Iowa assistant men’s basketball coach Sherman Dillard tweeted the following Wednesday afternoon: Congrats to our own Devyn Marble and Aaron White for being selected to try out for the 2013 USA Basketball World University Games. So cool! Marble’s reply: Thanks Coach Dillard we’re going to represent to the best of our ability The World University [...]

  OK, the headline was an exaggeration. But the Big Ten bowl lineup is about to get a makeover, starting with the 2014 season. And Mikey likes it. Because it puts all sorts of bowls, and lots of ever-changing possibilities, in play. That’s good for a sportswriter in November. Great, in fact. If you think [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Three years ago, Iowa State offered its fans a popular, familiar face as the new men’s basketball coach, and a blank slate beyond that. How would Fred Hoiberg, who had never coached at any level, be able to swim with the sharks of the Big 12 Conference and the rest of major-college [...]

I’m going to quit complaining about April through August being the Dead Zone when it comes to writing about college sports. There no longer is such a thing. The NFL and college athletics have figured out you can stay in the news every day if you parcel the material out, and if you stage events. [...]

  Last November, it was revealed that Rutgers University would be joining the Big Ten Conference and start competition in the league during the 2014-2015 academic year. The reason for adding Rutgers seemed to be singular, at least realistically. That, of course, is the New York-New Jersey television market. It wasn’t that Rutgers had any [...]

I can’t believe I’m going to publicly disagree with Bob Dylan, and it will never happen again. But his line in “Lay Lady Lay” was wrong. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. As I wrote recently, I’m in the camp for maintaining the Iowa-Iowa State football series when the Big Ten goes [...]

We don’t know how many of the six remaining slots are already filled on Iowa’s 2013-2014 nonconference men’s basketball schedule. For this exercise, let’s assume none. I’m assuming the six slots will all be filled by home games, since five of the seven games we know about are away from Iowa City. And of those [...]

I thought there would be more of an uproar when the University of Illinois recently announced its basketball arena, Assembly Hall, will be renamed State Farm Center. But I guess people have become inured to such things. At least the spaceship-shaped gym on the prairie does have a connection to a farm. The university’s Beef [...]

It may have been mentioned a time or 10,000 that Iowa’s men’s basketball nonconference schedule wasn’t the stuff that dreams are made of last season. Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said the schedule would get better. It couldn’t get much worse. But there is already some teeth in McCaffery’s words. Wednesday’s pending announcement that the Hawkeyes [...]