BIG TEN NETWORK FLOODING IOWA FOOTBALL GAMES WITH POLITICAL ADS IN 2015

Just a nightmare of a lede from Scott Dochterman over at The Gazette on Tuesday:

Political campaigns trying to gain traction among Iowa voters have soaked up most of Big Ten Network's advertising inventory for Iowa football games this fall.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has purchased a significant amount of time for Iowa football games, and Republican candidates and their Super PACs have followed suit, said Jim Reeder, BTN's vice president of advertising sales.

We have few rules on BHGP, but one to which we cling fiercely is NO POLITICS, so the fact that we're about to get bombarded with politics a full year ahead of the presidential election is just about the worst possible news—and that goes for either party's media buys.

Football is supposed to be our escape from the real world, not the real world's avenue into our private lives. I mean my goodness, if we really wanted to spend our Saturday afternoons inundated with hokey, jingoistic imagery interspersed with pointless, intractable fights over minutiae, callbacks to an essentially fictional vision of America of the 1950s and millions of dollars thrown into zero-sum games...

...okay, point taken.

But for real, can we preemptively impose a moratorium now on discussing political ads during gamethreads? I know making fun of advertisements is the nicest, easiest way to kill the time between timeouts, but let's all acknowledge both political sides are going to make dumb, irrelevant, disingenuous points in their ad buys and people loyal to those sides aren't going to want to hear that these points are dumb, irrelevant and disingenuous. No good comes from picking those guns up, I promise you. So let's not.

Not while there's a football program that everybody in the building can gripe about.