LUNCH LINKS NEEDS LONGER SLEEVES

Happy Friday, folks. Football is so close we can taste it. In fact, tonight will be the first night of fall practice for the 2018 iteration of the Hawkeyes!

As always, every season is its own unique story. And we’ve had some interesting tidbits of information come out about the 2018 season in the last few weeks of football-less summer, particularly in regards to roster attrition.

Chad Leistikow took a deep dive today into all of the 2017 scholarship players with 2018 eligibility who have departed the program. Now, of course there are varying reasons for these departures, like graduate transfers and medical concerns, but the sheer number of departures (19) seems high this year. Chad’s not alarmed, and you should read his post to find out why. But combining this with all of the recent off-field issues as well does at least give me pause. History tells us summers like these are a rarity for Kirk Ferentz and his program. I guess we’ll have to see what sort of situation this season brings for next year’s offseason.

Along the trend of new beginnings, for all you uniform nerds out there like me, you may have noticed that we had some rare Iowa football uniform needs this week. Mainly, that the jersey number font has changed:

Big day, folks. Big day. Also note that they officially switched the collar from the ugly Flywire collar pictured on the left to the Vapor Untouchable template (Nike’s name for it, not mine) on the right that we saw on last year’s alternate uniforms. These are very small changes but overall I think the jersey looks a lot cleaner now. There is, however, one big uniform change we’ll see on the field in September:

I....don’t love this look! But hey, if this means Nate Stanley is somehow able to emulate the passing finess of Ben Roethlisberger, Aaron Rodgers and Peyton Manning, who are fellow long sleeve jersey-wearers, then I’m a-okay with it.

And now for some quick hitter news and reads for your Friday afternoon.

For the basketball folk:

Mark Emmert wrote a fun piece on Luka Garza’s summer heading into his sophomore season for Hawk Central.

Iowa baseball welcomed Joe Migliaccio to the coaching staff as an assistant coach. The announcement was made yesterday:

Softball made a hire, too:

And now for the NFL crowd (and no, I’m not just going to link to a bunch of pieces about the new tackle rule). Bryan Bulaga is back from his ACL tear and practicing with the Packers.

I wish Bryan nothing but the best, and I hope he didn’t return from injury too soon.

It looks like Jaleel Johnson is poised for some big things in his sophomore season with the Vikings.

And finally, random links from around the web.

This is really frustrating: the Las Vegas Aces were stuck in the airport for 24 hours before a game because WNBA teams fly commercial

The Browns are the Most Interesting 0-16 Team in NFL History

The Ringer’s Irrational No. 1 TV Episodes of the Century

And finally, behold, a very bad take from one of our very own bloggers: