Mike Hlas

Is anything duller than the way Ohio State has trampled those with lesser football resources over the years, er, decades?

Hawkeye forward Payton Sandfort was terrific last season in many ways. He wants to bow out at Iowa with a big senior season and “a ton of wins” before turning toward pro basketball.

Fun Facts about Saturday’s Iowa football game at Ohio State. Iowa is bigger. The state, that is. Ohio is more stuffed with humans, many of whom are good football players.

Only Caitlin Clark and USC’s JuJu Watkins outscored Iowa’s Lucy Olsen last season when Olsen was in her third season of pouring in points at Villanova.

Juju Watkins, second to Iowa’s Caitlin Clark last year in NCAA scoring, is the sophomore sensation who will lead Big Ten preseason favorite USC in its first year in the conference.

Iowa’s Payton Sandfort is on the preseason All-Big Ten men’s basketball team. The 6-foot-8 senior forward averaged 16.4 points, 6.6 rebounds and 2.7 assists last season.

Johnson didn’t get a scholarship offer from Ohio State, but he had plenty of other opportunities. He took one from Iowa after de-committing from Cal, and his high school coach says “The rest is history.”

Caitlin Clark’s rookie-season impact on the WNBA was phenomenal in multiple ways, and she’s only just begun.

At the one-third pole of the season, Hawkeye running back Kaleb Johnson would be considered a darkhorse at the very least .

It wasn’t this way with 11 or 12 or 14, but now that the Big Ten has 18 football teams I find all my waking thoughts are about the conference. USC is a punting paradise so far this season, while Illinois is throwing a bunch of touchdown passes.

It’s a late-night (well, more like early-morning) edition of The Final Score podcast after Kaleb Johnson trampled Minnesota in a 31-14 Iowa victory. Tune in for our postgame thoughts.

The difference between the 2023 Hawkeye running game and the 2024 version? Ask Minnesota, which stymied Iowa a year ago and got run over by the Hawkeyes Saturday.

A closer look at Iowa’s 31-14 win over Minnesota Saturday night at Huntington Bank Stadium. This game turned the moment Iowa ran its first play of the second half.

If nothing else, the invalid fair catch signal call against the Hawkeyes in last year’s Minnesota-Iowa football game sure sold a lot of T-shirts.

The WNBA playoffs are set. Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever face two games at Connecticut in best-of-3 series that starts Sunday.