Audacity of Hope 2009

Turkeys at ISU, 12 EDT. I've got a good feeling about this one (pdf).

The game is being broadcast in Syracuse on the Madison Square Garden Plus channel, of all places.

UPDATE: We scored. In the 1990s, that was considered victory. Just sayin'.

We're Number Four!

Maxim Magazine picks Syracuse as worst football team in the BCS

Iowa State fans everywhere rejoice, as for once, it's not us.

I have been remiss.

I was so otherwise occupied this week I didn't notice the Iowa State women made the Sweet Sixteen. Excellent. :)

Note to self: Next year pay more attention.

That didn't take long...

AMES, Iowa – Paul Rhoads, a highly successful and charismatic defensive coordinator at both Pitt and Auburn and a former Cyclone assistant coach, is returning home to become head football coach at Iowa State University.

At least this one isn't gonna blow out of town on the first plane to the SEC after lying about his intentions--his parents still live in central Iowa. Heh.

It's going to be a long, cold winter.

OK, losing at the last second to Drake (...Cyclones have beat Drake once this century) I could let go with no comment, but this, this is just pathetic.

I blame Ashton Kutcher.

For those of you who follow Milwaukee natives in their college careers (or is that jus a small-town thing?), Diante Garrett had 16 points.

...and this is just weird. Why would an SEC school want a coach who can't win in the Big 12?

Alright. AD Jamie Pollack got to go. The new logo is stupid stupid stupid (What's that I? Indiana? Idaho? Ithaca?), keeping Chizek is stupid, and I'll give McDermott another season, but hiring a coach because he played high school ball in Iowa was stupid. That's too much stupid, even for a school with a long tradition of suck.

Vote Cy!

AMES, Iowa – Cy is calling all Cyclone fans to help him defend his title as the nation’s best mascot. Cy was named the 2007 “Most Dominant Mascot on Earth” and now faces a championship matchup against Thundar of North Dakota State in the final vote to see which mascot will be named the 2008 Capital One National Mascot of the Year. Fans can vote once a day for Cy at www.capitalonebowl.com.

Who needs a stupid bowl game?

Cyclone Nation?

Iowa State has a student-recruitment billboard up at the corner of Capitol Drive and Green Bay/MLK.

I guess that's not as weird as it seemed at first--Messmer High School is on the other side of the overpass, and Rufus King HS is in the area. Lots of potential customers students to enroll for a year to get those diversity numbers up. But it was odd as hell to see any mention of ISU so far east of the Mississippi.

(In ten years, I've met three people in Milwaukee who even knew there was an Iowa State before they met me and my cardinal-and-gold wardrobe--and that was back in 2001 when there was that horrible basketball tragedy.)

Good grief.

When you get ejected from an NCAA game, you're not allowed to play in the next week's game.

Which saves Gene Chizek the trouble of suspending the moron/asshole who tackled the UNLV running back who scored the first touchdown tonight AFTER he had handed the ball back to the officials. *boggle* Yo, Nebraska is thataway. And it's not like ISU needs hundreds of penalty yards to get humiliated. Our new punter seems good though. *sigh*

Maybe he heard there were New England Patriots scouts in attendance.

(Unrelated, the Brewers sent me e-mail telling me I did not win a chance to purchase post-season tickets. I feel strangely unaffected by this news.)

Hope! Change! Yes We Can!

ISU's off to a much better start than last year. Especially the special teams--5 INTs, four in the first half. School record on the 202 return yards.

To quote radio guy John Walters (I still miss Pete Taylor), "it's nice to be on this side of a blowout for a change."

Looks like I'm going to miss the global O-gasm

I'm sure by daybreak there will be a hundred thousand mashups of the chanting on YouTube.

Ames, Ia. – Coach Gene Chizik announced today that Austen Arnaud will be Iowa State’s starting quarterback when the Cyclones open the season Thursday against South Dakota State.

I was going to pre-emptively denounce myself as a racist until I looked up Arnaud's profile. He's a sophomore, with more successful leadership under his pads than the Obamarama...

Completed five-of-seven passes for 130 yards in win over Kansas State

Sweet.

Semi-related, for the low price of $248, ISU will send me a DVD each Tuesday with the game video, the radio broadcast, and "the weekly Gene Chizik Show." I'm satisfied catching the games on Sirius--but I can see this being a really cool service for rabid ISU fans deployed overseas...hrm...

Unrelated, everytime the TV guy says "Brian Brohm" I hear "Ryan Braun." Football, that's gonna help his intercostal strain.

Even the physics class is just what a girl would like!

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:


a) Neither the Home Ec building nor the Home Ec students changed between 1951 and 2001, even though they started calling it "Family and Consumer Sciences" in the 1990s. They combined with sports psychology/management to form "Human Sciences" around the time my brother graduated. Back off, man, we're scientists.

b) I wonder how women ever got married and had kids without a college degree in home management.

Iowa State commemorates a century of basketball Saturday

Also scheduled to return are eight of the 12 living members of Iowa State's 15-man all-century team - [Gary] Thompson, Jeff Grayer, Fred Hoiberg, Hercle "Poison" Ivy, Zaid Abdul-Aziz, Victor Alexander, Kelvin Cato and Jake Sullivan.

The man who reinvented Iowa State basketball, coach Johnny Orr, will also be back.

I love Johnny Orr. The REAL Johnny Orr, not this poseur.

Key Iowa State Basketball Moments.

I remember that Big 8 title game like it was yesterday (in your face LaFrentz, you traitor!), but I don't remember the 2000 Big XII title game, probably because it was on ESPN and I didn't have cable. I do remember the quilts I was working on during that winter and the Big XII tournament--all the other games were on local TV. (Barry Stevens is fuzzy, probably because that's the week I got a little brother.)

The ISU women were also back-to-back conference champions in 2000 and 2001 (I saw a lot of their games with my aunt and uncle). I will never throw out that T-shirt.


Anyway, if the trends hold, ISU basketball will stop sucking around 2013 or 2026.