Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

In yet another attempt by Fox to differentiate itself from ESPN, the early Saturday college football game is getting some higher-profile teams. Let’s ignore for the moment that a talking-head set of Urban Meyer, Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, and Brady Quinn raises all sorts of skeevy ethical questions and look at the branding for this game:

Big Noon Saturday.

The Big Ten and Big 12, the conferences from which this pool of early games will be drawn, have nine teams in Eastern Time and 15 in Central. That means for a majority of the people tuning in to watch their team, it’s actually Big 11 AM Saturday with the pregame — called “Big Noon Kickoff” — starting at 10.

The East Coast could at least pretend they know that flyover country exists by not deliberately giving programs names that don’t work for a majority of the viewers (see also: ESPN’s “SC6”), but that would require perspective.

Matt Campbell could be Iowa State’s Earle Bruce. The second Earle Bruce, I mean. The first Bruce won eight games at ISU three years in a row, but couldn’t get over a conference hump. He left ISU to go to a place where his teams would be the pursued rather than the pursuers — Ohio State — where they eventually got tired of him winning “only” eight games a year.

Matt Campbell could be Iowa State’s John Cooper. Cooper, a player on Iowa State’s “Dirty Thirty”, replaced Bruce as Ohio State’s coach. He won three conference championships and lost more than four games in a season only twice, but was fired because he couldn’t beat his school’s biggest rival and lost more bowl games than won.

(Ohio State could really, really use an actual period of wandering in the wilderness.)

Matt Campbell could be Iowa State’s second Dan McCarney. McCarney took an ISU program that was extremely down in the dumps, rebuilt it over five years back when coaches were allowed that much time, and brought it to heights not experienced before. Then, through both comedies and tragedies of errors, he watched it crumble enough that the leadership demanded someone else.

But right now, Matt Campbell is 0-1-1 in regulation against Northern Iowa and 0-4 against Iowa. The most hyped ISU team in a generation is a fumble recovery away from starting 0-2.

The 2019 Iowa State team started with a preseason ranking, the first time that’s ever happened. ESPN spent a morning here. Lee Corso put on Cy’s mascot head. The atmosphere was electric, and yes I very intentionally mean it that way.

And all that national attention boiled down to … this.

When Paul Rhoads was fired, I compiled a list of the most Iowa State ways possible that Iowa State has lost games this century. It’s been updated not just with this game, but others from the Campbell era.

Campbell’s done some good things (the outfits not among them) and has one huge data point in his favor. The season is young and Big 12 play is still ahead.

Go Cyclones.

During Conferencepocalypse, Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Bianchi questioned the justification of multiple non-blue-blood teams, including Iowa State, in major-college football. Well, more than questioned. He railed to anyone who would listen (and those of us in existential angst) that teams that “could not compete” should be expelled in favor of the University of Central Florida — a place that barely over 30 years prior was known as Florida Technical University and didn’t have a football program.

In 2014, as the realignment dust was settling, Bianchi outright called on the SEC to “get[] rid of the irrelevant schools” — specifically, Ole Miss and Mississippi State — and, purely on the basis of media markets and “growth potential”, pick up one team that less than 20 years prior was playing in Division I-AA and another that 20 years prior didn’t exist. That came four years after he had apologized to the state of Mississippi when Mississippi State defeated a ranked Florida team in the Swamp.

As the 2010s come to a close, Bianchi, now with the sword of UCF’s pillowy-soft alleged national championship at his disposal, refuses to stop taking massive dumps on Iowa State and its undistinguished-on-the-football-field compatriots.

It’s no secret that many of these bottom-feeding Power 5 programs are simply taking up a spot that would be better suited for UCF — a burgeoning university in a major metropolitan TV market.

He also plays fast and loose with timelines, saying “those Power 5 leagues were formed nearly 100 years ago.” But:

• The ACC didn’t exist until 1953.
• The primordial ooze of the Pac-12 can be traced to 1916, but along the way, the conference ceased to exist in a pay-for-play scandal, only to be reconstituted in a way that the only university that really got screwed was Idaho.
• Texas Tech — one of his go-tos for a team that doesn’t belong — didn’t start football until 1925, was in the Border Conference along with the Arizona schools until the mid-’50s, and then shifted to the Southwest Conference.
• The Big 12, though it disavows the existence of anything before 1996, is for all intents and purposes a descendant of the Big Six/Seven/Eight. I’ll grant that. But I’ll also point out that politicking in the Texas Legislature as SWC schools fought for lifeboat space is how it got to where it was in 2010.

According to the 2019 U.S. News & World Report rankings, UCF is tied for the 165th-best national university in the country, lower than every member of a power conference except Louisville, Mississippi State and Texas Tech. (Iowa State is 119th.) If there is any bulwark against the view I was seeing a decade ago (and Bianchi continues to trumpet) about how it is all about the football eyeballs, it’s that UCF remains where it is.

This started as a very different blog post.

In all the early speculation about “College GameDay could come to Ames!” — see here, and here, and here — I was certain that there was no way it could possibly happen.

I was wrong. It just required a massive confluence of events.

• Weeks 2/3 can be a desert in terms of college football programming, even below SEC Cupcake Week. The high-profile non-conference matchups happen early, and conference games are scattered at best. Iowa-Iowa State (no, not the name certain corners of the Internet want to give it) is the only regular non-conference series of note in the Big Ten.
• ABC’s Saturday night game is Clemson at Syracuse, a conference game, and ESPN play-by-play announcer and Syracuse alumnus Sean McDonough will be calling it. But Syracuse got trucked by Maryland. ESPN’s night game is Florida-Kentucky (always has to be early in the year because Gators can’t stand the cold), and Kentucky hasn’t beaten Florida at home in more than 30 years.
• Another potential GameDay matchup, Stanford at UCF, would fit the “offbeat” game profile, but ESPN had already cashed its Orlando chip at Disney World for Week 0 and Stanford’s game against USC was so late that when a decision had to be made, it wasn’t known if Stanford would be a ranked team next week.
• Because this year’s schedule has an extra week and idle Week 2’s are stupid, Iowa State didn’t have any new data point after beating a I-AA team in triple overtime while Nebraska blew a 17-point halftime lead in front of a home crowd at Folsom Field. (You read that correctly.)

The research I did is still good, but the conclusion has to be modified to take into account new data. So, rather than how “GameDay” was never coming to Ames, here’s just how unlikely it had to be.

Of all the college football fan bases out there, Iowa State’s should be one of the most understanding of a 21st-century sports maxim: ESPN programming exists to support “the ESPN family of networks.” That also means talking about the College Football Playoff, and when not talking about the College Football Playoff, asking, “What about this team that might make the College Football Playoff?” (This guy gets it.)

With the help of the NCAA’s list of College GameDay sites crossed with lsufootball.net’s comprehensive TV schedule archive (in God’s Own Time Zone, of course), I set to work compiling a spreadsheet of every GameDay site, matchup, and network in the 2010s.

Statistics are for nine years, 2010-18.

• Of 161 GameDay events, 12 were stunt GameDays with non-power-conference teams (two were actually non-games, Times Square and the NFL Draft), 33 were conference championship games or BCS/CFP games, and five were Army-Navy. So we’re down to 111 data points.
• 78 of those 111 games had a top-five team playing, and 18 more had a top-ten team playing.
• 64 were on ABC or ESPN at 6 PM or later. Iowa State has never ever played Saturday night on ABC or ESPN in the modern television era. ISU played Nebraska in 2006 on Saturday night on ABC to a not-quite national audience — the only such game until 2020.
• 33 were non-ESPN family — but 14 of them were the CBS SEC Game of the Week and six more were LSU-Alabama CBS night games. So, really, we’re talking about 13 games ESPN had to make an extra effort for. THIRTEEN.
• GameDay went to one game where both teams were unranked: 9/10/11, Notre Dame at Michigan, on ESPN. Those 13 games in the above bullet point? Two of them are the Irish, and Iowa State will never play Notre Dame (unless in a bowl).

The complete list of “College GameDay” power-conference games, 2010-present, not on the ESPN family of networks not involving a top-10 team:

• 10/12/13, #12 Oregon beats #16 Washington, 3 PM on FS1
• 9/24/16, #14 Tennessee beats #19 Florida, 2:30 PM on CBS
• 10/20/18, #25 Washington State beats #12 Oregon, 6:30 PM on Fox (the culmination of a 15-year campaign to get GameDay to come to Pullman)
• 9/1/18, #12 Notre Dame beats #14 Michigan, 6:30 PM on NBC
• 9/14/19, #20 Iowa at unranked Iowa State, 3 PM on FS1

Congratulations, “College ‘Ames’ Day.” See if Jim Walden is bringing the Washington State flag.

CORRECTION 9/27/20: One game has been on ABC prime-time this century. It has been noted above.