Friday Hawkeyes Reading Room -- Plenty o' praise for Iowa to be found

I've gone to national outposts for Reading Room material. How about something from the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun?

Crystal Eskelsen of the Sun has a nice piece here about how the Hawkeyes' successful season has brought her and her family closer to relatives and strangers. She writes:

We have a four-year-old neighbor who is quite possibly the biggest Iowa fan you will meet. He was so upset in the third quarter of Saturday's game against Indiana, he laid his head on the seat in front of him, muttering that it was all over.

The four-year-olds get it, my mom gets it, my brother-in-law gets it. We are all watching or listening to football on Saturday.

We even got a phone call from my sister-in-law, who is a Utah Utes fan. (If you'll remember, the Utes were undefeated in football last season, but didn't get a shot at the title.) She was calling to tell us that now we know what it was like for her the previous season – she was following the Hawkeyes, too.

A lot of people in Hawkeyeland are buying into "negative press" and "no respect."

That's fine. I like to say the only thing fans of a team like more than outsiders' praise of that team is criticism of it. That said, I had no trouble finding lots of complimentary things written about the Hawkeyes on Thursday.

Vahe Gregorian of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch starts things out for us. Click here for Gregorian's full column. An excerpt:

By any number of indicators at this moment, Iowa has the best resume in the country. With a No. 2 computer rating, the machines are a lot closer to getting it right than the pollsters.

No matter how the match-up would look, if actual achievement matters more than

predictions, Iowa would deserve to play for the national title if the season ended today. Even if it got creamed.

Rece Davis of ESPN has some generous things to say here bout 9-0 Iowa. Such as:

Iowa hardly has an easy time Saturday against Northwestern. Then again, the Hawkeyes don't make anything easy. But as long as the fourth quarter is coming and they've got Ricky Stanzi, anything is possible.

I don't know that I've ever seen anything like Stanzi's disastrous third quarter against Indiana in Week 9 turn into something like his fourth quarter in that game. He and his entire team define resilient. There's a point when your perceived weakness becomes your strength. Iowa has reached that point. So the Hawkeyes can't put anybody away. Big deal. Nobody has beaten them. They believe the next play is the one they're going to make, the one that's going to turn the game in their favor. Just ask Tyler Sash after that bizarre pick-six last week.

David Briggs of the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune also expresses admiration for the Iowa season-to-date and its coach, Kirk Ferentz. Click here for Briggs' column.

Some teams, such as Texas perhaps, will hang close to the Mack Brown school of shameless politicking. Others may seek style points and ring the advice hotline of Bob Stoops, the man who would go for two late in a 95-0 victory over Norman Community College only because he couldn't go for three. A rebellious school or two might even try playing a tough schedule and remaining undefeated.

Personally, though, I like Iowa's approach. Call it the charming disconnect, starring Coach Kirk Ferentz as the oblivious feel-good hero and his defiant press man as the villain. . . .

Maybe it's not all a delightful act. Maybe, as few question, he is a genuinely good guy who's more content with his team's abidingly clutch play than irritated by the pollsters' low regard for Big Ten football.

Chris Dufresne of the Los Angeles Times shows up here again, and why not? Dufresne keeps churning out entertaining, informative pieces about college football, and I keep lifting passages. Like this one from his latest essay, one suggesting the more unbeatens the BCS has this year, the better it likes it.

The usual rules of anti-BCS engagement -- hoping a worst-case scenario leads to an overthrow that leads to a college football playoff -- may not apply.

What you think might be best for your cause -- six undefeated teams at the end of the year -- may be manna for the "bad" guys. . . .

Let's say six teams finish undefeated and the final BCS standings order is Florida, Texas, Iowa, Cincinnati, Texas Christian and Boise State.

The BCS championship game is Florida-Texas, the teams ranked first and second heading into the season. . . .

Iowa is the 12-0 champion of the Big Ten but has to play in the Rose Bowl against the Pac-10 champion, let's say Oregon. . . .

Not only is that a terrific game before the BCS title match in the Rose Bowl, the Big Ten can't say a word about getting cheated out of a title chance because Jim Delany has been the Big Ten poster commissioner against any kind of playoff.

This isn't Hawkeye-related (unless you see an inevitable Iowa-Oregon Rose Bowl, which means you see an Iowa win over Northwestern Saturday as inevitable), but I wanted to share it with you. It's a terrific, very sad piece about an Oregon fan, a missing football helmet, and a far-larger void in the fan's life.

I can't do justice by it with a few lifted paragraphs. So click here for George Schroeder's fine work in the Eugene Register-Guard.

For something fluffier to close on, Dave Kindred has this funny column on a "competitive, contentious, combative bunch of characters."

Namely, sportswriters. An example:

The late Will McDonough of the Boston Globe was in the New England Patriots locker

room taking notes of an interview with the day's hero when there came a noise from the locker next door. The noise was created by Raymond Clayborn, a cornerback. "I'm gonna bury you, mother," he said to McDonough, who wasn't even his father. What led up to that was never quite determined, but what happened next was witnessed by reporters who felt blessed to have been there. Shaking a finger at the sportswriter, Clayborn made the mistake of scratching McDonough's face. In response, McDonough, a Southie who knew about these things, threw two quick right hands. Clayborn went down in sections.