Hlog Digest: Hawkeye draftees, ISU import

After a vacation to nowhere, the Hlog has returned.

I will, depending on how well-read they are, have morning roundups of interesting stories and videos I come across that you may have missed, and will add some commentary to them. This will be called the Hlog Digest, only because I know that won't infringe on anyone's copyright.

Let's start with the NFL draft.

Iowa had its 20th, 21st and 22nd NFL draftees of this decade in third-rounders C.J. Fiedorowicz and Christian Kirksey and fourth-rounder Anthony Hitchens.

Here's a feel-good story from ChicagoFootball.com on Fiedorowicz's draft-watching party at a hometown bowling alley.

For the less than feel-good from a Hawkeyes point-of-view, Eric Edholm of Yahoo Sports ranks each team's draft and lists his picks for the best and worst draft choices of each club. The three aforementioned Iowa players are Edholm's picks as the worst selections of Houston, Cleveland and Dallas, respectively.

If that's the kind of thing that irks you, go back and look at the NFL drafts of three, five, 10 years ago and see what people said immediately about them after they were over. It's throwing darts and flipping coins, in the NFL war rooms and in the punditocracy.

Here's the main reason I think Fiedorowicz, for one, will play well in the The League: Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz says he will.

Ferentz, as you may have gathered over the last 15 years, doesn't spend much time going out on limbs or using hyperbole.

Iowa's track record for mid-draft picks is pretty good, I think, but not great. You could probably say that about every program that sends three or four players per year to the NFL.

I kept waiting for the Green Bay Packers to snap up a Hawkeye given how well they've done with mid-round players from Iowa the previous two years (Mike Daniels, 4th-round, 2012; Micah Hyde, 5th-round, 2013).

There's no barometer to gauge how well the three drafted Hawkeyes will do in the NFL. All it takes is one injury to stall a career. All it takes is one injury to someone else to open a big opportunity.

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Trivia question: Who was the only Iowan picked in this year's NFL draft?

Answer: South Dakota linebacker Tyler Starr of Little Rock, with the next-to-last pick in the entire draft, by the Atlanta Falcons.

Former Drake sports information director Mike Mahon let me in on that nugget.

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There was much teeth-gnashing here in the Midwest about the Big Ten's announcement it was holding its 2017 men's basketball tournament in Washington, D.C.

I certainly don't care for it, simply because I'd prefer to drive to Chicago or Indianapolis than fly to D.C. But that's kind of selfish, isn't it?

It makes sense why the league is doing it given its commitment to going east, and yet, ick. The Big Ten isn't Washington. It isn't New York. It isn't Maryland and Rutgers no matter how much it says it's reinventing itself.

That genie is out of the bottle, though. Tom Shatel of the Omaha World-Herald had this terrific column Sunday looking at what the league's eastward migration means for Big Ten football, and what it means for Nebraska in specific.

Can you feel like a dupe even when you're taking all that Big Ten Network money? Maybe.

Nebraska was upset when it started playing Oklahoma just twice of every four years once the Big 12 was formed. But Ohio State and Michigan will almost be total strangers to the Huskers (and Iowa, and the Big 12 West).

You take that BTN lucre, and you surrender something in exchange. A lot of things, really.

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Sunday's news that Iowa State will sign a 7-foot-1, 17-year-old lefthander from Greece named Giorgos Tsalmpouris was just one more move in Fred Hoiberg's quest for college basketball dominance, or something resembling it.

Oregon State transfer Hallice Cooke visited ISU not long ago. Cooke is a point guard with three seasons left,

Cooke averaged 26 minutes and 8.2 points as a freshman point guard, and oh yeah, was 41-of-90 from 3-point range.

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And Now for Something Completely Different ... 'A Beautiful Corpse. An Oral History of the Fast Life and Quick Death of the XFL.”