This is a week old, but can’t go unchallenged.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/a><\/p>\n Here’s ISU’s “scheduling philosophy”:<\/p>\n That’s it. The nine-game Big 12 schedule hems in ISU more than anything else. There’s no real philosophy.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In the first half of the 2000s, when Iowa State would have put Tulsa on the schedule for 2012 and 2013, Tulsa was terrible<\/em><\/a>. It’s not the Cyclones’ fault that they’re winding up playing the Conference USA champions.<\/p>\n Maybe Ubben meant something like this: “Going 3-0 in nonconference play is always the key, and Iowa State’s insistence on scheduling Iowa<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0ISU has a future home-and-home with\u00a0Akron<\/em>, for crying out loud.<\/p>\n No matter how you slice it, it’s a puzzling use of phrase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading \n