Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

July 21, 2012

As covered on the Murph and Andy radio show Friday (go to the 25:30 mark) Bud Legg of the IHSAA has compiled a list (PDF) of Iowa high school team nicknames in the first half of the 20th century.

Despite what the list says, though, Traer and North Tama’s mascot was/is Redhawks, one word. There’s also a list of current schools and teams (PDF) but it has “Red Hawks” instead of “Redhawks” as well.

My list of school changes doesn’t include nicknames, so it’s not quite as rich for Andy Fales to mine. He had plenty of fun with them Friday.

Today North Tama is not playing football. The Redhawks are off.

Iowa high school football didn’t used to have bye weeks. The entire schedule was more straightforward: Nine weeks of games, followed by one playoff game a week(ish) for four weeks.

Now neither of those are true. There is a Week Zero, which overlaps with the Iowa State Fair, and teams that play then often get a bye later. On the other end, the first three rounds of the 32-team playoffs are compressed into a Wednesday-Monday-Friday setting in order to be done the weekend before Thanksgiving.

For the moment, let’s leave aside the playoff inflation issue and look at the regular season as a whole. Since it’s a week longer now, does that make the calendar creep less apparent on the surface? Think of it along the lines of “Football season’s starting already, so there’s no problem with getting school going.” In 2012, the season started so early that some teams had played three games before Labor Day. A last-week-of-August start date for classes would have seemed out of sync.

Even if there was no conscious decision, the earlier starts for both school and the football season may have fed on each other until it was too late to make any real changes to either.