Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Not the University of Iowa, not the universities or our D-III college conference, but football in Iowa, period.

Last week, a Cyclone fan wrote to Big 12 blogger David Ubben about all the current head coaches who had links to both Iowa and Iowa State. Ubben replied (third Q&A):

Iowa doesn’t have the greatest reputation when it comes to football culture, but that’s a staggering amount of connections for a state with just two major programs within its borders. 

The original e-mail did not mention “football culture” at all. The response angered an Iowa fan (!) enough to write about the Hayden Fry coaching tree and Nile Kinnick. Ubben didn’t budge.

Hey, I’m not talking about historical accomplishments or coaching trees. I’m talking purely cultural. Iowa’s isn’t bad, but do you really believe it compares to some of the great ones around the nation? Are the multimillion-dollar, 10-20,000-seat high school stadiums all over the place? Do people really obsess over the game? I’d say Texas and Oklahoma’s football “culture” are markedly better than Iowa’s. It’s not to say Iowa’s is poor, just that it doesn’t compare with the best nationally.

You know why we don’t have 10-20,000-seat high school stadiums “all over the place,” Mr. Ubben? Because only a third of our counties have more than 20,000 people. Then the middle-population-tier counties are divided among multiple school districts.

If you come to any of the individual games, especially on the small end of the scale, we may not have 10,000 seats, but the percentage of people from the surrounding area at the game is significant. It’s also easier to get thousands of fans to show up when they don’t have to worry about gametime temperatures in the 40s and/or biting wind chills.

Do we obsess over the game? We have a statewide radio network that does a scoreboard show for hours every Friday, and it’s carried on TV even though it’s just a couple of guys with headphones reading scores.

Do we obsess about it as much as Oklahoma and Texas? I will admit that is not likely the case. But have you seen some of the stuff they post on TexAgs? I submit that not being as obsessive as Oklahoma and Texas is a good thing. Plus, Iowans are more “polytheistic” when it comes to sports.

I hope Ubben has heard about Ed Thomas. There’s also Curt Bladt and Duane Twait. They and hundreds of other coaches across the state, in the past and today, along with parents and fans, make Iowa football culture pretty darn good. The state of Iowa may not be the state of Texas, but it holds its own against just about anywhere else.

The 11 Division I-A football conference commissioners (and Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick, can’t forget him, reminding us that Notre Dame answers to no one) are reportedly close to announcing what the new college football postseason structure will look like.

This comes about after Iowa State’s sixth victory of the 2011 season resulted in Alabama weaseling its way into ending up in the BCS championship game against a team it had already lost to. (Utah State’s collapse against Auburn is a likely second factor that pushed Alabama over Oklahoma State.) There will no longer be “automatic qualifier” conferences, but the separation will exist by fact if not by law. There are the Big Five and everybody else. It’s too late to tell that genie to give up TV contracts.

Will the loss of “AQ” designation put a pause to conference musical chairs? Maybe. But there is still money to be had, and lots of it. That brings me back to an Andy Staples column from earlier this month, dealing with his fear that the power conferences would secede from the NCAA and form their own group, creating basketball tournaments without “Cinderellas.”

No more Lehigh over Duke. No more Northern Iowa over Kansas. No more Hampton over Iowa State. A division of strictly economic heavyweights might not want to split the take with have-nots. That’s exactly what happened in football when the BCS was created. 

Take a look at the three victims he uses in his examples. One of them is not like the other two. One does not have gobs of basketball championship trophies. One has only been a 2-seed twice in its entire history.

Why bring attention to this? Because two years ago, Staples suggested expelling Iowa State from the power conference ranks.

So, which are the Cyclones? Are they one of the economic heavyweights, a team that everyone enjoys seeing fall to a plucky mid-major? Are they a small-budget have-not who shouldn’t be sitting at the adults’ table? Or are they the Schroedinger’s Cat of college athletics, existing in both states and becoming one or the other only upon observation?

The answer lies somewhere in the middle. But after seeing “Iowa State” used practically as a synonym for “college sports bottom-feeder” across the Internet, please forgive those of us who aren’t quite done looking over our shoulders.

Noted Iowa State hater Pat Forde is at it again.

What about the move to outlaw 6-6 teams from bowl games: That will definitely spur some discussion and debate. In that scenario, several bowls likely would be put out of business.

On one level — the Vanderbilt/Washington State/Syracuse/Duke/Indiana/Iowa State level — getting to 6-6 and going to a bowl is an accomplishment. Commissioners are cognizant of that and don’t want to keep their lower-echelon programs from hitting a high point on occasion.

Iowa State went 6-6 in the regular season last year, and Paul Rhoads got a contract extension, so this isn’t a random point. Remember, Rhoads is one failed two-point conversion away from being perfectly mediocre in the regular season for three years. (He’s 18-20 overall.)

I don’t particularly like bowls for 6-6 teams either, and I say that as a fan of one of the major beneficiaries. However, when there are so many bowls that it is imperative to a coach’s job that six wins be attained in some manner, it’s inescapable. It also leads to a nonconference schedule of Iowa, a I-AA team that more often than not is UNI, and a non-BCS team. The home-and-home with UConn and the 2002 Eddie Robinson Classic against Florida State have been the only regular-season games against any BCS opponent not named Iowa since Minnesota in 1997 — and before that, TCU and Rice when they were still in the Southwest Conference. A nine-game conference slate isn’t going to change that any time soon, although Navy’s move to the Big East will happen before a home-and-home with them in 2018-19.

I think the number of bowls should be cut such that even some 7-5 teams stay home, as long as coaching contracts and ADs and fans recognize that that doesn’t automatically mean someone should be fired. That may be the biggest mental block of all.

But all that is tangent to my original point of contention: Lumping us in the same football category as Duke? That hurts. (Counterpoint: The Blue Devils actually managed to win a couple of conference championships.)