Phil Steele has become the E.F. Hutton of college football national gurus. For those of you who don’t remember the company’s world-famous commercials back in the 1980s, E.F. Hutton touted its stock market success and left you with a simple phrase: “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” Well, Phil Steele has that kind of clout, [...]

  If I’m Florida State, I let the Big 12 Conference help me pay a $20 million buyout to the Atlantic Coast Conference and jump leagues. The rocks have already started to melt and the sea has begun to burn. College football’s inevitable evolution toward four superconferences took off when the Pacific-12 added two schools [...]

Big Ten basketball lacks the schedule intrigue of its football counterpart partly because all league schools play one another at least once during the season. But clearly there are basketball rivalries that rise above the rest, and there are questions as to whether they automatically are played twice each year. Purdue and Indiana come to [...]

  Who would you say is the best NFL player among all the ex-Iowa Hawkeyes currently in the league? When I thought about this, the answer that leaped to my mind was Minnesota Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway. He hasn’t missed a game in the last five seasons, and averaged 9.6 tackles per game last season. [...]

  The Big Ten made a Big Deal about releasing its 2015 and 2016 conference football schedules Monday. Well, maybe not a big deal, but it was a press release. I took little interest in it since a) There’s no guarantee I or the world will be here in 2015 and b) who’s to say [...]

The “On Iowa” podcast with Marc Morehouse and Scott Dochterman breaks down the intense debate surrounding college football’s postseason, the current bowl structure and the potential for additional conference realignment with Gazette columnist Mike Hlas. We also answer your Twitter questions. To listen to this podcast, click on the side or below icon or download [...]

  UPDATE:  Clark has signed with Tampa Bay.   A vivid reminder of what tight end Dallas Clark meant to Iowa’s football program was on display the other night on the Big Ten Network. The BTN re-aired the Purdue-Iowa game of 2002, when Clark not only had a Kinnick Stadium-record 95-yard touchdown play on a [...]

  Ten things that have happened since Iowa played Illinois on Nov. 1, 2008: 1) Obama elected — Coincidentally, the renewal (six years after) will be played the Saturday before the next presidential election. 2) The economy crashed — Mainly, the housing bubble burst. Who knew, right? 3) The Chicago Blackhawks won a Stanley Cup [...]

  NEWTON — On Wednesday, we’ll find out if a black man enters NASCAR’s Hall of Fame. The late Wendell Scott won a 1963 NASCAR Grand National (now Sprint Cup) race in Jacksonville, Fla. It remains the only victory by an African-American in stock car racing’s top circuit. Scott raced in NASCAR from 1961 to [...]

The Big Ten’s realignment process produced one key casualty among the league’s football rivalries: Iowa-Wisconsin. The schools had played 72 of 74 years before the Big Ten added Nebraska as its 12th member for the 2011 school year. When the league split into two divisions based not on geography but competitive equality, the Iowa-Wisconsin rivalry [...]