I’m going to bury the lede (photo) and start with some Iowa Hawkeye sports updates, because you’re on an Iowa Hawkeye sports web log.

In Season

• The baseball team played a barn-burner against The Ohio State University in the matchup of the “‘eyes” on a Mother’s Day. The very long walk off homer led to a 2-1 series win and this fantastic headline.

Nicely done.

The team is a mortal, but not mathematical, lock for the conference tournament and still has a chance to win the regular season. That’d be cool.

• The track team finished fifth and seventh at the Big Ten Championships in the men’s and women’s competition, respectively. Aaron Mallett’s wind-aided 110m high hurdle win would have been the fastest time in the nation. On to Regionals.
• The softball team lost to Wisconsin in their conference tournament. Their season ended with a 19-32 record and they went 9-14 in conference.

Offseason

• Fran McCaffery spoke with The Gazette and offered some perspective on who will fill in the hole left behind by Peter Jok’s departing 20 points per game (I’m rounding up). He also spoke about the importance of the Europe trip, including on-boarding incoming freshmen. Connor may not be a part of that group, he’ll be with the baseball team. Hmmmm.
• Mark Perry will be joining the Hawkeye Wrestling Club staff, after stints with Illinois, Penn State, and Cal Poly. This is very good news as they wrestle side-by-side the college team.
• Land of Ten has been churning out great work catching up with the incoming freshmen before they are hidden away in the House that Doyle built for their seasoning. My favorite is Djimon Colbert, who wants to be Bob Sanders. I would take a 6’1” Bob Sanders.
• All Hawkeye sports cleared the 930 APR hurdle “signaling academic progress,” per HawkeyeSports. Four sports achieved a perfect 1000.
• A couple Hawks will be plying their trade at different institutions next year:

• While Kirk Ferentz had this to say about Jerminic Smith:

Ouch.

• While Kirk’s quote isn’t a stunner, this is:

The Gazette had a nice little writeup on what made this happen.

All Season

And now, the good stuff. Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell are now on the market. They broke up after meeting on The Bachelor’s 2016 varietal and going through another season of reality television titled: Happily Ever After? I guess not.

Ben, you will recall, told two women he loved them on a fateful trip in Jamaica. The other was Jojo Fletcher. She is with Jordan Rodgers, who can’t throw a football all that well (still better than me) but can magically coif his hair. They met on The Bachelorette. Shocker, I know.

Since everyone from Jojo’s season was a dud, the producers chose Bachelor retread/wannabe celebrity/chronic mumbler Nick Viall for this most recent season. He picked Vanessa, despite the fact they seem to hate each other. I think he is only doing so well on Dancing with the Stars to avoid her presence, which isn’t going so well.

Now, we’ve got Rachel, who finished 3rd in Nick’s season as the new Bachelorette. It will be fantastic. But will she find love? Probably not. There’s a pretty high failure rate with this show. Stay tuned for coverage.