Happy Creepy Day, everyone! Today's Wednesday, February 3, so it's time for the letters of intent to go out and get signed. Re-acquaint yourself with the commits, make your heart-filled glittery Blingees to Marcus Coker and James Morris, and let's get this party started.
We'll be providing some more coverage over the course of the day as it happens--and God help us if anybody's LOI doesn't get faxed back and Iowa's scrambling to fill a scholarship--but for now, this is looking like one of the sturdiest, least drama-filled, most Ferentzian of draft classes.
We'll probably have to wait for sometime this afternoon for the incomparably awesome GoHawks.com to post highlight reels--unembeddable, of course, which grrrr screw you guys--but we do have some amazing footage of C.J. Fiedorowicz as he wait what do you mean you broke the magical charm no do you know what this means NOOOOOOOOOOO
Great. So now our tight end is Greasy Sax Man. Son of a bitch.
More like the NOT Fighting Illini!: Speaking of momentous occasions, the Hawkeyes host the Illini tonight at Carver (even though they probably couldn't fill up the Knapp over in Des Moines). Yes, it's another weekday date; in case you're keeping track, we're 18 days removed from the last weekend game and 25 away from the next. If the logic of spending five straight weekends without a men's game strikes you as ridiculous, well, you're clearly not Gary Barta.
Even though the Illini are 6-3 on the front nine and slapped Iowa around in Shampoo-Banana four weeks ago, this game smells slightly winnable for Iowa. Illinois already has eight losses on the year and came awfully close to losing home games to Iowa's BXI basement compatriots, Penn State and Indiana. RealTimeRPI.com puts this at 72-68 Illinois and KenPom.com says 69-63. Which is to say, n=1 sample size be damned, this game'll probably be competitive for close to 40 minutes. Or so we hope, anyway.
THREE YARD OUT ROUTEZ:
No, Brandon Wegher is not transferring to some I-AA school. This seemed like a silly idea from the get-go, and Wegher's dad utterly erased the rumors to the Argus Leader when asked. Best aspect, though (courtesy the Fan's Shots) had to be the SDSU fans telling themselves Wegher would be a co-#1 at best. Because really, the Missouri Valley is in every way the Big Ten's equal, talent-wise.
We probably had to post this at some point. Probably:
Via the FPs. We had a video put together that excised the 6 uninteresting minutes of this video, but our excessive editing apparently ruined the video/audio sync. We'd post it anyway, but these guys don't deserve to have their work further defiled by bad editing. That's unfair, especially when we can just point to the comments in the FanPost to adequately reflect our readers' derision.
Iowa's actually not the single-least efficient team in the conference! Not even second worst! Listen, people, this is progress (via TOC):
| Pace | PPP | Opp. PPP | EM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michigan St | 64.7 | 1.05 | 0.94 | 0.11 |
| Wisconsin | 58.7 | 1.03 | 0.93 | 0.1 |
| Purdue | 65 | 1.06 | 0.98 | 0.08 |
| Ohio St | 63.7 | 1.05 | 0.97 | 0.08 |
| Michigan | 61.4 | 1.01 | 0.96 | 0.05 |
| Illinois | 66.7 | 1.03 | 0.99 | 0.04 |
| Minnesota | 66 | 1.02 | 1.06 | -0.04 |
| Northwestern | 63.2 | 1.05 | 1.13 | -0.08 |
| Iowa | 63 | 0.92 | 1.02 | -0.1 |
| Indiana | 65.5 | 0.92 | 1.03 | -0.11 |
| Penn St | 61.3 | 0.95 | 1.09 | -0.14 |
Ta-daaa!
And finally, we're thawing some chicken for this as we speak: We don't know what "Chicarrones de Pollos" means--do you mean this?--but if this recipe is half as good as TSW's usually are, you can have one goddamn awesome chicken dish for Super Bowl Sunday.
But for real, we're cooking that exact chicken dish tonight. It's goin' down.