116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Troy vs. Iowa game has over a million reasons to exist, and each involves commerce
Trojans-Hawkeyes game may lack cosmic meaning, but this game is being played in America, not an extraterrestrial vastness
Sep. 13, 2024 11:02 pm
Troy-Iowa doesn’t do anything for me, either, but at least we know it’s a nonconference game.
Baylor played at Utah last Saturday. I thought I was a smart guy for somehow knowing Utah is now in the Big 12. The Utes won, so for most of this week I thought they were 1-0 in the conference and Baylor was 0-1.
Wrong again. Four days later, I learned it was a nonconference game because it had been scheduled before Utah was invited into the league. In fact, the game was booked in 2015.
Troy is in the Sun Belt Conference, one of the few honestly named leagues in major-college sports. The Big Ten has 18 teams, the Big 12 has 16, the Southeastern Conference is in Missouri and Oklahoma, and the Atlantic Coast has two teams in California.
Those things are all true, crazy as it seems.
It’s still an adjustment period for we who follow this stuff, trying to keep track of who are in which league. I’d say we’ll figure it out by season’s end, but that may be optimistic.
Arizona played Kansas State Friday night in a meeting of two Big 12 teams. It also was a nonconference game between two teams from the same league. If Iowa is shrewd, it will hurry up and announce its Oct. 5 game at Ohio State is a nonconference contest.
Indiana is at UCLA Saturday night, and it’s a Big Ten game on NBC. My first immediate thought: That’s a new and fresh nonconference matchup. My second thought: No, wait. UCLA is in the Big Ten now.
My third thought: Indiana is playing on a major network in prime-time? Is this some sort of punishment from the FCC?
It’s the first time the Hoosiers will play in the Rose Bowl stadium since they met USC in the Rose Bowl game on Jan. 1, 1968. The Trojans won, 14-3. O.J. Simpson scored the two touchdowns.
USC was then the champ of the Pac-8, which became the Pac-10, Pac-12, the seemingly Packed-Up-and-Gone, and this week, the Pac-Back-From-The-Dead as it has swiped four schools from the Mountain West.
Simpson still is dead, after a rather uneventful post-college life.
Iowa plays at UCLA on Nov. 8. Sure, West Coast Hawkeyes will revel in it and Iowa could have more fans in the Rose Bowl than the Bruins.
It’s a night game, however, and the spectators won’t get to see the sun set over the San Gabriel Mountains at the end of the third quarter like they do at the Rose Bowl game. Which was the only reason for Hawkeye fans to stay that long the last time they were there.
That was on Jan. 1, 2016. Iowa played Stanford, which is now in the ACC. Stanford is 2,616 miles from Atlantic City, N.J., The Pacific coast is about 20 miles from the Stanford campus.
The NFL is reprehensible in countless ways, but It has Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay and Minnesota in the same division because it looked at a map!
Were the NFL a college conference, the NFC North probably would be Minnesota, Rutgers, USC and the University of Amsterdam.
Iowa has a home game scheduled with Northern Illinois in 2029. Stay tuned to find out if the Huskies gain entrance into the Big Ten before then. They’re certainly more of a football force these days than Notre Dame.
The best thing in college football last Saturday, of course, was Northern Illinois’ 16-14 win at Notre Dame. The second-best thing was that Notre Dame paid Northern Illinois $1.4 million to play the game.
NBC will give Notre Dame about $50 million a year to telecast the Irish’s home games from 2026 through 2029. Yet, the network recently fired the house band of “Late Night with Seth Meyers” to save some money, and that band had a lot more rhythm than Notre Dame’s offense.
Troy will receive $1.6 million from Iowa for flying up here for the weekend and absorbing a defeat. Iowa is playing this game that shouldn’t be a fair fight because it can. Troy is playing it because it must.
Absorb all the analysis and predictions for that game that you want, but here are the key points to remember: The tickets are all sold, and the television contracts are all signed.
Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com
Daily Newsletters