Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Friday is first Iowa-Iowa State men’s basketball game in a quarter-century where both teams are ranked — but unlike Lafester Rhodes’ command performance of 1987, many Iowans are not going to be able to watch. It’s not (just) because of a relatively super-late start time, after 8:30 Central, but where it’s going to be on TV.

The game has been shoved onto ESPNU, a sports-tier channel not available to Mediacom customers on expanded basic cable. In order to be able to get the $8 sports pack in the first place, you must already have an HDTV, a cable box, and Mediacom Prime — which as of a year ago was $14 more per month than expanded basic. So for basic cable subscribers, the option of “temporarily pay and then cancel” simply is not there.

DirectTV and Dish have moved ESPNU onto a lower tier, which is beneficial, but prices have steadily been increasing there too. (From what I can tell, Dish does not have ESPNU in HD, but at least it exists in the lowest tier. Conversely, though, that tier includes neither Fox Sports 1 nor any regional Fox Sports Net, which is where a lot of Big 12 games are also shown.)

This schedule was set at the beginning of the season, when neither team was ranked. ESPN is showing an NBA game; ESPN2 is showing the I-AA playoffs. (Fox Sports Nets are also showing NBA games.) This game is another indicator that ESPN has the rights to so much content that it can hold games hostage for viewers. Of course, the same thing could be said on a lesser level for the Big Ten Network before it strongarmed Midwest cable providers.

Four ISU conference road games this season will be on ESPNU, too, including against Kansas in Lawrence.

In the end, I guess I’m combining a bunch of little rants here: against the sports bubble, the cable bundle bubble, the decline of college sports on broadcast television, ESPN, and my own poor self.

John Walters and Gary Dolphin will likely be giving their radio play-by-plays tonight to fans who don’t usually listen. Perhaps those fans will listen while streaming the Christmas Cats instead.

This is a timed post.

I know the athletic departments won’t go for it, but I’m going to suggest and write about it anyway: Iowa State should set up a home-and-home with Northwestern in football, playing in Evanston in 2020 and Ames in 2022.

Why? Because 2020 is the 125th anniversary of the year Northwestern was Struck By A Cyclone.

I’ve touched on 1895 before, in the blog post “The ISU-Purdue game that doesn’t exist”. Thirteen days after playing Butte Athletic Club, the Iowa Agricultural College* football team was in Evanston for its second game ever outside the state of Iowa, Sept. 28, 1895. (In fact, the 1895 team did not play a single home game.)

I.A.C. won 36-0, and the next day’s Chicago Tribune headline, bolded above (subhead: “It Comes from Iowa and Devastates Evanston Town”), became the inspiration for the team’s nickname.

Iowa State has played Northwestern seven times since, and has lost seven times since. The last meeting was in 1956, and the two teams never played in Ames.

Both teams have unfilled slots in their 2020 and 2022 schedules, but here is where the logistics stop being favorable for my proposal. The one big non-conference game each team has scheduled in both those years is a road game — ISU at Iowa, and Northwestern at Stanford, each in multi-year arrangements. Each team would end up having two true road games against non-conference BCS/power-conference opponents in a year, and that doesn’t happen much if ever nowadays. (Aside from the neutral-road setup with Florida State and Iowa in 2002, the last time ISU did it was 1990.)

Along with and related to that, the Big Ten will start playing nine conference games in 2016, and the Big 12 has done so since 2011. Also, Northwestern may not be as enthusiastic about remembering the event as ISU.

As long as that setup continues, and as long as six games garner a bowl, it is highly unlikely that the one remaining non-I-AA slot** on ISU’s schedule will be filled with anything besides a team from the MAC or Mountain West. While I would love to see Northwestern — or Illinois, or Kentucky, or another typically less-powerful power-conference team — on the Cyclones’ schedule alongside Iowa, some things just aren’t going to be.

*It became Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts in 1898.
**Northern Iowa is on the schedule every odd-numbered year through 2023, plus 2016.

Baylor has its first outright conference title since 1980. Baylor had the most conference losses of any Big 12 team in the 1990s (1996-99) and 2000s (2000-09).

The Bears’ championship comes two years after the Big Eight’s worst team of the ’90s, Oklahoma State, won its first Big 12 conference championship, and one year after the Big Eight’s worst team of the ’80s, Kansas State, earned its second Big 12 title.

The second-worst Big Eight and Big 12 team of the 1990s…is so far the second-worst Big 12 team of the 2010s and finished the 2013 season 3-9 (2-7).

Iowa State football, 101 years since a championship and counting.

This post has been edited.