Hawkeyes miss the boat by not gerrymandering their football schedule

Iowa football’s media day is on Friday, but so many questions about the Hawkeyes won’t get asked then.

It’s the media’s fault. Ask the tough questions, you pandering wimps.

For instance, since gerrymandering is all the rage these days, why hasn’t Iowa reconfigured its 2025 schedule to play Purdue and Maryland instead of Penn State and Oregon?

Speaking of which, why was the Hawkeyes’ Sept. 13 home game against Massachusetts sold out before the Oregon and Penn State games on Oct. 18 and Nov. 8?

That’s asked with the knowledge the single-game prices for UMass-Iowa tickets were $50 to $70 while those for the Oregon and Penn State contests are $165 to $185. Few remain for those games, by the way, and all will be bought.

If the game is the thing, though, shouldn’t preseason Top 10 teams Oregon and Penn State have sold out Kinnick first, no matter the price? UMass was 2-10 last year and is a godawful 26-122 since it moved up to FBS.

If the game’s the thing, wouldn’t the Albany-Iowa season-opener on Aug. 30 have been the last of the seven on the Hawkeyes’ home schedule to sell out?

Is the game the thing, though? Do we in my racket here make too much racket about the performers and their results? Aren’t the main reasons these game sell out is a) Iowa has no major league pro sports and b) it’s the social event of the year in Iowa for so many people?

Look to the west. Nebraska claims to never have had an unsold ticket for a football game in Lincoln since 1962. What would the Huskers have drawn last year coming off a seventh-straight losing season if they had been located in, say, Minneapolis or Chicago?

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What would the average attendance for Iowa games be if the university didn’t allow alcohol consumption in its parking lots, let alone inside the stadium? Not 70,000.

A different question: Is it not better to expand than to be an expansion team? Oregon’s team will fly 16,744 miles in the regular-season and cross 20 time zones. Iowa’s will fly 5,932 miles and cross just six time zones, and plays just two games further than 275 miles from home.

This isn’t a question, but Oregon has a hog population of about 5,000, and most are wild. Iowa has about 24 million pigs. We’ve got twice as many utility-scale wind turbines as Oregon. Sports is all about statistics, you know.

What does Oregon have, come to think of it? Other than majestic mountain ranges, the beautiful Pacific coast, lush forests, no statewide sales tax, and the defending Big Ten football champion?

If you were voting on an All-Big Ten team for the first 25 years of this century, how many Iowa players would be on it?

RotoWire.com recently put out its list. The Hawkeyes on it are tight end T.J. Hockenson, cornerback Desmond King and punter Tory Taylor.

Iowa has had 18 consensus All-America players in that time including Outland Trophy (interior linemen) winners Robert Gallery and Brandon Scherff, John Mackey Award (tight ends) winners Dallas Clark and Hockenson, and Dick Butkus Award (linebackers) winner Jack Campbell.

The Hawkeyes tied for second place with the most RotoWire selections with Michigan, Michigan State and Wisconsin. Ohio State had eight of the 26 players. Nebraska, which began Big Ten football in 2011, had none.

One more question: Does it strike anyone else as interesting that for all the football-football-football dominance when it comes to discussion about athletics at the University of Iowa over the last century, the person who easily is the all-time most-famous athlete from the University of Iowa is a women’s basketball player?

Name a former Hawkeye football player who grabbed the nation’s attention for any real length of time, let alone a few years.

If you say Nile Kinnick, you get a sad trombone sound effect. Those who never saw him play in person never saw him play. Kinnick’s Heisman Trophy in 1939 wasn’t huge news. It was just the fifth Heisman awarded. Kinnick’s legendary Heisman acceptance speech (in Iowa, anyway) had no television to spread it across the country.

He never even had a shoe contract.

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