Hawkeyes hope Huskies leave Iowa with nothing gained but frequent-flier points

Here’s how Washington has handled its preparation for its 11 a.m. (9 a.m. Pacific time) football game at Iowa Saturday:

It held 9 a.m. practices in Seattle this week, flew to Iowa Thursday instead of the usual day before a road game, and had a Friday walk-through at 11 a.m. (9 a.m. Pacific time).

Huskies Coach Jedd Fisch had his team spend two nights in Iowa to adjust to the time change, a subject irrelevant to Big Ten play before this year.

Lo and behold, a league spanning four time zones instead of two is a strange, new animal. Washington already got a sour taste of that a few weeks ago when it went to Rutgers for a Friday night game.

Seattle is about as far west as you can go for a college football game if you don’t count Hawaii. Rutgers is about as far east as you can go if you forget about Dublin. The Huskies stayed in New Jersey after that game and flew home Saturday.

By the way, Rutgers won, 21-18. You have to figure the home-field advantage for a game against a team that comes from one coast to the other is at least three points.

In Big Ten play this season, teams that have traveled at least two time zones are 1-8. At home last week, Washington beat Michigan. USC lost as favorites at Michigan and Minnesota, but downed Wisconsin 38-21 in Los Angeles.

The only team to break through is Indiana, which crushed UCLA 42-13 in Pasadena. UCLA isn’t very good. Nonetheless, Minnesota should be wary when it plays the Bruins in the Rose Bowl Saturday. The Iowa-UCLA Friday night game there on Nov. 8 could have more weirdness than the Hawkeyes desire.

None of the 14 holdover Big Ten teams make more than one West Coast trip per season, and that’s how it will be through at least 2028. The Pac-12 refugees, however, will forever be travelin’ men and women.

“It's going to be interesting in a lot of different ways,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said this week. “Our travel out there, their travel here, what that is, what's the long-term effect over the course of a season, all those kinds of things. It's just something we never had to deal with, but there's so many things in college football right now that fit in that category.”

The Hawkeyes have it good compared to most. Iowa’s next game after its UCLA journey is 15 days later. Washington played at Rutgers just six days after its previous game.

Iowa is only the fourth-longest trip of the season for Washington (fifth if it goes to the one of the cockamamie bowl games east of the Mississippi). Besides Rutgers, the Huskies have Eastern time zone games against Penn State and Indiana.

This is what they and Oregon signed on for when they rejected a proposed media deal between the Pac-12 and Apple as too dicey and chintzy. Wanting to stay relevant, and afloat financially, they followed UCLA and USC into the arms of the Big Ten.

Washington and Oregon will get $30 million as its share of Big Ten revenue this year while the other 16 members get twice that. The two Pacific Northwest schools won’t become full-earning members until the conference’s next media rights deals start in the 2030-31 school year.

As investments go, it seems quite good. By 2030, the Big Ten and SEC probably will have annexed everything but Harvard, Yale and Walmart.

Last October, then-Washington coach Kalen DeBoer said “I’m all about being at U-Dub. This place is amazing and special."

Washington played in the national-championship game last season. DeBoer then left for Alabama. Like his school, he fled for a greener pasture.

On Jan. 4, then-Arizona coach Fisch was on Jim Rome’s radio show and said “I have no interest in going anywhere.” Ten days later, he was Washington’s new coach.

In 2011, then-Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said his conference was “as happy as could be” with 12 members and “is not in an active mode” when it came to expansion. In 2012, hello Maryland and Rutgers.

In 2021, the Big Ten formally entered an alliance with the Pac-12 (and ACC). In 2022, the Big Ten swiped USC and UCLA.

To borrow the words of Seattle’s all-time most-famous radio host, Dr. Frasier Crane, college athletics is tossed salad and scrambled eggs.

Good night, Seattle, we love you!

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com