Iowa-Iowa State football appears to be on solid ground for now

IOWA CITY - The Big Ten's flirtation with a nine-game league football schedule will impact Iowa's future plans, but the annual Iowa-Iowa State football game seems safe for now.

“We're just in the formative stages of this so certainly I've not had any discussion with anybody about it,” Mark Abbott, Iowa's associate athletics director for legal affairs, said this week. “We would anticipate our series with Iowa State would continue, so that would be our direction.”

The schools' 10-year contract, which was signed May 28, 2008, and lasts through 2017, has an out clause: ”Should either school's conference add additional conference football games, that school shall be entitled to request that the parties seek to renegotiate the contract terms for the remaining contract years that are affected by the conference scheduling change. Both schools agree to make every effort to work with their respective conferences to try to keep this issue from arising.”

The game is played the second Saturday of September. Both schools prefer to host seven of their 12 games for financial reasons. If a school had five road games in a nine-game conference schedule, all three non-conference games must be at home to reach seven games.

The now 10-school Big 12 Conference added a ninth conference game starting this fall. Iowa State synced its conference schedule so when it hosts Iowa it has five league road games. Mark Rudner, the Big Ten's senior associate commissioner for television administration, said last fall that if the Big Ten expanded to nine conference games, the league office would work with schools to ensure league schedules sync with non-conference rivals.

Big Ten officials and school administrators meet next month to discuss the proposed nine-game Big Ten schedule, which could start by 2015.

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