Iowa official: 9-game Big Ten schedule shouldn't impact Cy-Hawk series

IOWA CITY - The Big Ten's flirtation with a nine-game league football slate will impact Iowa's future scheduling plans, but the annual Iowa-Iowa State football game seems safe for now.

"We're  just in the formative stages of this so certainly I've not had any discussion with anybody about it," Mark Abbott, Iowa's associate athletics director for legal affairs, said earlier this week. "We would anticipate our series with Iowa State would continue, so that would be our direction."

The schools' 10-year contract, which was signed May 28, 2008 and lasts through 2017, has an out clause "should either school's conference adds additional conference football games, that school shall be entitled to request that the parties seek to renegotiate the contract terms for the remaining contract years that are affected by the conference scheduling change. Both schools agree to make every effort to work with their respective conferences to try to keep this issue from arising."

The schools' games are played on the second Saturday of September. Of the schools' annual 12 regular-season games, both prefer to host seven for financial reasons. So in a nine-game conference schedule and a school has five road league games, all three non-conference games must be scheduled at home for the school to host seven games.

The now 10-school Big 12 Conference added a ninth conference games entering this fall. Iowa State synced its conference schedule so when it plays host to Iowa, it has five league road games. Mark Rudner, the Big Ten's senior associate commissioner for television administration, said last fall that if the Big Ten expanded to nine conference games, the league office would work with schools to ensure future league schedules sync with non-conference rivalries such as Iowa-Iowa State and Michigan-Notre Dame.

Big Ten officials and school administrators meet next month to discuss the proposed nine-game Big Ten schedule, which could start by 2015. Based on the Iowa-Iowa State contract, the Hawkeyes would need five conference home games in 2015 to accommodate their trip to Ames and maintain a seven-game home schedule.

Abbott said Iowa's athletics department has yet to discuss how a nine-game Big Ten scheduling would impact its non-conference scheduling philosophy. Currently, of its four annual non-conference opponents, Iowa's philosophy is to schedule Iowa State (Big 12 member), another BCS-conference opponent (this year Pittsburgh of the Big East), a mid-major conference opponent (this year Louisiana-Monroe of the Sun Belt) and an opponent usually from the championship subdivision (this year Tennessee Tech).

"Since we aren't dealing with nine-games schedules, we haven't altered the philosophy at this time," Abbott said. " If at some point the conference would make a determination that they would want to go to nine games, we at that time would have to take a look at how to alter that philosophy so that we can continue to have seven home games.

"We haven't really had the discussions to continue how would we do that."

Iowa has three non-conference games scheduled in 2015 - Pittsburgh (Iowa City), North Texas (Iowa City) and at Iowa State. Abbott said the school is continuing to "look at options" regarding future non-conference games, even in 2015.