Today we start our lunch links not with Iowa sports news, but with something much more near and dear to our hearts: the Hamburg Inn.
If you haven’t heard, the Iowa City breakfast staple is going global. Instead of opening up a new joint in, say, Cedar Rapids and Muscatine as it builds slowly towards expansion, the pie shake purveyor is opening 30 locations seemingly at once, with stops reaching from Moline to Shanghai:
“The first group will be in the state of Iowa. I’m looking for a minimum of 30; we have to hire 10 or more [employees per restaurant],” Lee said. “We need to hire 600 full-time jobs in the state of Iowa. That will help the state of Iowa, that will help the University of Iowa, and that will help the international investors like in China. I call it the ‘win-win’ creation for everybody.”
The restaurant will undergo a name change overseas to ... “American President’s Diner,” which is ... an interesting marketing decision.
OK.
On to sports
For those of you who have asked, Iowa’s spring is April 21. The time is still TBD, but it’s a Friday night so you can wager around 7pm.
Chad Leistikow had a column yesterday that may put to rest some worries we have about an offense under Brian Ferentz:
No joke, here’s the first offensive play I saw around 7:50 a.m.: Quarterback Nathan Stanley fakes a handoff to Toks Akinribade and gives the football to wide receiver Nick Easley for an end-around.
Obviously there’s a lot of caveats in there, but still. End-arounds!
Rounding out some spring practice coverage we have Marc Morehouse, who offers that Matt Nelson is currently in a walking boot and Nathan Bazata isn’t participating in practice. He stresses that there’s five months until football, though.
The injuries right now are opening the door for Cedrick Lattimore at defensive tackle:
The 6-5, 295-pounder played as a true freshman last season. He didn’t play a lot, seeing just 86 snaps, but was in the action, getting that feel for the speed of the game first-year players talk about. This year, Lattimore is expected to be a starter. He’s actually kind of written in Sharpie on the depth chart. What’s ahead for him is maybe 600 more snaps (for comparison former Iowa DT Jaleel Johnson played 668).
- You may have heard Jarrod Uthoff scored his first NBA points yesterday.
Welcome to the NBA, @Mr_Uthoff! #MFFL pic.twitter.com/c7sf23QLBe
— Dallas Mavericks (@dallasmavs) March 30, 2017
- We cover the details of his new contract with the Mavs here.
- Our dear colleague Jonah Parker also had a nice basketball recruiting roundup this morning.
- Former Iowa offensive lineman Ben Sobieski now runs an embroidery business in Minnesota.
- An oral history of Wrestlemania III
- Ichiro Suzuki sees no point in life after baseball.
And finally, on to some more somber news: former Big Ten commissioner and Iowa grad Wayne Duke passed away last night. He was 88.
John Bohenkamp has a very nice obituary on Duke. Highly recommend.
Go forth.