Hawkeyes Sports Rewind: Presidential candidates, ethics in sports

It’s the offseason for Iowa’s major sports and while baseball is keeping the lights on, news flow these days is much more ebb and flow. In an effort to keep things fresh, we’re trying something new: a daily recap of the news in Hawkeye sports land. The BHGP staff typically shares things as they come up throughout each day and we debate the validity of a full scale article against the time constraints of the staff writers. That won’t change, but we will be trying to compile those news items we share back and forth into something for the BHGP community to discuss rather than to pop up sporadically on other posts.

Feedback welcome in the comments.

In case you didn’t see:

The Hawkeyes landed North Dakota transfer Filip Rebraca. My takeaway? The optics are good as Iowa got option 1B to Liam Robbins’ 1A when the portal started to heat up. The ability seems to match, as he can fill it up. Stylistically he isn’t necessarily a true center so hopefully there’s more to come.

On the academic side of things:

Iowa’s presidential search is going on, with the fourth candidate, Daniel Clay, having had his public forum earlier today. It seemed like a run of the mill search through the first three, with each of Hari Michele Osofsky, Barbara Wilson, and Wendy Hensel having the typical academic backgrounds and clean records one would expect from a Presidential candidates for an AAU and Power 5 institution. Clay, though...well let’s just say he’s an outlier. From Vanessa Miller:

He signed that letter, among his academic titles, “Interim CEO, International Education Associates, LLC” — although incorporating documents don’t list Clay in any capacity.

Just some casual misleading of titles. I guess that’s okay.

Clay lists several of his business endeavors — including co-founding Malum Terminus, a UI-based startup in 2017 offering software to identify and mitigate risks, and founding “Mizzou K-12 Online,” which has been renamed “Mizzou Academy.”

Miller goes on to describe Mizzou Academy, an endeavor Clay founded as one facing a lawsuit from a Brazilian education firm. Though this happened well after Clay’s involvement, it’s not exactly a win.

The coup de gras, though, is an age discrimination lawsuit his University of Iowa department faces as he forced out one 63-year-old director of UI REACH and replaced her with a younger worker, something he is accused of doing a number of times. Sure, this happens everywhere, but how often do people get caught?

So more to come. You can watch all of their public forums and submit feedback here.

From the department of “this checks out:”

An ethics coalition has been formed by the NCAA regarding basketball and you’re not going to believe who’s on it: one Fran McCaffery. The write-up is titled “Fighting the Good Fight” and describes its motives as “identifying ethical issues,” “providing leadership by ‘walking the walk and talking the talk,’” and “acting as quasi-mentors and resources to other coaches on ethical issues and concerns.”

Good friggin luck.

Listen, I love the way Fran operates as much as anyone but fighting the good fight really only matters if there’s a critical mass fighting “good” alongside you. Sadly, they’re not.

Some football rules changed:

Spit takes

• Probably some adjustment for Iowa with the padded practices.
• OT rules feels like a miss and, conspiratorially, a way to limit the over from hitting
• We should emphasize taunting and uniform violations because those are fun
• Refs are going to mess up the fake injuries thing