Is the time right to Bear down and Pack Carver-Hawkeye on Sunday afternoon?

There's a ballgame Sunday at 2 p.m. that's of great interest to thousands and thousands of Iowans.

The Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. A Super Bowl berth is on the line. That should make good television, huh?

There's another ballgame Sunday at 2 p.m. Indiana and Iowa. Men's basketball in Iowa City.

It's not what you'd call the ideal day and time to draw a huge crowd to Carver-Hawkeye Arena, is it? I know what I'll be watching. But I'll switch over to the Iowa game during timeouts of the NFC Championship.

“You can't adjust your schedule on the fly for the NFL playoffs,” Big Ten associate commissioner Mark Rudner told me Friday. His summers are devoured trying to nudge the league's computer to come up with the ideal schedules for his league's men's and women's basketball seasons.

Nonetheless, Iowa's home wrestling dual with Indiana was recently rescheduled from 5:30 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday to the Friday night, Feb. 4 so fans didn't have to choose between the Super Bowl and Hawkeyes wrestling. There was no Big Ten Network television obstacles to hurdle, no TV schedule to tear up, no rescheduling problems for all the people and equipment it takes to televise an event.

I admit, I was gearing up to blast the league for having the Hawkeyes men's basketball team playing on four straight Sundays in January, the first three colliding with NFL games. Iowa has enough to overcome to rebuild fan-support without butting directly into things like last Sunday's memorable Jets-Patriots playoff contest.

But the days of the league playing five games on Thursday night and five more on Saturday is becoming more and more a distant memory. If it was a Thursday or Saturday in Big Ten basketball season, you knew it was a game day. But it also was a time when you couldn't see many of those games.

The Big Ten Network gives every conference game its own time slot. That, factored with a set of other principles, makes for scheduling on Sundays and at somewhat-untraditional times.

Whether that's ultimately for the better or worse probably depends on which time slots your team landed.

First and foremost, conference coaches requested to have two days to prepare for each game up until the time ESPN and CBS make their picks for wild-card games in the final three weeks of the regular-season. Indiana played at Wisconsin Thursday night. Thus, it couldn't play at Iowa on Saturday.

Other factors: No team can play more than two straight road games. You have to play four or five of your nine league home games in each half of the Big Ten season. You have to play four or five of your home league games on the weekend in each half of the Big Ten season.

The exclusive window for every conference game is why there are Sunday games, and some odd starting times during the week like the 5:35 p.m. (Central time) Iowa had at Ohio State last Wednesday.

That game had little live-sports competition from anywhere on the TV dial in the first half, but it sure had some from things that keep people from getting home by 5:35 in the Central time zone.

The Big Ten Network is pumping a lot of cash into the coffers of its league schools. But everything lucrative always seems to come with a price.

Oh well. Enjoy the game Sunday afternoon. Or games.