Hlas: In sports, Election Day is Friday, Saturday ...

IOWA CITY - Tuesday was a day for a sports writer to feel even more inadequate than usual.

While I was stuck in the 'toy department” as the sports department is sometimes called, the rest of the newsroom was hunkered down in Election Day mode, ready to assemble a cascade of results from hundreds of precincts and try to attach instant historical context to them.

You know, like the sports department does with high school and college football and basketball results on several dozen nights a year. Tuesday, Sports Illustrated college football writer Andy Staples spoke for thousands of sports reporters and copy editors when he tweeted this:

Congratulations to all the news side reporters who will get free pizza tonight for doing what sports writers do every day.

Still, show me a sports writer who hasn't had hundreds of free meals and I'll show you someone who hasn't been in the business very long.

Anyway, the stakes are so much higher and the results so much more meaningful on Election Day. Right?

Hmmm. Super Bowl Sunday is a virtual national holiday, when we gather together to celebrate football, a hot show business act of the moment, and most importantly, new television commercials that promote beer, pistachios and Volkswagen.

Election Day, however, is held on a day in which people are expected to squeeze out some time during their work day to participate, and do it alone behind a curtain. Where's the party in that?

I attended Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz's weekly press conference Tuesday with a few dozen other members of the press. And it was just for the week of an Iowa-Minnesota game. What if it were a contest of actual national significance?

That may have been a larger gathering of reporters than any who attended any whistle stop made in Iowa this fall by any candidate for elective office. Is that how it should be? Perhaps not, but there's probably something in the First Amendment that says that's OK. Hey, I'm no political scholar.

On Page 1 of Tuesday's Gazette, there was a story about how almost 5,000 of the 36,380 voters in Linn County who requested absentee ballots hadn't returned them to the county's Auditor's Office as of Monday afternoon.

Over the years, I've been an Associated Press Top 25 voter and a Heisman Trophy voter. I don't remember a single person on either panel ever declining to vote. Because that stuff is important!

A Page 2A story in that same Tuesday Gazette gave you numbers to really put things in perspective. It noted Ferentz is easily the highest-paid Iowa state employee at $3.825 million for fiscal 2014.

Meanwhile, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad made $130,000 for fiscal 2014, ranking him 2,295th among state employees. The governor earns almost 30 times less than a football coach.

We can draw one clear conclusion from this: Branstad needs Ferentz's agent.

It brings to mind what Babe Ruth said in 1930 when it was pointed out to him that he made more money (a huge-for-its-time $80,000) than President Herbert Hoover ($75,000).

'Why not?” Ruth replied. 'I had a better year than him.”