for greater “efficiencies.”

(A numerical aside: As a part of the council consolidation, Girl Scout troops now have five-digit numbers, based on adding digits to the old numbers that could be duplicated across old councils.)

For camps, like the schools, when the numbers and the money aren’t there, difficult choices must be made.

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Jan 20

So, um, about those Cyclones

Posted on Monday, January 20, 2014, at 12:40 PM by Jeff

Since Baylor coach Scott Drew said Iowa State “is a team that can win a National Championship” the men’s team has gone 0-3.

The women are now 0-2 all-time to West Virginia in their own house and laid enough bricks at Kansas State to build a new dorm or two.

So.


(via blogspot.com)

Related and now very dated: Iowa State hoops enjoying “Magic” ride. ISU has gone winless since that was published.

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Jan 18

Two of Iowa’s shortest state highways may be on way out

Posted on Saturday, January 18, 2014, at 12:57 PM by Jeff


September 8, 2010

Iowa Highway 98, a road that serves little purpose except to provide a state-maintained bridge across the Des Moines River to the unincorporated village of Leando*, was the only spur highway that was not decommissioned on July 1, 2003.** That bridge is scheduled to be replaced this year — and after that happens, the DOT is interested in turning the route over to Van Buren County. The Ottumwa Courier has the story.

The county supervisors are hoping for $1.5 million per mile for 1.8 miles ($2.7 million total) because the rest of IA 98 will need to be repaved. The sticking point, as always, will be money.

The Courier quotes Supervisor Tom Nixon as saying, “I realize in 50 years I won’t be sitting here, but 50 years ago, the DOT gave us the Bonaparte bridge.” That is not quite true. The existing Bonaparte bridge (part of the original incarnation of IA 79) was built in 1960, but was not turned over to the county until 1980.

 April 1, 2010

IA 152, created in 1980, is a short but winding road connecting the interstate to US 69 north of Osceola. Its bridge over I-35 is also scheduled for replacement this year. However, the county may take over the road before that happens. The Osceola Sentinel-Tribune has that transfer story, with a twist: The DOT put out feelers about rerouting US 69. The story does not say how far south the move to I-35 would have been carried out — US 34? Van Wert? All the way to Lamoni? — but it is an echo of an idea floated in 1980, when the state looked at moving a significant portion of 69 onto I-35. Then and now, though, the state kept US 69 on its mostly two-lane route.

The IA 152 process may be further ahead than IA 98, as the article says there is a “tentative deal” that Clarke County would get $2.5 million instead of the state spending $2.746 million this year and next to replace the bridge and repave IA 152. (It’s also possible the bridge could be replaced with state money and then turned over, costing the state a little more money but then it’s done dealing with the road.)

At the beginning of 2014, IA 152 and IA 98 are respectively the state of Iowa’s second- and fourth-shortest state highways, and fifth- and seventh-shortest state-maintained roads overall. Will they still be around next year? We’ll have to wait and see.

*The 2010 census tallied up populations for a whole bunch of unincorporated towns as “Census-Designated Places.” Leando had a population of 115 and Douds had a population of 152, making them bigger than literally dozens of Iowa cities.

**IA 316 was transformed into a spur in 2003. As it so happens, its bridge across the Des Moines River is scheduled to be replaced next year.

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Jan 17

Contractors, wide shields, and the 2009 MUTCD

Posted on Friday, January 17, 2014, at 12:56 PM by Jeff

The presence of wide shields on the north extension of IA 196 to new US 20 has been documented here already. It’s not a good look. Notably, these shields were not put up by the state, but by a contractor. It’s not the only incident of the latter happening in the state.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This shield was up May 10, 2012, at the IA 8/21 intersection in Dysart. At the time, US 218 was closed for a bridge replacement in La Porte City. This was also set up by a contractor, IPSI.

It used to be that the state would set up the detour assemblies, and may still do so in some cases. The US 63 detours north of Traer in 1997-98 were all handled by the state, with signs up ahead of time. But the presence of contractors’ signs up during and after construction projects is becoming more noticeable. Perhaps it’s a cost-saving measure by the state. If the contractor does multiple projects in an area, the shields can be recycled.

This wouldn’t be an issue at all, except the signs don’t match state standards. Something is off on them. The double-arrow assembly, for example, is also non-standard to Iowa signage.

It’s likely these newer signs are built to conform to the 2009 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, on a subject the state of Iowa has been nonconformist about.

A 24 x 24-inch minimum sign size shall be used for U.S. route numbers with one or two digits, and a 30 x 24-inch minimum sign size shall be used for U.S. route numbers having three digits. — 2009 MUTCD Section 2D.11.09

Yes, that’s right — although you may not notice it while driving, your standard highway sign is 2 feet by 2 feet.

Missouri has made great leaps into compliance with this rule in the past few years, replacing nearly all its square 3-digit shields. Iowa, however, has not. The only 3-digit US route in the state that does not include “1” as a digit is US 275, so we’ve been able to get away with it.

The issue really rears its ugly head when state-shaped shields, like Missouri’s, and circular shields, like Iowa’s, are stretched out to meet this specification. See, for example, the signs on the IA 330 extension to I-80.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind it if the state dragged its feet as long as possible (i.e. using existing inventory) on this matter. But like implementing the larger initial capital letter on cardinal directions, it may only be a matter of time.

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