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.