Big Time. I'm On My Way. I'm Making It. In an outside programming note, Oops Pow Surprise sits down with bigtennetwork.com to discuss the BHGP. It's about 60% true, 25% fiction, and 15% abject bullshit. You should read it, and you should be listening to Peter Gabriel while you do that. My favorite part is the completely true story of the origin of our stupid name:
How did you come up with the name for your blog?
Actually, we were just stone cold out of ideas. We had been called The Hawkeye Compulsion back when we were with Blogger. When we signed a contract with SBN, one of the stipulations was you couldn't use nicknames, like Hawkeyes. We spent like five days talking about it and couldn't really think of anything when one of our guys was like what about Black Heart Gold Pants? We were like, actually that sounds pretty terrible, let's do something else. But he was working the closest with SBN and said we were going with it.
Thanks, Jebus! There's also JoePa, the Joe Tiller cream cheese fetish, OPS claiming to regularly read a blog that changed its URL five months ago (sorry about that, Toki), and a cheap shot at our journalistic skills by the BTN (I got your breaking news right here!) (/gestures at crotch) (/loves parentheticals). Seriously, why aren't you reading it? Go read it.
Creepiness, Now in Chart Form! It used to be that blogs named for fight song lyrics were the exclusive property of Ohio State. Then came Michigan State and Northwestern (wait, that's not their fight song?), and now Iowa's gotten in the act. If you want a breakdown of the holes in the depth chart and the current candidates to fill them, take a look at the excellent recruiting breakdown at Fight for Iowa. A couple of points:
- It's especially good to see we have approximately 53 tight ends on the roster; like Forest Evashevski said, you can never have enough tight ends.
- With five (and, let's face it, probably six) offensive linemen coming off the books at the end of the year, it's slightly disconcerting that we have just one commitment. It's more disconcerting that we only have two other possibilities (and that one of them is being Googlestalked in ways we cannot even imagine).
- This sentence: "With the Vandervelde injury and the Calloway suspension, that should help some of the younger guys get meaningful game experience as well." I'm sorry, man, but you're WAY too glass-half-full to be an Iowa fan.
Grappling Is Creepy. Intermat places Iowa's 2009 recruiting class fifth in the nation. Only Minnesota ranked higher in the conference. Cael Sanderson took his rightful place behind Brands, as Penn State finishes sixth primarily on the strength of the coach's All-American sibling. The rest of the Big Ten's big guns came in between ninth and seventeenth. Iowa State is nowhere to be found. In a related story, Jamie Pollard remains inconsolable.
Footnotes. Pat Angerer, A.J. Edds, and Tony Moeaki will attend Big Ten Media Day. Moeaki will walk onstage, rupture his patella tendon, and miss the rest of the season. Morehouse's "Hall of Ferentz" series keeps on rolling. Some of these aren't going to be easy; running back is one, though I can't argue with the rankings. Ohio State moves deck chairs on that Titanic.