Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

This late of a state tournament may be unprecedented. I don’t know what caused it — RAGBRAI, the calendar, or a late start — but it has always seemed that the tournament never went into August. Last year the finals were the 28th.

The semifinals start today. Only Class 4A doesn’t have a private school among the  remaining teams. The rest are the usual suspects: Newman; Beckman and Kuemper; Assumption and Heelan.

Summer high school baseball in Iowa: It’s unique, and it’s wonderful.

Mm-hm.

“I mean, the Hawkeyes in Iowa are the preeminent team,” [Big Ten Network President Mark] Silverman explained. “And because they are, they’re a flagship member of the Big Ten and they’re able to generate revenue.”

Said “flagship” member has won two halves of a conference football championship and two men’s basketball tournaments in the past 20 years. (Who is a non-flagship member? Stop pointing at Illinois like that.)

Remember, the Big Ten shoveled as many Iowa events as it could to the network in its first season to blackmail strong-arm persuade Mediacom into picking it up (and charging $1 per subscriber).

In the NCAA, Division III universities are the smallest and non-scholarship. Iowa has a bunch of them (Wartburg, Luther, Simpson, Central, etc.).

Division II allows for scholarships. Upper Iowa is the only one in the state, which creates the fun oddity of Fayette being a town with a university but not a high school.

Division I-AA (no I will not use the Newspeak term “Football Championship Subdivision”) is made up of the smaller universities from the Division I split in 1978, and the designation is for football only. This includes UNI, of course, and Drake, which is one of a handful of non-scholarship universities in the division (they have their own conference, the Pioneer League).

And then there’s Division I-A, which consists of the teams you hear about every day and their less-moneyed brethren. The top 64(ish) teams in this division are the BCS, soon to be Power Five, teams.

Anyway, with all that said, my question is: If the biggest teams want to create their own division of NCAA sports, since the size and money involve increase as the number gets smaller, shouldn’t the chatter be about a “Division 0” instead of a “Division 4”?

To further the Iowa angle of this post, UNI has found itself as a somewhat unintentional poster boy for the lower-tier have-nots because former UNI/Iowa AD and current Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby remarked at media days, “Northern Iowa and Texas aren’t much alike.” That got Dennis Dodd (linked above) to opine,

Northern Iowa has almost nothing in common with Texas but has the ability to vote down a stipend because it can’t afford it. What the BCS commissioners are saying: Why is Northern Iowa voting on the issue in the first place?

UNI may also reflect the situation at hand more than some because state demands to be self-sufficient (thanks, Big Ten Network!) have put athletics programs in something of a cash crunch. That’s why the Panthers got a paycheck from Wisconsin last year and why they’re regularly on ISU’s schedule. And that’s the reason for voting against a stipend.

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.