This may be heresy to some, but I’ve always found Weeks 2 through 12 of a college football season more enjoyable than Week 1.

The opening game meant I was entering the seven months of the year that were my busiest as a sportswriter, the college football-basketball march from September to March. In football season, it meant almost every Saturday was spoken for. So were chunks of Sundays in order to recap the day before and look ahead to the coming week’s game.

I can’t prove it, but I think I missed a lot of invitations to social events because of it. Yeah, that’s the reason.

Fall foliage? I’d have to take your word that it existed unless I was driving to Purdue in October. If you’ve never been to West Lafayette, trust me when I tell you there are reasons Anthony Bourdain never taped a show there.

Another thing I disliked about the start of football season is it marked the unofficial end of summer. That’s no big whoop in California or either Carolina, but summer is way too short in Iowa. So are autumn and spring. Winter, however, seems to last at least nine months and maybe 10 or 11.

In my previous life, I’d sit in the press box at a Week 1 game and mutter in depressed disbelief about football starting up already. Once the game was over and the text was filed, we’d move into Week 2. Labor Day came and went, and the normalcy and structure of the season returned. There’s no such thing as endless summer, anyway.

Regarding the football itself, Week 1 generally is a tedious exercise played out to get the biggest schools home gates and easy wins against smaller programs serving as sacrificial lambs. The college-town vendors of tenderloins, tequila and jacked-up prices for hotel rooms rooms love the Week 1 games. That doesn’t mean they’re usually much to watch, let alone remember.

This week’s schedule is dreadful. There are 91 games involving the 138 FBS (major-college) teams in the coming weekend. How does that math work? Well, 48 of those 91 games have visiting teams from FCS (the next highest-level) schools.

Those include football giants like Duquesne, Mercyhurst and Virginia Military Institute.

Among the FCS teams playing at Big Ten stadiums this week are Eastern Illinois, Hampton and Indiana State. Iowa will host FCS Northern Iowa on Sept. 18. If the Hawkeyes don’t win handily, there will be as much fear and loathing about that in Iowa as is caused by the ceaseless political campaign commercials on television and YouTube.

Does someone’s mind get changed by a 66th viewing of the same commercial? I’ve seen Flo from Progressive at least a thousand times. I’m still not changing insurance companies.

Anyway, Iowa State welcomes Southeast Missouri State on Saturday. The Redhawks of Cape Girardeau have played 27 FBS teams since 2000. They lost every time. Seven of the games were decided by at least 49 points.

SEMO was 4-8 last season, with defeats to Gardner-Webb, Tennessee Tech and Lindenwood.

That is sport? If you say so.

Only one of the 91 games matches two teams in the preseason Top 25, Louisville-Ole Miss on Sunday night. Meanwhile, No. 3 Georgia faces FCS Tennessee State. No. 1 Ohio State plays an FBS team in Ball State, which is 186th in the Sagarin Ratings, below 48 FCS teams. You’d think a school named after a Ball would have better football.

Iowa’s opponent in Week 1 is a curious case. Northern Illinois has a pile of wins over teams from Power 4 conferences in this millennium, including a 2013 victory at Iowa. The Huskies posted the national upset of the year in 2024 when they stunned Notre Dame in South Bend. They also won at Nebraska in 2017, at Northwestern in 2014, and at Purdue in 2013.

But they went 3-9 last year and left the sensibly named Mid-American Conference for a football-only spot in the Mountain West Conference. Which is headquartered in Las Vegas and has members in California, Texas and Hawaii.

The MAC, which consists primarily of schools in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, promptly found a replacement in Sacramento State. Yes, it’s the Sacramento in California. The logical question:

Did Rand McNally go out of business and forget to tell us?

Well, the 2026 season is coming at us and will have a tough time topping last season.

It was almost too good to be true eight months ago when Indiana completed its two-year rise from football hopelessness to national-champion. That blew the minds of all the old-money programs and their fans. It made them question what they’re doing or not doing, made them wonder if the new wild world of NIL and the transfer portal had dashed past them.

When football heavyweights like Clemson, Penn State, LSU and Florida all sputtered last season while Indiana was on its way to bathing in confetti, college football had some goodness.

Then you take a look at Indiana’s first three games this season and see it’s at home against North Texas, Howard and Western Kentucky. So it isn’t like Muhammad Ali following up his win over Joe Frazier in 1974 by fighting George Foreman.

Here’s a good way to get on Indiana’s track: Virginia’s starting offensive line has a fifth-year left tackle, two sixth-year guards, a seventh-year center and a seventh-year right tackle. The Cavaliers started three other fifth-year players on offense, including quarterback Beau Pribula, formerly of Penn State and Missouri. That’s 31 years!

Meanwhile, the average age of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins starting offensive linemen is 24.4.

Virginia punter Dan Sparks is in his seventh season of college ball. The Cavaliers have five sixth-year players, six seventh-year guys, and defensive back Ja’Maric Morris is in his eighth season after stops at Georgia Military College, Hutchinson Community College, UCF and Georgia State. He earned a college degree over two years ago.

Virginia rushed for 258 yards in its 34-8 season-opening win over ACC rival North Carolina State Saturday. Maybe the graybeard Cavaliers are this year’s Indiana.

N.C. State’s next game is at home against FCS Richmond, so that should be medicine for its sagging spirits. Richmond lost last season to Bucknell, Holy Cross, Lehigh and Lafayette. Presumably, none had a total of 31 years of college experience in their starting offensive lines.

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The major-college football season starts Saturday in eight cities, from in Los Angeles and Fargo, in Las Vegas and Ypsilanti. And in Dublin. Yes, the one in Ireland. That’s where historical Irish favorites North Carolina and TCU will clash.

Everybody else gets started next week, including the classic matchups of Northern Illinois-Iowa and Southeast Missouri State-Iowa State.

I have a pressing question about the season that’s upon us. Namely, if Iowa Hawkeyes fans are drinking Busch Light or Grey Goose vodka, are they openly defying the team they love?

See, in June we got the unveiling of TIGERHAWK, a premium lager from Iowa City’s own Big Grove Brewery. A portion of the proceeds from every pour, can, and case sold go toward Hawkeye athletics.

“We wanted to create a beer that Iowans are proud to hold—not just because it looks amazing and tastes great, but because every sip helps the Hawks win,” said Big Grove CEO Matt Swift. “This is about fueling the next generation of Iowa legends.”

It’s fun to pretend. Or maybe Swift is right. Iowa might have stopped Michigan State a few inches from the goal line and hung on to win the 2015 Big Ten championship game if it had the proper beer as the wind beneath its wings.

This month, Cedar Ridge Distillery introduced 1847 Bourbon and 1847 Vodka, "celebrating Hawkeye pride and tradition.” 1847 is the year the University of Iowa was founded.

According to the UI, the collaboration between the Swisher-based distillery and Hawkeye Sports Properties “marks the first official bourbon and vodka partnership in Iowa Athletics history.” My research indicates that is true. In fact, construction of Kinnick Stadium was completed in 1929, four years before the end of Prohibition.

Alcohol sales were once taboo at collegiate athletic events. Now, beer for sale is as much a part of the campus stadium scene as marching bands, mascots and ejections of fans for underage-drinking and public intoxication.

Two years ago, Big Grove was named the Official Craft Brewery of the Iowa Hawkeyes. So if Iowa fans aren’t guzzling a TIGERHAWK, just what kind of fans are they?

Booze sponsorships for athletic department bucks isn’t just an Iowa thing, of course. Two years ago, Arkansas made GoatLab Brewery its Official Craft Brewery partner.

“We are confident our family’s dedication to the program and our commitment to excellence in brewing will set a new craft beer standard and energize the entire Razorback community,” GoatLab owner Bill Adams said at the time.

Arkansas was 0-8 in SEC football last season. Head coach Sam Pittman was dismissed during the season. You know the old saying in sports: You can’t fire the official craft brewery, so you fire the coach.

Tyson Foods is the Official Protein of Arkansas Razorbacks athletics. You may identify Tyson strictly with chicken, but the company owns Jimmy Dean sausage, too. Protein, protein, protein!

Tyson’s world headquarters are in Arkansas. This month, Tyson closed facilities in Illinois and Utah, laying off more than 3,000 workers. Its beef operations have hit hard times. The company cited “one of the most historic cattle shortages the country has ever experienced.”

Back to booze. The University of Texas recently announced Verdadero Tequila as the Official Tequila Sponsor of the Texas Longhorns.

"We are so excited to have Austin-based Verdadero join our ongoing initiatives to create the best fan experiences in college sports, on game days and beyond," said Drew Martin, executive senior associate athletics director for external affairs for Texas Athletics. "We look forward to integrating their premium products into our venues and events for Longhorn Nation to enjoy."

Longhorn fans, remember to drink a shot of Verdadero each time the Horns score against Texas State in their Sept. 5 season-opener in Austin. You may black out by halftime, but you’re doing it to support your team.

A beer sponsorship came to Texas long ago. In 2017, Corona came to UT athletics as a partner. “Horns up, limes in” was the new advertising slogan. I’m not making that up.

I’ve always enjoyed the Official Such-and-Suches of the University of Whichway Whozits. There are some dandies across the land. For instance …

• Last month, Ohio State announced Chase would be the Official Bank of the Buckeyes. Of course. mighty, mighty Ohio State wouldn’t associate with any bank that didn’t have at least $4 trillion in total assets. It would never hook up with a friendly neighborhood financial institution like Buckeye State Bank.

• Have you or one of your offspring ever thought about enrolling at a Big Ten university but thought “Wait a minute! I’m not doing this until I know the. Official Smoked Sausage and Deli Meat partner of the conference.” Well, it’s Eckrich, which says it is celebrating the traditions, rivalries and moments that define the Big Ten fan experience under the creative platform “A House United.”

• If an athletic department isn’t going to have an official steakhouse, how are the fans to know where to get a slab of American beef? (Or Argentinian beef. As mentioned earlier, these are troubling beef times in the U.S.) Rutgers is aware, thus Steakhouse 85 in New Brunswick is the Official Steakhouse of Rutgers Athletics.

• Fresno State and the Wonderful Company are in business together. The school that has former Iowa offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz as its offensive line coach and ex-Hawkeye quarterback Spencer Petras as an assistant to Ferentz will showcase Wonderful Pistachios and Wonderful Halos mandarins. The school’s 18 sports teams will wear patches on their uniforms featuring a Wonderful brand.

• University of Kansas athletics is in cahoots with Ripple, the leading provider of blockchain-based enterprise solutions across traditional and digital finance. An XRP cryptocurrency patch will be worn on all Jayhawks uniforms.

  “Having the XRP logo displayed on our Jayhawk uniforms reflects a shared commitment to innovation and excellence,” said KU Athletic Director Travis Goff.

  "Our football program is excited to proudly display the XRP logo on our jerseys,” Kansas football coach Lance Leipold said. One wonders how Kansas athletes would feel about getting their NIL payments in crypto rather than cash.

I know what you’re asking right about now. Who is the Official Cleaning and Restoration Sponsor of University of Maryland athletics? Here’s your answer:

• Us, too, says Penn State.

• The University of West Florida Argonauts of Pensacola are transitioning from NCAA Division II to FCS. That takes money, so West Florida has partnered with Short’s Travel Management as its official travel management partner.

• Short’s was founded in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1946, and remains headuartered there. It coordinates travel for over 1,600 college teams and managed over 3 million miles of travel last year.

• I mentioned that because Mike Hlas — Out of Bounds could use an official sponsor as well as a travel coordinator. Hey Short’s, I’m just right down I-380 from you. I can give you as much bang for your buck as the West Florida Argonauts, so email me at mikehlas1@gmail.com. Oh, the places we’ll go!

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I don’t much care for billionaires.

Is it envy? No, I really don’t think so. I couldn’t handle having a private jet. My carbon footprint is more like someone who tracks dirt into his house.

I sure don’t want a $75 million mansion combining timeless European-inspired architecture with resort-style luxury. Some folks aren’t cut out for fru-fru. Besides, how am I going to reel in a spider who is crawling on a soaring double-height ceiling?

I’ve gotten by without a private helipad all these years. Who wants to add clutter?

Landscaped gardens? Don’t need them. Fabulous fountains? Don’t want them. Yacht-mooring facilities down at the marina in my heavily guarded rich man’s fortress? I sure don’t want to suffer the same fate as Gilligan, Skipper, and the other five castaways.of the S.S. Minnow if I hire someone to take me out on a 3-hour tour.

So, no, it’s not envy for Richie Rich. It’s disgust.

As I’ve stated here before, I don’t think there should be billionaires. You get up to a net worth of $500 million, you’re pretty much set up for life. If you have another half-billion in your checking account, go change thousands of lives for the better. You’ll still have all the things you need and all toys you could want, and maybe one of the people you pull out of poverty will go on to create a disease-curing vaccine that will be rejected by those who think whooping cough is no big whoop.

Pro sports is infested with billionaires who are, uh, interesting. I’m talking owners. Like Stan Kroenke, who moved his NFL Rams from St. Louis to Los Angeles 10 years ago.

The Rams had left Anaheim for St. Louis in 1995 after St. Louis and the state of Missouri forked out $260 million to build the then-Trans World Dome. The team had to pay a modest rent of about $500,000 a year in its 30-year lease, but a clause in the deal said the team could vacate the lease with a year’s notice if the stadium lost its status as a “first-tier” NFL venue.

When the two sides went to arbitration over what “first-tier” required, an arbitrator sided with the Rams. St. Louis wasn’t willing or able to fork out $700 million for upgrades. Ciao, NFL.

I’m not going to spend space detailing the efforts St. Louis made to keep the team or the lawsuit settlement Missouri native Kroenke made with the city, but let’s just say it was one of the worst public sports-financing episodes in our nation’s history.

Being an NFL owner is a license for rich people to get even wealthier no matter where their franchises are located. Kroenke could have lived the rest of his days just fine with his team in St. Louis. He took it to Inglewood, Calif., where it now plays in $5.5 billion SoFi Stadium.

The Rams are making beaucoup bucks and all is well. Except for Kroenke seeking about $400 million in reimbursement from Inglewood, arguing that the city was obligated to cover certain infrastructure improvements tied to the stadium site and surrounding Hollywood Park development. Inglewood is disputing the claim.

Forbes magazine estimates Kroenke’s net worth at $24.3 billion, putting him among the 125 richest people on the planet. The 79-year-old also owns Arsenal of the Premier League, the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, and Colorado’s franchises in Major League Soccer and the National Lacrosse League.

He likes his sports. He likes his land. He has over 2.7 million acres across the U.S. and Canada. Philanthropy? Not so much. In 2018, Forbes reported Kroenke had donated a total of about $1 million to charity over his lifetime, less than two percent of his net worth at the time.

Cedar Rapids can claim a billionaire of its own, though I’ve yet to see evidence of Mark Walter reinvesting in his hometown or home state.

Walter owns 27 percent of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He led a consortium that bought the team in 2012. The Dodgers have money. Every time they need a superstar player, they buy one. Or even when they don’t need one.

Walter and a partner purchased 27 percent of the Los Angeles Lakers five years ago. Last June, Walter bought majority control of the franchise for $10 billion. Last week, he agreed to sell the Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for $12.5 billion.

Good business, right? A $2.5 billion profit in a year’s time. Really good business, right?

Sure, but is it just coincidence that Kushner is the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner? Is it just coincidence that Walter is under federal investigation for tax fraud? Was Walter just being a good patriot by presenting Trump with an engraved championship ring in July when the Dodgers were feted at the White House for their second-straight World Series title?

If you want to know more about Walter, I strongly suggest you read this recent story at TheRinger.com. And not just because it links to a 2012 feature I wrote about Walter for the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

Mine was a puff piece, by the way. In 2012, all I could tell about Walter is he was a really rich guy living and working in Chicago who stayed quiet and grabbed a really large American Dream. I tried to reach him for an interview, oh yes I did. I made three tries. I even went to the 60-story Franklin Center in Chicago where his Guggenheim Partners is headquartered. I got as far as the security desk, explained who I was and why was there, and was soon headed back out onto the sidewalk.

I wasn’t roughed up, mind you. Still, my feelings were hurt. I couldn’t understand why a guy wouldn’t want to talk to his hometown newspaper. Among the people I did interview who were in his Class of 1978 at Jefferson High School in Cedar Rapids was his prom date. It’s not like I was working on a hit piece.

What has always happened in my sportswriting career is anyone who hasn’t cooperated with me or was less than cordial with me has ended up facing some sort of hard times. Even billionaires. I don’t make the rules, they just exist.

The feds looking into tax fraud? That doesn’t sound good, even if you can get in someone’s good graces by selling the Lakers for the highest valuation in pro sports history.

Monday, a story broke that Walter and fellow billionaires Todd Boehly and Hansjorg Wyss are considering selling their 38.5 percent minority ownership of Chelsea Football Club in West London to majority owner Clearlake Capital. That wouldn’t be a $12.5 billion deal, but it would still involve 10 digits.

When you’re being investigated by the US Department of Justice for over $21 billion in loans that are alleged to not have been disclosed to state insurance regulators, maybe you just want — I don’t know what you want. I wasn’t a business major in college.

Billionaires are not like you and me. You don’t really need a vivid imagination to envision yourself with a million dollars. A brilliant invention, some super-savvy investment moves, a rich grandmother who favored you over the rest of her offspring’s offspring, and you can go get yourself a mansion with a landscaped garden and fabulous fountain.

But a billionaire? That’s someone with a least a million bucks a thousand times over. That’s insane money, and my guess is it requires somewhat-insane people to amass it. The names Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos just floated through my head for some reason.

Would you trust any billionaire to be the commissioner of your fantasy football league? He’ll win the title every year by hook or by crook. If you complain about him being late for waiver claims or making a trade after the deadline, he’ll just buy you out. Or hire someone to do something to you in the shadows that’s far worse.

Nope, I don’t much care for billionaires. I’d add “So sue me,” but one of them would probably do it.

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Barry Piatt on Politics: — Behind the Curtains is one I’ll single out this week. There’s so much other good stuff on a variety of topics.

Luka Garza with a National Player of the Year award when he was winding up his Iowa basketball career (Hawkeyesports.com photo)

How can the kids at Luka Garza’s basketball camps in Fayette Aug. 17 and Indianola Aug. 19 possibly relate to someone making a seven-figure salary who is good enough to play in the NBA?

Quite easily, actually.

Garza’s basketball story is and always has been someone whose achievements have outdistanced expectations for him, and his game plan has always been the same: Put in the work.

In June, Celtics.com named the fifth-year pro the Boston Celtics’ Sixth Man of the Year. In his first season with Boston, Garza averaged career-highs of 8.1 points, 4.1 rebounds, 16.2 minutes, 57.7 percent field goal percentage and 43.3 percent 3-point percentage.

As Celtics.com noted in this story, Garza’s 3-point shooting was the best by any center in the NBA, and his true shooting percentage of 68.2 percent was the second-best clip in NBA history by a center with at least 100 3-point attempts.

That’s pretty good for someone who hadn’t been a regular part of a playing rotation in his first four NBA seasons.

“I know it sounds simple,” Garza said by phone Monday, “but I think a lot of it was, first of all, opportunity. You know, getting out on the floor, getting a chance to play, and especially for the Celtics with the coaching staff that we have, players that we have. Once I was able to get that opportunity and have some time out there, I kind of was able to to figure out the things that work for me on a nightly basis to impact the rotation and to impact winning.”

Those things aren’t all exciting. But they’re winning things, things that get you playing time for a winning franchise that went 56-26 last season.

“For me, it was the little things” Garza said. “Screening, getting guys open, crashing the glass offensively, getting offensive rebounds, and being able to stretch the floor and make good decisions when the ball does get to me.

“At first, it was hard. Like I hadn’t figured out quite what works for me. I think just going through the middle stretch this season when I was starting to get a lot of time, that’s kind of when it all clicked for me. I realized ‘OK, there’s a couple things I can do every single night that’s going to help the team.’ So I try to just go out there every single night and do those things.”

Garza’s journey to becoming Everybody’s All-America for his last two seasons at Iowa wasn’t common, nor was his path to getting a 2-year, $5.26 million contract with the Celtics a year ago. He can tell the kids in Fayette and Indianola that he wasn’t born with a basketball silver spoon in his mouth and has battled every step of the way to Boston.

“I think it might be harder to relate to me now,” said Garza, “but it’s not hard to relate to the guy who averaged four points a game as a freshman in high school, who didn’t really know what his future was in basketball, and just continued to work at it, chase it, and believe in himself, and then was able to see results and success from that.”

They are words supported by accomplishments. Garza wasn’t a Top 100 high school recruit coming out of high school in Washington, D.C., but did get a scholarship offer from the Big Ten’s Iowa, courtesy of Fran McCaffery. He contributed immediately, but made a huge leap from his sophomore to junior seasons, going from 13.1 to 23.9 points per game.

As a senior, Garza averaged 24.1 points for an Iowa team that he led to a 14-6 Big Ten record, the program’s best conference mark since 1986-87. And oh yeah, he was the consensus National Player of the Year.

Then it was time to start over. Most National Player of the Year honorees like the last two, Cooper Flagg and Cameron Boozer, become very high NBA draft picks. Garza went 52nd in the 2021 draft, by the Detroit Pistons. He spent time in the NBA G League his first two seasons. He played in 32 games for Detroit in his rookie season, and no more than 39 in any of three seasons at Minnesota.

A free agent after the 2024-25 season, Boston signed Garza. Not everyone in Celtics fandom was wowed by the transaction. But as the season went along, he began winning over fans and his team, and scored a career-high 27 points in the team’s final regular-season game. He played in all seven games of Boston’s first-round playoff series loss to Philadelphia.

All that gives Garza the credibility to offer a message to his grade school, middle school and high school campers about tackling challenges with desire.

“For me,” he said, “the main (message) is to find what you’re passionate about in life, and then commit to giving that everything you have every single day. And when you do that consistently, and you continue to chase and attack it, it will always lead you in a positive direction.

“I’ve seen that come true in my life, and I’ve seen that come true in the lives of a lot of people around me.

“It’s been a process of continuing to work and just have faith that even if the opportunity’s not right here, right now, that it will come. And when it does come, be ready physically and mentally to take advantage of it.”

Garza was talking to me Monday from Los Angeles, where he has been for weeks. Why? To hone his game before his camps in Iowa and then playing a pair of World Cup qualifying games for Bosnia and Herzegovina later this month.

“I’m headed right now to UCLA to go play pickup with some of the best players in the world. That environment, constantly being around that level of guys, is only going to help me improve.”

And, it seems safe to say, he will.

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I don’t have an addictive personality, which is luckier than hitting a 12-team football parlay.

When I make sports bets — which I do, and legally — they are the definition of small potatoes. It’s for fun, and nothing more. I’m way more scared of losing money than I am excited about the prospect of winning. That’s not some great touting of my thought process. It is, as I said, lucky. Quite lucky.

Not everyone is so fortunate, and I’m not sure how sports-betting junkies can avoid crashing and burning in 2026. It was enough that legalized online sports betting had become a staple in most of America, not all that long after the only place you could make legal sports wagers was Nevada.

New York state has filed a lawsuit against prediction platform Kalshi, alleging the company ran an illegal gambling operation by targeting users between the ages of 18 and 20 — an age group too young for legal mobile sports betting in the state.

These things called predictive markets are new and addictive. Polymarket is the largest. Kalshi has quite a foothold in the sports world.

New York has sued prediction market Kalshi, calling it an “illegal gambling operation” in the state.

The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, alleges the prediction market exposed New Yorkers, including those under 21, to gambling addiction without adequate safeguards.

About 40 states are cool with it as it is, including Iowa. New York? Not so much. It alleges the company has targeted users between 18 and 20, people who can’t even legally use mobile sports betting sites in the state.

You can see how that might perceived as a problem. Perhaps a horrendous one.

At last month’s annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Chicago, Iowa State Sen. Dan Dawson told the audience that a group of students at his son’s high school used Kalshi to bet on World Cup matches. Iowa’s legal age for online sports betting is 21.

Kalshi quickly became mainstream, sports fans. It had advertisements in World Cup stadiums. It has made commercials featuring actor Timothee Chalamet.

Last month, President Trump’s teleprompter operator was alleged to have made nearly $100,000 on Kalshi. He is suspected of using his access to Trump’s prepared remarks to bet on Kalshi’s “mention markets,” where users can wager on things like what Trump will or won’t say during public events.

Among its list of words and phrases Trump might say this week, as of noon (CT) Monday, the site had “stupid question” at 41 percent yes, “windmill” at 58 percent, and “landslide” at 80 percent.

Kalshi suspended a Minnesota state senator from using its site after he bet on his own election.

The site’s sports betting isn’t traditional, with point-spreads. Some of it is betting on future results like league championships. But it’s largely what is called “moneyline” in sports books. When I wrote this Monday, the Golden State Valkyries of the WNBA were 87 percent yes to defeat the Toronto Tempo Tuesday night. Ten dollars would win you $11.10, while $10 on Toronto to win would net you $78.40.

On Monday (all of the following percentages were as of Monday), the Indiana Fever were at 11 percent to win the WNBA title. Ten bucks wagered would win you $85.57 if the Fever get past Minnesota (46 percent), Las Vegas (17 percent) and everyone else in the league.

A $10 bet on Iowa to win the 2026-27 NCAA men’s basketball championships would bring you $1,038 if the Hawkeyes pull it off. With Iowa State, it’s $1,334. Both are 1 percent or under to get that little job done.

Sports is a major part of Kalshi, but there’s so much more. You could bet on words that would be said during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism titled "Hearings To Examine Data And Profit, Focusing On The Consumer Cost Of AI Surveillance Pricing,"

If someone utters the term “data center,” the 48 percent who bet yes on it will cash.

Politics is huge on Kalshi. There are hundreds of wagers offered, including Senate, Congress, gubernatorial and even some mayoral elections around the U.S., and in others around the world.

Kalshi bettors have made Rob Sand a 64 percent favorite to become governor in November. A $10 bet on him would return $15.24 if he wins. Because people have bet the way they have, Ashley Hinson was at 59 percent to win a U.S. Senate seat over Josh Turek, though Turek held a lead of a few percentage points in an average of polls taken on the matter.

If you think this is really niche betting, know that over $1 million has been wagered at Kalshi on that Senate race, and the election is still three months away. In the betting for the closest Senate race in the nation, Iowa is at 13 percent. Those who use gambling jargon might call that good value given what the polls say about that race.

Kalshi offers bets on climate. Monday, the majority of the money on the highest temperature in Chicago was on 82 to 83 degrees. That’s a bet you could literally sweat out.

You can bet on the average price of a Starbucks grande Strawberry Acai Refresher in the month of August. The price being at least $5.09 has gotten 53 percent of its bets in the affirmative. Go up just four cents more, and it’s 6 percent.

Gas prices, jobs reports, the average price of a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich in August, the winner of Season 28 of Big Brother, and on and on. They’re all gamble-able.

If you want a real long shot, put some coin on Elon Musk to win a Nobel Peace Prize this year. It’s roughly the equivalent to betting on the Colorado Rockies (45-68 through Monday) to win this year’s World Series.

Kalshi claims this stuff isn’t gambling, but rather, a regulated derivatives exchange with the same federal framework that governs wheat futures and oil contracts. A Minnesota law would make it a felony for businesses to create, operate or intentionally support covered prediction markets, but last week a U.S. District Judge granted a preliminary injunction.

I remember my first trip to Las Vegas and thinking how amazingly great it was to walk up to a clerk in a casino sports book and bet $10 on a basketball game, then cheer and grouse while watching the game on one of the book’s big screens.

Circa Las Vegas sportsbook (Circa Las Vegas)

Today, there’s a sports book just down the highway from Iowa City at the casino in Riverside, and it seems completely normal. Nine different online sports books are available in Iowa.

Now, you not only can bet on games at home, you can bet on them during games as the odds change. Live betting, it’s called, though it may as well be called crack cocaine for people with gambling issues.

I’m not especially big on moralizing, especially since I’m pretty sure I won’t sway anyone with intelligence on anything that matters. I will say the following, nonetheless:

• “Prediction markets” are gambling sites, case closed.

• Being regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission doesn’t mean “Safe for your wallet.”

• If you want to bet on whether it will rain in Des Moines tomorrow, first get a unanimous supporting opinion from at least six American Meteorological Society Board-Certified Consulting Meteorologists.

• Gambling is for suckers.

• That said, take those Golden State Valkyries at home Tuesday night against Toronto despite the very small profit you’ll make. Expansion Toronto has hit the skids after being competitive for the first half of the season, while Golden State is 20-9 and playing great ball. Consider it an investment.

• FOOTNOTE: Golden State won, 92-82.

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I orginally wrote this story for HawkFanatic.com. The reaction was good, so I thought I’d share it here.

Iowa had a national-championship football team that deserves that recognition in Kinnick Stadium.

That’s the conclusion of William Hughes, an Omaha businessman and lifelong Hawkeyes fan who has done more than simply state an opinion. Hughes spent time over the last five years researching and writing a book about the 1960 Iowa team called “Standing Up for the Hawkeyes: The Legitimate 1960 College Football National Champion and #1 Ranked Team.”

Last October, the University of Minnesota honored its 1960 national-championship football team on the weekend of a home game. The stadium’s brick facade perimeter on its upper deck had already commemorated the title. The Gophers were No. 1 in the final Associated Press rankings that season.

Hughes, however, lays out a statistical argument for Iowa and then some. That last AP poll was conducted before some late regular-season games and all the bowl games were played. Minnesota, by virtue of a Pacific-8 Conference vote, was selected to play in the Rose Bowl instead of the other Big Ten co-champion, Iowa. Washington then defeated Minnesota, 17-7, the Gophers’ second loss in their last three games.

In those pre-playoff days, all sorts of organizations awarded mythical national-titles. Mississippi, Missouri and Washington also were named the champion by various entities. So was Iowa, named No. 1 by four different research outlets as noted in the Hawkeyes’ football media guide.

The Hawkeyes were 8-1 that season with a late-season 35-12 upset triumph over then-No. 3 Ohio State in Iowa City, one of the greatest wins in school history. Iowa was third in that final AP poll, released in November. Yes, it lost at Minnesota, 27-10, after leading 10-7 in the third quarter despite three starting linemen being unavailable because of injury. Did Iowa have a superior body of work, however? Let’s put it this way: Seven of its eight wins were against teams ranked 12th or higher, and the other was at Notre Dame.

Iowa’s strength-of-schedule easily was No. 1 in the nation that year. You could argue it was the toughest any major-college team has ever played. You could also suggest the Hawkeyes should have been No. 1 in the final poll even with their loss at Minnesota because of their overall credentials. Hughes has that opinion shared in his book by poll-evaluators and college football experts. Beating seven ranked teams by an average of 16.4 points is a pretty good starting point.

Besides defeating then-No. 1 Iowa, Minnesota had just two other wins over ranked teams, and none over anyone in the Top Ten. Iowa’s midseason non-conference game was a 21-7 win over Kansas, which went 6-0-1 in the Big Eight. Minnesota’s was a rout of Big Eight last-place team Kansas State.

So Hughes wrote a hard-cover book about this, and not for profit. In fact, he’s giving it away. Those who want ask for a copy can send an email to AAM@Radiks.net for information on how to receive one. I recently met up with Hughes in Cedar Rapids when he was here to present a copy of the book to Nadine Hollis, the widow of the quarterback of that 1960 Hawkeyes squad, Wilburn Hollis. He explained why he was moved to write the book.

“I just felt that somebody needed to stand up for the 1960 team,” Hughes said, “and I definitely felt they were the legitimate national-champion and No. 1-ranked team.

“The AP poll had nothing to do with the end of the season nor any of the bowl games, and there were quite a few upsets in the Top Ten after that poll. I noticed Iowa recognized the title in the media guide, but I never understood why they didn’t expand on it more.

“Where you should earn it is on the field, and they did. I felt it’s as simple as that.”

Though he attended Upper Iowa and then graduated from Arizona State, Davenport native Hughes is a self-described “avid Hawkeye fan.” In his 70s, he’s a longtime season-ticket holder and donor. He knows Iowa football history and sinks his teeth into it in his book.

Even those who support Minnesota or another team other than Iowa to be No. 1 that season would have to concede Hughes presents a worthy argument for the Hawkeyes. And even those who disagree could find the story of the 1960 Hawks to be worth the read in itself.

It was a team with low preseason expectations, to say the least.

College football had switched back to single-platoon in 1953 to save money on scholarships, and didn’t revert to true full-platoon football until 1964. Thus, if you played, you played both ways. Iowa Coach Forest Evashevski, whose 1956 and 1958 Hawkeye teams are the last two Iowa clubs to win Rose Bowls, had nine first-time starters among his 11.

“There were a lot of people questioning whether Evy should coach that team because they thought it was going to be so bad that it would detract from the great record he had built, and he had a lot of opportunities at that time. But he was very loyal to those guys.”

It turned out to be Evashevski’s last team. He retired from coaching after the 1960 season and became Iowa’s athletic director. He believed in his 1960 guys well before anyone else.

During Hughes’ recent in-home visit with Jerry Mauren, captain/halfback/defensive back of the 1960 Hawkeyes, the former player said “Evy always had your back.”

Entering the season, however, the players were realistic about the rugged schedule they faced. There wasn’t an automatic win among the nine games. Fatigue and injuries were a threat to bring the Hawkeyes down even if opponents couldn’t, and a commonality during the season was Iowa jumping to lead then wearing down a bit -- but not too much -- in the second half.

Before the 1960 campaign began, Iowa players called it the “Season of Doom.” They clearly didn’t take those words to heart once the games started. Down went No. 10 Oregon State in the opener. Down went No. 6 Northwestern in Evanston, 42-0. Down went No. 8 Michigan State in East Lansing. Down went No. 10 Purdue and No. 9 Kansas. The latter’s only losses were 14-7 to then-No. 2 Syracuse and 21-7 at Iowa while the Hawkeyes were in their 3-week run at No. 1.

Down went Ohio State, with a thud after sportswriters across the Big Ten, the nation, and Iowa itself picking the Buckeyes to prevail. Coming off their demoralizing loss at Minnesota the week before, the Hawkeyes rebounded and ran over a Woody Hayes-coached squad that seemingly had a clear path to the national-championship. Larry Ferguson, an All-America selection at halfback by the Football Writers Association of America, took a handoff from Hollis and darted around right end for a 91-yard touchdown to put the game away.

“The Hawkeyes were an absolutely superior team in every respect,” wrote Dayton Daily News sports editor Si Burick after the game. “They earned their five touchdowns on thorough superior backfield speed, offensive imagination, line charge, and defensive alertness when it counted.”

After Iowa ended its regular-season with a 28-0 win at Notre Dame, it waited to see if it would be headed to Pasadena. In the event of a co-championship in the Big Ten, the Pacific-8 (known as the Pacific Coast Conference when the teams started playing each other in the Rose Bowl) selected the school to represent the Big Ten.

Hughes writes: “The media believed Iowa would receive the invitation because Iowa had voted in favor and Minnesota had voted against extending the Rose Bowl agreement.”

But Minnesota got the call.

“Washington had played in the prior Rose Bowl,” Hughes said, “and they pounded Wisconsin (44-8). They kind of liked playing those slow teams. The Hawkeyes were a lot different. They were a fast team. So if (Washington) had any say, they’re probably telling their league ‘Hey, we’d rather play Minnesota.’ Which ended up to be accurate when at halftime the score was 17-0, Washington.”

So, there was no Rose Bowl and no consensus No. 1 recognition for that Iowa team. Sixty-six years later, Hughes would like to see a new honor come the way of the ‘60 Hawkeyes. That’s acknowledgment for a national-championship during a Hawkeyes game in Kinnick Stadium.

In 2007, Washington recognized its 1960 team as national-champions, an honor bestowed upon it 47 years earlier by the Helms Athletic Foundation. A flag signifying the team as national-champs was unfurled in the UW’s Husky Stadium.

“If we could get Iowa to do this, it would be like at the University of Washington where they invited the players who are still living or family members of those who aren’t to come back.”

One of those players probably will be in Kinnick, anyway. Tom Moore, now 87, was the placekicker for the 1960 Hawkeyes. Ferentz hired him this year as a senior consultant and offensive analyst. If Moore can serve up a few of those plays to offensive coordinator Tim Lester and they have similar success to when they chopped down mighty Big Ten teams 66 years ago? He’ll be worth whatever Iowa is paying him.

And if the Hawkeyes can enjoy a similarly successful season to their ‘60 ancestors? They won’t need any other conference to invite them to the College Football Playoff. They’ll be going in style.

I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Please sample the talents of my fellow collaborative members. If you can afford to be a paid subscriber, that would be most appreciated. If not, you can still read it without being haunted by me.

The Big Ten Conference’s football media days start Tuesday morning in Chicago, stretching through late Thursday afternoon.

I’ve been to that clambake so many times since the 1980s. But not this year, and barring a strange set of circumstances, never again. Despite the oppressive heat in the Midwest this week, the air will feel crisper during the rare times I step outside. I’d say the food will taste better, too, but I’m a sucker for Chicago’s deep dish pizza and Italian beef sandwiches.

Press conferences and media days were the banes of my professional existence. You often had to be enormously lucky to get a story of your own that was any good because you’re swamped by other reporters and essayists, and the material often could be pretty thin.

If you were never in my racket, you don’t know how it feels to have your soul rotting away when you’ve gotten two or three really good answers from someone only to have someone from The Jock or The Schlock or the Upper Peninsula Daily Howl bringing the flow to a horribly screeching stop. Often it was by asking a player to name his favorite flavor of energy drink or something equally inane.

That doesn’t mean those with enterprise and determination can’t come up with something original and even interesting this week. They will. But they’ll have to wait out a lot of other media mopes who may be asking questions that need never be asked.

Then, to be even more discouraged, you’ll see some types in the media circus who can’t keep the smile off their faces and the drool off their chins as they park themselves at a coach’s table and bask in being near him.

It was never my idea of fun, but if you didn’t go it would be the one year the coach you cover announced it was his last season and he was going to run for the U.S. Senate. So you always went just in case, and the coach always stayed put.

One-on-ones are the only satisfying kind of interviews. Those aren’t coming your way at a conference’s media day unless the subject is of little interest to all your peers.

Inevitably and thankfully, the event ends and you find yourself back in the car to Iowa, crawling through Chicagoland traffic and wondering exactly what it was that you saw and heard. Besides, that is, just another promotion for a conference that really doesn’t need it given its fat television contracts and packed stadiums. And you’ve written about it like the trained seal you are because college football moves the needle in your market a whole lot more than Single-A minor-league baseball or a fishing derby at a city park.

At the Big Ten event, each coach gets 15 minutes at a podium in a ballroom delivering prepared remarks and answering a few vital questions of the day. Later in the day, they sit at their own big round table somewhere in another ballroom at the same time several coaches and three players from each of the six teams that day also are answering questions nearby.

What you learn is that the coaches are excited. Because they tell you that. Over and over, in some cases. Here are some podium nuggets from last year in Las Vegas, where the Big Ten had its media days for the first and probably only time:

“I can honestly sit here and tell you that we’re really excited,” said Wisconsin Coach Luke Fickell.

“I’m very excited about this team,” said Oregon Coach Dan Lanning.

“We're very, very excited for the 2025 season,” said Minnesota Coach P.J. Fleck.

“So many things to be excited about,” said Illinois Coach Bret Bielema.

“Couldn't be more excited about this opportunity and challenge that's in front of us, said Michigan State Coach Jonathan Smith, who surely was less enthused after he was fired four months later.

Smith’s replacement, Pat Fitzgerald, reportedly is excited about his new opportunity. He would have been excited at the 2023 Big Ten football media days, but was fired as Northwestern’s football coach two weeks earlier. At the ‘23 event, then-interim Wildcats head coach David Braun said “I'm very excited about what we have coming back on the offensive side of the ball.”

Braun, who became full-time head coach, edged Oregon’s Dan Lanning, 17-16, for most uses of “excited” or “exciting” in their 15-minute slots a year ago. Amazingly, last-place went to Fleck, whose aforementioned quote here was the only time he used the ‘E’ word. That’s wild because there’s nobody more excitable in Big Ten coaching than Mr. Row the Boat Ski-U-Mah Fleck.

Row the Boat and Ski-U-Mah are trademarked Gopher gibberish. Intellectual property, you know.

In the midst of the chatty Fleck’s long opening remarks that allowed time for just one question in his 15 minutes, he offered this information about Gophers running back Darius Taylor:

“Loves cars. It’s a good time in college athletics to like cars. He’s from Detroit, Michigan. He should like cars. It’s a great time in college football to like cars.”

Of the three days, 18 coaches, and four-and-a-half hours of their podium talks last year in Vegas, there was one moment in which I should have fled the football jibber-jabber for the property’s sports book. That was after Indiana Coach Curt Cignetti spoke. The Hoosiers were expected to slip at least a bit last year after going 11-2 and reaching the College Football Playoff in Cignetti’s first season at IU, 2024.

“Year one is in the books,” Cignetti said in the first 30 seconds of his address. “One hundred twenty-six years of Indiana football. Best season in Indiana history. Number 1 out of 126.”

That was the same sort of swagger Cignetti showed in his introductory press conference at Indiana in December 2023 when asked how he woud sell his vision to high school recruits.

“Yeah, it’s pretty simple,” Cignetti said. “I win. Google me.”

That wasn’t coach-speak. Bragging about coming off the winningest season in school history wasn’t, either.

Last season, the Hoosiers went unbeaten and won the national-championship. Indiana was listed as 100-to-1 to do that in July 2025. Google it.

Had I wagered $100 in July on Cignetti’s team to win it all, I’d have cashed for $10,000 the following January. For some reason, you never do the things you should have done when you’re in Las Vegas, instead doing things you shouldn’t.

I should have gone to the sportsbook at Mandalay Bay last July after hearing Curt Cignetti’s swagger.

Cignetti had spoken at the first of the three days of the media soiree in Vegas. Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz said this two days later:

“I think all of us just feel very honored to be in a great conference and see it as a privilege as well to play in the Big Ten. To coach in the Big Ten is a really unique opportunity. I think we're all fortunate of that and looking forward to getting started. It should be a really exciting year this coming season.”

Gonna go out on a limb here and say the dean of Big Ten coaches will say something similar Tuesday when he’s the second of the 18 coaches to meet the press.

I love Chicago in the summer, but not if it’s for three days of sitting in a hotel and listening to college football coaches. I’d rather be sitting around a bonfire in my backyard while it’s 91 degrees with 70 percent humidity. As long as the fire was contained and started by me, not some darn climate-change reason.

Football season may be coming fast, but it’s still a month out, my babies. Go slowly, August. I’m not letting summer ghost me. I have enough so-called friends doing that.

I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Click on the link to sample the latest collection of reporting and essay-writing on all sorts of things by people who are indeed talents.

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You have nothing to lose but your time, and on rare occasion, your cookies.

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As much as I may have wished I did, I’ve never had much in common with the Rolling Stones.

Which is why they’re the Stones, I guess. If we mortals were like them, we’d have to find another active band that has been iconic for over 60 years. Blimey, that’s a big ask. Just staying alive that long has been too challenging for many inductees of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Mick Jagger turns 83 Sunday. Keith Richards is 82. Ronnie Wood is 79. They have a combined 19 children.

Maybe I don’t want to share every commonality with them.

My first memory of the Stones was in the mid-1960s. My dad was reading a Saturday afternoon edition of the local newspaper and started laughing. A story on the front page about one Stone or another heading off to jail or facing that prospect had the headline “Rolling Stones are breaking rocks.” Pops, who probably thought the long-haired wild boys of that period were best left in England, thought the headline was funny. Little kid me did, too, when he read it to me.

That kind of got me interested in the Stones, though. When I was 10 and heard “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on the radio over and over, my interest really grew.

Like so many Stones hits, it had an opening that hooked you and would stay part of your musical consciousness forever. Think of the openings of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Honky Tonk Women,” or “Sympathy for the Devil,” for instance.

“Start Me Up” is 45 years old and still is frequently used in arenas before sporting events get started. It gets fans started up.

Anyway, the Stones released their 27th studio album this month, “Foreign Tongues.” It’s getting good reviews. All I’ve heard from it so far is the single that was released ahead of it, “In the Stars.” It’s infectious.

It probably doesn’t rank among the band’s best 100 songs, but it’s rock ‘n roll and I like it.

What I like about it the most is these rascals are old and they’re still making records. They’re older than rock and roll. They’re older than Frank Sinatra’s first hit record.

When you’re young, you might agree with something like the Who’s famous “I hope I die before I get old” from “My Generation.” That song was punk rock long before punk rock was a thing. When you’re the age of readers of this Substack — I’ve seen the metrics and thus can’t pretend you’re young — continuing to live seems like a pretty good deal.

I used to sneer in my working life like the Who’s Roger Daltrey did when he sang “My Generation.” I would look at the older sports writing and broadcasting cats around me and wonder why they don’t all f-f-fade away.

Now, as someone who actually leafs through the AARP magazine that comes to my house every month, I get why the Stones have ignored Pete Townshend’s lyrics and kept recording and touring. If you’re doing what you still love and do it well, why stop if you aren’t leaving puddles of drool behind while doing it?

The Stones, I think it’s safe to say, don’t need the money even with all the kids they’ve fathered.

So I do this, hope to maintain a base of subscribers and even miraculously add more, and apologize to no one about it.

Should some blogging bloviator of a younger age dismiss me as yesterday’s news, well, that would be right. Still, if they looked objectively at musical acts of 20-somethings trying to get their music out into the world, they might surmise those people aren’t as good as the Rolling Stones are at 82.

Being blissfully unaware or uncaring of those who came before you is an unalienable right, one many of us including myself have observed in our lives. However, the Stones didn’t have that character flaw. They were in their 20s once upon a time and were very influenced by blues artists who came before them, like Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker.

I also want it said that I’m not among the large group of 60-somethings who think the best music in history came exclusively from their youth. My favorite SiriusXM satellite radio channel, the Spectrum, has introduced me to the Black Keys, Brandi Carlisle, Sam Fender, Maggie Rogers, Lord Huron, Zach Bryan.

If you don’t know any or all of them, check them out. Fender and Olivia Dean did a duet called “Rein Me In” that became the all-time second-longest running No. 1 song on the UK’s Official Singles Chart Top 100 at 17 weeks.

The Spectrum mixes in good older stuff, too. Like, you know, a certain band that formed in London in 1962.

However, one question remains unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. How has Keith Richards survived so long? There’s a reason the pseudonym the Stones have used for nearly five decades is the Cockroaches.

They live forever, and not doing so while gumming tapioca and watching the Andy Griffith version of “Matlock.”

To paraphrase Olivia Dean (27 years old) and Sam Fender (32), please don’t rein in us oldies.

I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Click on the link to sample the latest collection of reporting and essay-writing on all sorts of things by people who are indeed talents.

Please sample the talents of my fellow collaborative members. If you can afford to be a paid subscriber, that would be most appreciated. If not, you can still subscribe with the only cost being your email basket will get a tiny bit more cluttered once or twice per week.

You have nothing to lose but your time, and on rare occasion, your cookies.

Even in 2026, words still have meaning. Or should, anyway.

Alas, some words get wrongly repackaged, repurposed, reconfigured and recast for reprehensible reasons. In the words of Chico Marx, thassa no good.

The trick is to stop such malicious usage of language at every front, from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam and polluted by plastic. So when you hear people use a false phrase, correct them even if it takes every last breath in your body. Or just frown and slowly shake your head in disgust. Such expressions include …

“All I can say is …”

All I can say about people who say “All I can say is” is that they’re kidding themselves.

Whenever you hear them say “All I can say is,” they follow it with a lot more than whatever it is that is all they can say. They aren’t the least bit concise. They certainly haven’t rolled all their thoughts into one salient point. They’re frauds. Nay, they’re charlatans. Which is just another word for “frauds,” but it sounds like more of an insult.

“All I can say is” is a big buildup to a dramatic moment that never arrives. “All I can say is my ex-partner is no damn good” should pack a wallop. But it doesn’t, because it always is followed by a laundry list of the ex-partner’s flaws and sins, and it quickly gets as monotonous as a bus ride across Nebraska.

No one who ever says “All I can say is” knows the first thing about the art of editing. It’s four unnecessary words coming from someone who is about to lay hundreds and probably thousands more on you.

It’s like going to the movies with someone who says “Just one handful” when you offer them some of your popcorn, and their hand proceeds to take up permanent residence in the tub of corn until the snack is nothing but old maids.

If someone starts a comment with “All I can say is,” finishes it in one sentence, and then moves on to something else or opts to listen to your reply, you have encountered a creature rarer than a Northern white rhinoceros. Embrace it. The person, that is, not the rhino.

“I’m just sayin’”

What the double hockey sticks does that mean? Everything you say is just sayin’.

It is said to cushion the blow of a harsh thing the person just said, but it fails miserably.

“You remind me of Charlie Manson. I’m just sayin’.”

It’s like someone threw a brick through your windshield and then hid their hands behind their back.

“Your dog is ugly. You should shave its butt and teach it to walk backward.”

Hey, that’s mean!

“I’m just sayin’”

Oh. Well, alrighty then.

It’s offending someone and then trying to walk it back with less effort than it takes to grill a hot dog over an open fire. You’re not really trying to start something unpleasant, and adding “I’m just sayin’” proves it. After you’ve already started something unpleasant, of course.

“It’s been a minute.”

This is a relatively new one. I don’t how it started, but it needs to stop.

Someone says “It’s been a minute” in describing something that hasn’t happened in a month or two, or far more likely, a year or more. By the way, there are 1,440 minutes in one day alone.

If you greet someone you haven’t seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic and the response is “Great to see you, it’s been a minute,” remind them it’s actually been over 3 million minutes.

Don’t give them the chance to say “It’s been a minute” when you are first reunited. Quickly blurt out “Great to see you, it’s been over 3 million minutes.” That only tacks on one more word and it’s 3 million times more honest. Plus, your old friend doesn’t have to worry that you’ve lost your capacity to tell time and do simple math.

Of course, there is a danger they’ll think “My gosh, that pandemic must have really been rough on you,” but being honest sometimes comes with a risk. Be brave. It’s worth it!

“At the end of the day …”

Who’s to blame for this catastrophe of a phrase? You hear it so often, yet it never means anything.

It’s stated as fact, like you’re about to hear the summation of all summations, the truth of all truths.

“At the end of the day, I knew I made the right choice.”

What, you couldn’t come to that same conclusion by afternoon tea, or when it’s time to clear the dishes from the dinner table? Or at least 15 minutes before the end of the day?

Nooooo! You went to bed, turned out the lights, closed your eyes, and suddenly you hit on total awareness.

At the end of the day, another day is done. Now that is end-of-the-day truth-telling. Unfortunately, it’s stating the painfully obvious and never requires being uttered. So skip it and get some sleep.

“Low-hanging fruit”

Low-hanging fruit is a metaphor for something easy to do or attain. It does make some sense, because actual low-hanging fruit is easier to pick than, say, apples or cherries or coconuts. However, it insults hard-working laborers.

Go tell a field worker that picking berries or grapes for eight hours a day under the big hard sun is easy because it’s low-hanging fruit. That’s a good way to get a watermelon dropped on your coconut, er, noggin.

Low-hanging fruit is in the eye of the beholder, anyway. To many, low-hanging fruit is understanding crypto currency or knowing how to properly load a dishwasher. To others like me, those things might as well be climbing a coconut tree while wearing flip flops.

By the way, I enjoy strawberries and blueberries and raspberries. They’re tasty and good for you. I don’t care if they are low-hanging fruit. I really don’t. I mean it. I don’t.

“Thinking outside the box”

What box? How big is the box? What goes on inside the box that makes you want to think outside it?

Sure, sure, thinking outside the box means considering unconventional solutions in doing or approaching things. But why not just say “Let’s consider an uncommon way to look at this problem” rather than “Let’s think outside the box,” and spare everyone else from wondering what box, how big is the box, and what goes inside the box that makes you want to think outside it?

And what if you work at a box factory? Wouldn’t it be counterproductive to think outside the box? Or, if you were employed at a box factory ,wouldn’t your goal be to one day work outside of a box factory? Unless, that is, you were a corporate suck-up who wanted to climb the box factory ladder. To each their own.

Why can’t you think outside the circle instead? Or outside the triangle, or the cone, or the pyramid? I’ve only been inside one pyramid in my life that I’m aware of, and that was in Las Vegas, not Egypt. I found I did much better thinking once I got outside the Luxor Las Vegas.

The tip of that pyramid has the Luxor Sky Beam, said to be the world’s most-powerful man-made light. I guess you can see it from space, but I can’t verify that first-hand. The resort is 33 years old, and I have yet to figure out why it needs that beam or what its purpose serves other than attracting moths.

Anyway, “thinking outside the box” has become so cliche that it’s actually thinking inside the box. Which again leads us to wonder what box, how big is the box, and what goes on inside the box that you have to think outside of it even though you’re actually back in it because thinking outside the box is no longer outside the box?

“Living rent-free in your head”

This one’s the worst. It always comes from a dope claiming he or she weaseled into your thoughts in a most unwanted way.

People who say that always think it’s incredibly clever. They act like they’re the first ones to ever utter the phrase, though even they know it’s as unoriginal as a cheese pizza. They always seem quite pleased to make the claim as if being supremely irritating is an accomplishment of note.

They are, of course, half-wits.

However, if they’re telling the truth they are unscrupulous at best. They’re not paying a dime of rent to take up space in your thoughts. They’re either terrible tenants or they’re squatters. They should be embarrassed. Yet, they’re proud of it!

Worse, they’re implying you are an incompetent landlord. So the next time anyone tells you they’re living rent-free in your head, demand payment immediately. Make it a large amount. Tell them if they want to live rent-free, go pitch a tent near some railroad tracks. And find a job so they can start working their way up to a one-bedroom apartment.

If you’re feeling more helpful than vengeful, suggest they could earn a nice side income by charging people to live inside their heads.

You may get little but scorn and insults as a response, but you’ll be in their heads. Which may not be where you want to spend your time. However, try to remember there is a big advantage to it. It’s rent-free!

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As with what mechanical engineering, motorcycle maintenance and marine biology, what I know about soccer could fit inside a space much smaller than a soccer net.

I certainly don’t know what constitutes offside. Then again, I don’t know what is and isn’t pass interference in American football, nor have I bothered to learn why 0 in tennis is called “love.” But you know what they say. There’s a thin line between love and 15.

Anyway, about soccer. The United States lost 4-1 to Belgium Monday, thus failing to reach the men’s World Cup semifinals. It remains a forever spectator in the Elite Eight, or whatever they call it. The quarterfinals, I guess. How pedestrian.

With that ignominious defeat to a nation of 11 million people came the usual blather about why not enough American males are drawn to the game and that people in this country in general still regard it as a niche sport. The U.S. has won four women’s World Cups. Apparently, there is a path to get from here to the soccer mountaintop.

Fox’s telecast of Monday’s game had 30 million viewers. Which cleared the previous all-time high for an English-langauge soccer telecast in the U.S., which was the 26.4 million that saw the U.S. beat Bosnia and Herzegovina five days earlier.

Had the Americans knocked off Belgium instead of getting flattened, the viewership for Friday afternoon’s quarterfinal aganst Spain would have included a lot of people skipping work, school, dental appointments and Pilates sessions.

Spain, by the way, would have shut out the U.S. and controlled the game because it has world-class players and we — if I may be so provincial as to say “we” — do not.

A backyard in my Cedar Rapids neighborhood

When I hear about how the U.S.’ best athletes are drawn to other sports instead of soccer, I look at Lionel Messi of Argentina. He is 5-foot-7, 148 pounds, 39 years old, and isn’t the soccer equivalent of Usain Bolt when it comes to dashing 100 meters. He merely is a wizard at doing the right things on a soccer pitch.

The sport rewards brains and instincts more than muscles and speed. At least that’s how it looks to someone who has played the game only during grade-school P.E. class, where anyone’s pass to a teammate usually was accidental and goals were counted if the ball went over the goalkeeper’s head, even if it was 10 feet over. In those prehistoric times, we didn’t have actual soccer goal posts and nets here.

It was fun, though.

The U.S. playing so well in getting to the Sweet 16 did a lot to enhance the event for American couch potatoes like myself. Then it met its toughest foe in the tournament and crumbled. It happens. Especially to the U.S.

But that England-Mexico game the night before … OMG, what a classic. Argentina’s comeback win over Egypt Tuesday … OMG, the same.

I’m an underdog guy, so I hope Norway or Switzerland plays Morocco or Belgium in the championship. The smart money, though, is on a rematch of the 2022 final between Argentina and France. Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe. That would be OK, too.

I’ve loved watching the World Cup. Unlike recent editions, the matches have been on at times that were workable. And, there has been so much to enjoy.

The dazzling and relentless individuals like Messi and Mbappe, Norway’s Erling Haaland and England’s Harry Kane have been so brilliant. Many a goalkeeper has been sensational. The story of Cape Verde tying traditional soccer powers Spain and Uruguay, advancing to the knockout round, and barely losing to defending champion Argentina in an mesmerizing contest, was beyond terrific.

Cape Verde, by the way, has roughly the population of Iowa’s Polk County. The U.S. has 350 million residents.

Most of all, the passion of the fans from around the world who ventured to North America for extended stays to party, cheer and make their presence felt has been a reminder this stuff is supposed to be fun. The way Scots took over Boston and Dutch flooded Kansas City in festive moods was just great.

If I could get tickets to Saturday night’s Argentina-Switzerland quarterfinal in Kansas City, I’d go from Cedat Rapids to Arrowhead Stadium Saturday without thinking twice. If, that is, the price were about $1,308 less than the lowest price for tickets on Vivid Seats as I type this. Which was $1,508.

Many people won’t get this and won’t want to get it. But you saw those TV numbers for the U.S.’ last game. I know people who starting watching the World Cup in the last two or three weeks and have gotten into it. One day, maybe, one of their grandsons will play for a U.S. team that makes it to the men’s World Cup’s version of the Elite Eight, or even the Final Four, or better yet, the big enchilada.

But probably not.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t overserved.

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The Savannah Bananas in pregame warmups at Kinnick Stadium Saturday

IOWA CITY — Those who are baseball-purists, whatever that means, may look upon the Savannah Bananas with scorn.

Then there’s most of the rest of us, who appreciate an entertainment extravaganza that fully is family-friendly and goes the extra 60 feet, 6 inches to give its customers an enjoyable night out.

In addition to being a football fortress for nearly a century, Kinnick Stadium has been used in recent years for unique college wrestling and basketball events. Friday and Saturday nights, however, were something else. The Bananas and their opponents, the Firefighters, filled the old brick house for baseball. Or, more specifically, Banana Ball.

It almost has to be seen to be described. It’s a mix of baseball, gymnastics, music, dance routines, comedy, a few moments meant to tug hearts, and surprise guests. It’s an enormous party, it’s G-rated fun with nary an inappropriate word uttered, and it’s found an amazingly large and loyal fan base in a decade’s time.

Firefighters mascot Bo the Beaver went to the top row of Kinnick Stadium Saturday to mingle with Savannah Bananas fans

Like they do everywhere else in Major League Baseball venues and everywhere else they go, the Bananas sold out Kinnick. Both nights. That’s roughly 137,000 tickets. Their starting price was $35, and went all the way up $175 for club seating. To sit one row from the top of the stadium set me back $120 for two seats.

By the way, Kinnick’s seats are still too small and I have no idea how people find it enjoyable to sit for almost four hours at football games so crammed together. Especially if you’re not near an aisle and have people crawling over you to get in and out. Double-especially if it’s a September game played under a big hard sun beating on the big people in the big hard world.

I also, admittedly, have lived a life of covering games from press boxes.

Anyway, Friday night’s game was delayed for two hours because of rain, but the show still went on. I attended Saturday’s game as a paid customer, strictly out of the curiosity of witnessing a phenomenon.

The experience was a bit mind-boggling and a bit comforting. The first part came from seeing 68,000 people not only embracing the event, but singing and chanting along with a large number wearing Bananas shirts and caps. The merchandise stations outside the stadium were multiple and with long lines, but many of the spectators showed up at Kinnick already in possession of Bananas garb.

The comforting came from seeeing so many people gather in one place to simply have fun, grinning and laughing out loud, not frothing at the mouth at referees or opponents. It also came from seeing so many families at Kinnick for something, people who probably wouldn’t be bringing kids of 6 or 8 or 12 or even themselves to a Hawkeyes football game.

I’ve always said I’m all for anarchy in which no one gets hurt. That’s Banana Ball. It makes “scripted chaos” a reality instead of an oxymoron.

Give me a sports league that has its players wear uniforms, but allows those players to include their own individual touches.

The Bananas’ starting pitcher Saturday wore a yellow cowboy hat. Another player wore a cape. Another was on stilts. Yes, a baseball player can pitch and hit, and even beat out a grounder for an infield hit.

Give me an umpire who dances to “La Bamba” between pitches or does a flip after calling a baserunner out.

Give me a version of baseball in which a walk is replaced by a sprint, in which bunting is illegal, in which pitchers waste no time between pitches and batters aren’t allowed to step out of the batter’s box to waste even more time. Give me a two-hour time limit for a baseball game with every moment of the two hours used for something. Especially the time between half-innings.

Give me former Iowa NCAA wrestling all-time great Spencer Lee, a 125-pounder, coming onto the field between innings to throw around a 205-pound muscleman who plays for the Firefighters.

I even liked most of the nonstop music that went on during the game. If you’re like me and don’t like country music, just wait 15 seconds or so and you’ll get something else, followed by something else, followed by something else. It was unusual to hear Iowa State staple “Sweet Caroline” sung along to by a Kinnick crowd, and my ISU-graduate wife said it was sacrilegious.

I’ve heard the Chicken Dance played between innings at professional baseball games. I hadn’t seen the players join the fans in acting it out.

Nary an empty seat was in sight at Kinnick Stadium Saturday

As for people who also expect some baseball, the players aren’t major-league quality but do have collegiate and even professional experience. They’re legitimately slick fielders and have pop in their bats. And when have you ever seen a major-league second baseman record an out by firing the ball behind his back to the first baseman after fielding a bouncer?

Trick plays like that are rewarded on the scoreboard, as Abner Doubleday surely would have wanted.

Not having to battle Friday’s rain, I had a favorable experience and I don’t need or want to have it a second time. If I had a 10-year-old child or grandchild, though, I wouldn’t hesitate to another Bananas game if I could secure tickets. Because the kids who helped fill Kinnick were having a great time and never seem the least bit bored, and their parents appeared to feel the same way.

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I’m not sure how Mount Rushmores came into vogue, given there is only one actual Mount Rushmore and it’s in South Dakota.

South Dakota, by the way, cannot be mentioned in this Substack without me again asking if we really need two Dakotas. North Dakota and South Dakota combined have twice as many U.S. Senators as California. Or Texas. Or Florida. Or New York. If you combined the Dakotas you’d still have a population smaller than 39 other states including Iowa.

The Founding Fathers couldn’t have had the Dakotas in mind. I know I never have, and it’s not like I’m living near the heartbeat of the nation.

Anyway, the University of Iowa’s X account (you may know it better as Twitter) recently asked which four Hawkeyes should be on the UI’s Mount Rushmore. It said Sunday night that the quartet that had collected the most votes consisted of Caitlin Clark, Hayden Fry, Nile Kinnick and James Van Allen.

Which goes to show voting isn’t for everyone.

Van Allen discovered the Van Allen radiation belts in 1958. I’m not about to give you scientific jargon since I don’t know any, but the belts were/are a big deal and Van Allen was a pioneer in establishing the field of magnetospheric research in space.

In 1959, Van Allen was on the cover of Time magazine. That, for you kids out there, was an enormous deal for decades. Time named Van Allen one of its 15 scientists who were named the Men of the Year in 1960.

So he a fitting member of the UI’s foursome. It’s kind of a surprise he made it given the other three selections were in Hawkeye athletics.

Clark is the only one of the three I’d have chosen, and I have as much appreciation for Kinnick and Fry as anyone. Although, you could argue I don’t since I wouldn’t put them on this particular mountain. So I’ll say I have as much realistic appreciation for them as anyone.

Clark is a sports and cultural game-changer. The way she has steered so many people into women’s basketball and women’s sports has been astounding.

If you ask random people in any state other than Iowa to tell you about Fry or Kinnick, it’s highly unlikely they could. If the subject is Clark, it’s likely they at least are aware of her, and quite possibly very much aware. When Iowa played in the NCAA regional in Albany, N.Y., in 2024, an Uber driver told me why she was so popular. The owner of Maurice’s Pearl Street Deli — across the street from Albany’s MVP Arena — saw I was wearing a press credential as I was perusing his menu, and asked if I could persuade Clark to visit his eatery. He promised some merchandise for her.

What I was going to get out of the deal never came up for discussion, not that I was ever going to try to broker it. It wouldn’t have been professional.

Caitlin Clark at the 2023 NCAA women’s basketball Final Four in Dallas (Mike Hlas photo)

Kinnick and Fry have mountains-full of sentimental value in Iowa and at the UI. Kinnick was the school’s only Heisman Trophy-winner, and gave what is widely regarded as the best Heisman acceptance speech to this day. After his college career, he volunteered for service in the U.S. Naval Air Reserve. His death off the east coast of Venezuela came during a training flight. He was training to be a fighter pilot. His plane developed an oil leak, and he crashed it in the Gulf of Paria. He was 24.

That’s a lot of lore. And it’s very easy to say he’s an automatic choice of the university’s top four. So many have said the articulate, serious, studious Kinnick could have gone on to be a governor, senator, even president.

The what-might-have-been with Kinnick doesn’t count, though. So how does Kinnick rate above, say, great authors, novelists and playwrights the school has sent into the world, not to mention its lesser-known but vital standouts in the areas of science, technology, medicine and journalism.

Fry turned Hawkeyes football from a perennial loser to a program of repute, and will long be warmly regarded at the university. It is, however, just football. Others in other walks had and still have high profiles nationally and beyond.

UI graduate Tennessee Williams wrote the plays “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” He was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for both.

“A Streetcar Named Desire,” for crying out loud!

Yet, some would favor Flannery O’Connor instead. Others might side with other authors with UI ties, like John Irving, John Cheever, Jane Smiley or Robert Penn Warren.

Then there’s Marilynne Robinson, who taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for a quarter-century. She won a Pulitzer for fiction in 2005. Robinson was named in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2016.

Would it be a reach to include actor/writer/director Gene Wilder, a UI grad? I say no. Just from his starring roles in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” alone, Wilder was a beloved and delightful comic actor in movies that were hugely popular. He also portrayed Willy Wonka. And, he was an Academy Award-nominee for his role in Brooks’ “The Producers.”

A dark horse for the UI’s Rushmore, but a pretty influential person, was alumni George Gallup. He was a pioneer of polling, used to determine public opinion. He established the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935. It was more commonly called the Gallup Poll.

Almost a century later, you seldom can go a day in America without hearing about the latest national poll.

There are many who would have Dan Gable on the UI’s Rushmore in place of, well, anyone. Coaching 15 NCAA championship wrestling teams while being a global ambassador of the sport is heady stuff, no pun intended. Had he won his Olympic gold medal as a Hawkeye instead of Iowa State when he competed on the mat, he’d be nearly impossible to omit.

But at some point, you’ve got to say “We’re the University of Iowa. We go back to 1847, and our athletics take a backseat to our societal achievements and our achievers.”

There’s no way three of your four most-important graduates or faculty members should be athletes or coaches no matter how successful they were, or how many people in Iowa identify with the university for its athletics and only its athletics.

So for three of the four people on the UI’s little Twitter survey to be from the world of 3-point shots and punt-returns isn’t to be taken seriously.

Now if you’ll indulge me, here’s a scene from the movie version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” that’s rather famous.

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When I grow up, I want to be like Chris Jericho.

No, I don’t necessarily want a 35-year career as a professional wrestler, even if it means performing before hundreds of thousands and probably millions of fans around the world. No, I don’t want to necessarily be a lead singer for a heavy metal band, even if it has released eight studio albums. If I suddenly gain the stage presence and voice for that, however, I may reconsider.

I do have full admiration for someone who has taken on multiple projects and hasn’t done them halfway. I do like someone who is 55 who doesn’t understand anyone asking him why he’s still wrestling. In fact, he called a question I asked him about that “immature.”

That was during a Tuesday phone interview. Jericho’s other band, Kuarantine, will perform an outdoor show Saturday night at the Double Z Bar & Grill in Cedar Rapids as part of a 3-night Midwest swing of its Unholy Night Tour 2026 that includes stops in Chicago and Milwaukee.

Yes, Jericho has two bands in addition to his continuing work with All Elite Wrestling (AEW). And his podcast of 13 years, Talk is Jericho. And his other work in acting and writing. And his Rock N’ Wrestling Rager at Sea, a 4-day cruise he will host for the seventh time when it sails from Miami to the Bahamas in November.

Check out Jericho’s Wikipedia page. I’ve only scratched the surface of all his endeavors and accomplishments.

“Follow your dreams,” Jericho said Tuesday. “That’s the best advice I can give. And don’t listen to people that say you can’t do something because they’re usually the ones that didn’t accomplish their own goals. If you have a dream, something you want to make happen, then go make it happen, and the worst that can happen is you try, you give it your all, it doesn’t work out. That’s not a bad thing, you know.

“A bad thing is not trying, always wondering. If you really try and it doesn’t work out well, at least you know you move on to the next thing. But most of the time, if you have enough of an ability to succeed at what you want to do if you give it 1,000% blinders on and just go for it? Most of the time you’re going to see some great results.”

Jericho, the son of former National Hockey League player Ted Irvine, is widely regarded as one of the top performers in pro wrestling history. The physical part of it is in the equation, but it’s his big and humorous personality that gave him most of his staying power.

He grew up in Canada loving wrestling and rock music, and ended up doing both. He has written three New York Times bestsellers to boot.

“It’s just all about not taking no for an answer,” Jericho said, “and just putting all of your mindset into something that you really want to do, and realize if you commit to it, you can make it work.”

Kuarantine is Jericho’s No. 2 band behind Fozzy, which he formed a quarter-century ago. But he doesn’t consider it a side hustle.

“We put as much time into Kuarantine as we possibly can and got it to a certain level,” he said. “We can put a lot more time into it when when when the situation arises and take it even higher. So I think that’s one of the things you just commit to it and just give 1,000 percent to anything that you do when you’re doing it.”

Kuarantine, Jericho said, is “the world’s greatest non-makeup ‘80s KISS cover band. We’re also the world’s only non-makeup ‘80s KISS cover band.”

“That’s just a total party atmosphere that they kind of never really delved into after that time frame, and we started doing this during the pandemic when guys were just kind of sitting around bored and we did an obscure KISS song from the 80s. Because no one was really putting music out on the radio, we released it as a single and got a Top 20 hit.

“So, as we move through the pandemic quarantine — get it? — we decided to continue forward, and we have gotten some great success from it. We’ve had five Top 20 songs on the radio as a result, and we even opened up for KISS last year in Las Vegas at the KISS Kruise: Land-Locked in Vegas, and we’re doing it again this year in November.”

If you watch AEW anytime soon on TBS, you’ll probably see Jericho, still yakking it up on the microphone, getting big crowd reactions, and trading bumps and thumps in the ring.

“Why do the Stones still tour?” Jericho asked. “They don’t need the money. You don’t do it for the money, you do it because you love doing it. You love making people happy.

“And you know, I think in this day and age, sometimes there’s a lot of haters that get mad at you for just doing what you do and just existing. But I still love doing it. I still see the reactions from the majority of people when, when I’m doing what I do. When the time comes to move out of it completely, I will, and move more full-time into the bands, into the podcast, to acting.

I take great responsibility in providing the people who enjoy my work with cool things to do and see and to be involved in. So that’s my job, you know. I can’t fix your car. I can’t build anything. But I can make you smile when I come and entertain you.”

Jericho wrestled at the then-Five Seasons Center in Cedar Rapids in 1997. Twenty-nine years later, he’s going to be belting out “Lick It Up” and “Heaven’s On Fire” in the same city.

“When we get a chance to play, it’s always a rock and roll party,” he said, “and we’re going to get a chance to do that this Saturday in Cedar Rapids.”

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I try to stay at least vaguely aware of current events, so I watched a telecast of President Trump’s speech/press conference in France Wednesday after the G7 summit.

It meant I didn’t catch Portugal’s sixth-minute World Cup goal against DR Congo. Ah, the prices you pay for enlightenment. But as Thomas Jefferson said, whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

That said, how about DR Congo battling heavily favored Portugal to a 1-1 draw? I can’t make you care about the World Cup, but the good folks of DR Congo and Cape Verde sure care. And the good people of Portugal and Spain are spitting nails.

Anyway, while listening to Trump Wednesday I wondered what a postgame press conference by Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz would sound like if Ferentz were the sport’s version of Trump instead of the president’s temperamental opposite.

Why would I consider such an odd thing? For the premise of a column for this Substack, of course. And away we go.

“So, we won tonight. Big win. Tremendous win, actually.

“I know wins, believe me, I’ve won many times. Some people are calling me and saying ‘Coach, we’ve never seen winning like this.’

“As you know, the score was very lopsided in our favor. Our team was truly, truly magnificent and the other team was, frankly, a catastrophe.

“Our offensive line today was beautiful. Big, strong, powerful men. The biggest. I handpicked those linemen personally. People don’t know that. Look at them now. Dominant. Because of me.

“The running game — and this is something the fake Iowa sports media will never give us credit for — was incredible. I’ve been told by very important football people that our run game tonight was the greatest in Big Ten history. Very smart football people are telling me that.

“Our defense is the greatest defense in the country. Maybe ever. A Hawkeye fan came to the front row of the grandstand after the game because he had something to tell me. A big, strong man, tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘Coach, I’ve never seen a defense like yours. Thank you for coming to Iowa.’

“Our linebackers are incredible. Like wild animals, frankly. Vicious, but a good kind of vicious.

“The other team was a disaster from the start. I watched their quarterback and I said, ‘This guy has no idea what he’s doing.’ We treated him like a dog.

“Their head coach, he seems like a nice guy but he was completely out-coached tonight. He was standing on the sideline looking very sleepy, very low-energy.

“I must say, the officials were an absolute disgrace. That holding call in the third quarter was treasonous. Millions of people — maybe the biggest television audience ever — were watching and saying that's not a hold. A perfect block. The crooked refs called it holding because they don't want us to win. Everybody knows it.

“Remember, we were in the most-rigged game in history. That was not an invalid fair catch by Cooper DeJean against Minnesota three years ago. We won that game. It was a disgrace. The Department of Justice should investigate.

“Next week’s opponent — I’m not going to get them fired up because I’m too smart for that — but I will say we’re going to win in a landslide. The fake Iowa sports media will say all week that the game will be close. I may sue them, I don’t know yet. I’ll decide in the next 48 hours or maybe two weeks. No Hawkeyes coach has ever been treated as badly as I have.”

Then the coach said he would take questions, but stomped out after calling a reporter “low IQ” when the reporter asked the coach why he punted on 4th-and-1 from the opponent’s 35-yard line in the first quarter.

What, you wanted me to write about a 2027 Iowa football commitment or the Hawkeyes’ men’s basketball team scheduling a December home game against South Dakota? Not happening, Cha Cha.

Hey, nice going, DR Congo!

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One of the U.S.’ four goals against Paraguay Friday is celebrated at a watch party in Cedar Rapids’ Kingston Yard. (Mike Hlas photos)

Twenty years ago, I happened to be in France on a vacation while France was making a run through the men’s World Cup to the championship game, which it lost to Italy.

In Paris, Avignon and Monaco — Monaco isn’t in France, but it rooted for France in the World Cupand has a team in France’s Ligue 1, the top tier of French soccer — we saw and heard the locals come together and be filled with anxiety and then joy during games.

On a summer night in walled Provence university city Avignon, televisions were set up in a town square as people dined al fresco before the game, then chewed on fingernails during it. The residents partied long into the night. It was amazing how, seemingly out of nowhere, the inner city quickly filled with cars and motorcycles with people waving French flags, honking their horns, and having a big old time.

It was one of the best things I’ve ever been in the middle of, sports-wise. It made me a little melancholy, knowing that there isn’t a sporting event that brings all Americans together for a feeling like that.

As far as U.S. team wins go, the gold standard will always be the men’s hockey team’s Olympic gold-medal run in 1980, and many Americans certainly enjoyed their nation’s men’s ice hockey Olympic triumph this year. American women have won three women’s Olympic ice hockey competitions, and have four World Cup titles.

Men’s soccer, however, has been a perennial non-starter in American sports fans’ minds. There has been nothing resembling a run at a gold medal. The U.S. team had a total of two goals in its three 2022 games. It didn’t even qualify for the event in 2018.

Friday night, however, I got a taste of what it was like being in France during the 2006 World Cup. I went to Big Grove Brewery & Taproom because I saw there was a watch-party for the U.S.-Paraguay first-round game.

Outside, watching the game on a big screen, were about 150 fans, a mix of kids and adults with many wearing U.S. soccer jerseys. The No. 10 of Christian Pulisic, who had a sensational game Friday, was a jersey favorite.

Kids, many wearing U.S. soccer star Christian Pulisic’s No. 10, were focused.

Adults came in U.S. soccer garb as well.

Inside the brewery, each of the 15 or so television sets showed the soccer game. No baseball, no anything else. And no one seemed to want anything else.

At the risk of getting cornball, it was nice to see people all getting behind something America-related. I’m no wild-eyed “patriot,” but seeing folks united in the United States behind the red, white and blue instead of being in a red tribe and a blue tribe was refreshing.

So was the way the American team came out from the get-go and made soccer look entertaining to non-fans with aggressive and intelligent play. This wasn’t the frustrating U.S. soccer we’ve come to know and disdain. Instead, the Americans were playing the beautiful game beautifully, and built a 3-0 halftime lead on the way to a 4-1 triumph.

Someone on social media told me there was an eruption of “USA! USA!” chants on the Pedestrian Mall in downtown Iowa City after a U.S. goal. I saw videos of a watch party in Des Moines that looked pretty well-attended. If those things happened in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Des Moines, they probably were going on all over the country.

Cool. The U.S.’ next game is next Friday at 2 p.m., Central time, against the Socceroos of Australia in Seattle. I like Aussies as much as the next Yank, but we’ve got to teach those mates a soccer lesson.

Fans at Kingston Yard in Cedar Rapids enjoy a late goal by the U.S. team.

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Caitlin Clark, after swishing a 31-footer for the winning points in the Indiana Fever’s game at Washington Monday.

They put you in a capsule, they send you towards the sun
They carve you into plastic before you orbit's done — Harry Chapin, “Star Tripper”

Why would anyone be surprised? As it seemed the joy was being siphoned from Caitlin Clark’s basketball journey to the sun, she did a very Caitlin Clark thing Monday night.

Clark’s Indiana Fever WNBA team led the Washington Mystics 49-32 with 7:17 left in the third quarter in Washington, but the Mystics rallied to take the lead. The Fever called time with 4.3 seconds left, trailing 76-75. Sophie Cunningham threw a perfect cross-court in-bounds pass to Clark, who shook loose.

Clark shot from 31 feet. Swish. Indiana led 78-76 with 1.2 seconds remaining, and that was the final score.

Maybe it was for the best that the second half of the game was played opposite Game 3 of the NBA Finals Monday night. For once, Clark played in the shadows.

The Fever entered the game with a 5-5 record, and everybody seemed to have something to criticize about it. Or someone.

For many, it was Clark. She’s a selfish, whiny, overrated, entitled player. Or so I’ve read from some who don’t appear to have any credentials as a basketball expert or anything else in life.

No, wait. It’s her coach, Stephanie White. She isn’t utilizing Clark’s strengths. Or it’s the incompetent Fever organization. Or the Fever’s nasty opponents who are jealous of her fame and fortune. Or the WNBA’s game officials, who supposedly go out of their way to make life harder for Clark.

Clark is a petulant complainer, some say. White is an incompetent who doesn’t take advantage of Clark’s talents, say others. The league goes out of its way to keep Clark down rather than supporting its top drawing card and attention-magnet, it is said. The referees are bozos, some insist.

This is what happens. You get to this kind of celebrity status and you they start carving you out of plastic instead of hoping you continue to soar across the galaxy.

Clark is averaging 18.7 points and a league-high 7.9 assists per game. She also averages 4.3 turnovers, which actually has lowered her career-average to 5.3.

She had made just 32.4 percent of her 3-point tries this season before going 4-of-10 Monday. The WNBA’s top three players in made 3-pointers per game are all shooting over 41 percent from that distance.

Clark’s team hasn’t looked like anything special. That’s because it isn’t. Not yet, anyhow.

All that said, the season is only one-fourth over. And, Clark is still Clark.

New York has some very good players. So do Las Vegas and Dallas and Atlanta and Minnesota. The WNBA isn’t the Big Ten. It’s the best women’s players in the world. They’re the best offensive players and the best defenders.

Clark can play with any of them and has. But this isn’t 2024 in Iowa City, where she’s at 30,000 feet compared to nearly all her opponents. She’ll seldom do to the Los Angeles Sparks what she did to the Michigan State Spartans.

Because she has celebrity status, though, she’ll get slings and arrows at every given turn. In Saturday’s game in Brooklyn, a video clip of her not returning teammate Tyasha Harris’ high-five after a timeout got spread around social media. As if it were a sign of Clark being arrogant, or uncaring about the teammate, or something even worse.

Was it actually a snub? I highly doubt it. Did no one consider her head was in the game and she didn’t even notice the teammate’s extended arm?

This non-story is the kind of thing that would have gone unnoticed had any other player in the league been involved. But with all the good that comes from national recognition comes the other side.

“There’s always going to be people that have opinions,” Clark said before Monday’s game in response to questioning from Christine Brennan, “and I understand that.

“Everything is analyzed. That’s OK. It’s a good position to be in, but also it takes great responsibility. You have to understand that. There’s going to be moments when you get frustrated with yourself, but you try to take a deep breath.

“I’m not perfect. Sometimes I think that’s hard for the common fan or the people that don’t play competitive sports at this level — we go through a lot of hard things, too. That’s never an excuse for things, but we do have a human side to us as well.

“I don’t think I would be as good a player if I were stoic and straight-faced all the time. I think you always want your mind to be neutral, but you also want to be excited and passionate, fiery and feisty. Maybe you have a moment with a ref here and there or maybe you get super-excited and get the crowd hyped up.

“That’s what’s so fun about competitive sports.”

Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs is in that relatively small club of superstar/celebrities in basketball. Before Game 2 of the NBA Finals, he kept his arms folded during the playing of the national anthem. Naturally, many people took time out of their busy lives to go online and rip him for it.

Such “disrespect.” Ridiculous. I wish I had $10,000 for every time I’ve seen a basketball or football or baseball player shuffle his or her feet in nervous energy during the anthem. I’d have enough money to buy all of us tickets to Wednesday’s Finals Game 4 in New York.

But just as soon as Wemby shot into an even higher level of stardom after the Spurs won the Western Conference finals, here came the etiquette guardians of cyberspace barking about him not putting his hand over his heart during the anthem.

Be patriotic the way I say is patriotic, or else. To which I’m reminded of what Samuel Johnson said 251 years ago: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

After the anthem is played in an arena, of course, it’s OK for fans to scream any awful thing they want at the player. It’s just fine for mostly anonymous social media trolls to make any vulgar comment about the player that the tapeworms in their heads tell them to post.

Nobody rides for free in the pros. You want to get those State Farm and Gatorade commercials like Clark has, you should know they come with angry nobodies waiting to cut you down for a bad game. Or worse, for a gesture they interpret as absolutely shameful. Why is it shameful? Because they want to interpret it that way.

I don’t think Clark needs any defending. She seems pretty capable of keeping jackals at bay. If she starts launching 30 shots a game instead of being a distributor, then there’s a problem. If she starts telling all her young fans to play in traffic instead of signing autographs for them, it’s time for an attitude-adjustment.

Does Clark sometimes do as much officiating as the officials themselves? Yes, and it’s not a great look. Could WNBA officials use the help from a player who sees the game better than they do? Yes, but the league will never admit it.

Like Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson and Paige Bueckers, I just enjoy watching Clark play ball.

Does every bit of joy we cling to in 2026 have to be ripped from us?

I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Please sample the talents of my fellow collaborative members. If you can afford to be a paid subscriber, that would be delightful. If not, the vast majority of content is free.

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This is the third time I’ve posted the previous paragraph, and I remain 0-for-Venmo. I thought you people liked cleaner air and less reliance on fossil fuels.

I want to say right up front that this is not one of those columns.

You know the one. The old guy column. The “what happened to this country” column, where somebody my age squints at the youth of today and shakes his head slowly, like a disappointed golden retriever. You’ve read a thousand of them, or heard versions in conversations.

This is not that. Who needs more of that? I have enough troubles trying to convince age peers that just as much good music is being made in 2026 as any other time. Give Lord Huron a listen. They’re performing in Waukee on July 19.

This tattoo thing is genuine curiosity from someone who has watched the art form oo go from biker bars and Navy ports to the forearms of kindergarten teachers and the ankles of grandmothers named Carol, trying to figure out what exactly happened and when and whether I missed a memo.

A half-century ago, I couldn’t stop wondering why my Uncle Ed had a tattoo on his upper arm that simply said “Eddie.” Failing to ask him why he got it and his state of sobriety at the time is on the “also receiving votes” list of my Top 25 regrets of the week.

Tattoos weren’t as common as electric scooters back then. Somewhere between the past and now, they went from counterculture to just culture. Tats are everywhere, accepted and unremarkable — except to people like me, who remain fascinated by it the way a dog is captivated by a ceiling fan. Not frightened. Not hostile. Just unable to look away.

I covered the Big Ten preseason football media days in Las Vegas last July. I’m pretty sure it was the first time the conference held that event at a site (Mandalay Bay) that also had a tattoo parlor on the premises.

Let me give you a number, because I am still a sports writer of sorts, and numbers are our currency. Cash would be better, but that’s another deal.

Somewhere around 40 percent of American adults have at least one tattoo now.

Among people under 40, it’s closer to half. Half. That means if you’re at a party — not a biker rally or a music festival, just a party where someone’s grilling brats in a backyard in Hiawatha, Iowa — roughly half the people holding a Modelo have ink on their bodies somewhere.

I still find this astonishing. Just the effort to go through the tattoo process is enough to keep me from it. But I’m fine with anyone else doing it. It clearly makes people happy and isn’t hurting anyone else. That seems to be a daily double that’s harder to find all the time. Plus, it’s freedom of expression, something to cling to dearly in 2026.

Hey, I live in a state where this license plate was granted to a citizen:

To some people, that’s offensive and shouldn’t be allowed. To me, it’s funny. There’s no Satan. If you disagree, I’ll just laugh harder. Plus, the state collects $25 for personalized license plates, so that’s more money for Iowa to spend for the greater good of its citizenry. Or however it spends it.

But about the tats: I have an endless interest about what they represent and why they were meaningful enough for someone to display them for the rest of their lives. Getting one is a commitment.

People will work a dozen different jobs, live in a dozen different cities, eat a dozen different doughnuts. But they’ll make a choice to be married to an artist’s rendition of something until their last breath.

Here is what I think has happened, freely acknowleding I am a rube from Cedar Rapids and not a cultural anthropologist:

A generation has grown up watching celebrities with tattoos. LeBron James, for instance, has about two dozen. Scarlett Johansson has them. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is covered in ink. He even has a line of men’s care products that includes a tattoo balm.

All of which seems better to me than being stamped with a bar code.

What I’m most curious about is the choosing. It seems like it would be impossibly hard, but clearly it isn’t.

Some people pick the names and/or faces of their spouse, kids, parents or grandparents. Some choose the coordinates of a place that matters — a hometown, a monument, a street corner that makes them sentimental. That’s nice.

Other selections are more baffling. Maybe they simply mark time. I have old photos and ticket stubs stashed in boxes, seldom seen. Some people kept diaries or journals that nobody reads. Now, those are carried around everywhere on the body itself.

At least it’s less junk for your survivors to throw out and after you’ve gone to the great tattoo emporium in the sky.

The laws of average being what they are, some tattoos are regretted. The stock market may be a risky venture, but I’d gladly invest in a national franchise of high-speed tattoo-removal shops. Imagine all the business you’d get just from situations that seemed like a good idea on spring break.

I remain untattooed. This is not a principled stand. I just don’t have anything to share with the rest of the world.

Is that a good thing to state on a Substack? Maybe not, but at least it didn’t cost me $200.

That said, I offer you this free advice: Live boldly, love freely, and Google the translation before you get a neck tattoo in Chinese.

I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Please sample the talents of my fellow collaborative members. If you can afford to be a paid subscriber, that would be delightful. If not, the vast majority of content is free.

This column will always be free, but if you would like to help buy me an electric car to help lower my gasoline bill, my Venmo account is @Mike-Hlas. It would be good for the environment.

Here’s what college football looked like not so long ago.

You played 11 games, maybe 12. If you won enough of them, you went to a bowl game. A handful of them mattered. Most didn’t. The national championship was decided by people sitting in committee rooms, and half the time they got it wrong, and everybody argued about it for years, and it was fantastic.

OK, “fantastic” is a bit of an exaggeration. But it certainly was different than every other college sport.

Then we got a two-team playoff, then four, then 12. Now the Big Ten wants 24.

Next stop, everyone gets a trophy and a juice box.

To be fair, the Big Ten’s pitch isn’t entirely crazy. The conference has been pushing what it’s calling — with a straight face, apparently — a “24-team CFP Format Compromise.” The top eight seeds get byes. The other 16 play campus games in early December. Quarterfinals stay at the bowls on New Year’s. Conference championship games go away to make room for all of this.

That last part is actually interesting. Conference championship games in the Big Ten and SEC have become mostly just an injury risk for teams already in the playoff. Eliminating them to create more meaningful playoff games isn’t the worst idea anyone’s ever had. It’s not even the worst idea the Big Ten has had this decade.

But 24 teams?

Hey, the Big Ten isn’t a lone wolf on this. The Big 12 and ACC are for it, too. Understandably so, since had the proposal had been applied to last season, the field would have included seven SEC teams, six from the Big Ten, five from the Big 12, three from the ACC, two Group of Five teams and Notre Dame. Notre Dame, God love it, apparently gets a spot just for existing.

That’s not a playoff. That’s a conference season with better marketing.

Recently, Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti said “I don’t get why we can’t have a Minnesota-Iowa game have real impact every so often, like every year actually. Why can’t we do that?”

That’s quite a thing to say about one of your league’s big rivalry games. Floyd of Rosedale might as well find a nice quiet farm near the Amanas and never come out again.

College football has become like national politics. There are just two real parties, the Democrats and Republicans. That’s the Big Ten and SEC. I know Big Ten states Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa and Ohio may not appreciate being called Democrats, but the SEC isn’t going to budge on that issue.

The other conferences are the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and other fringe parties like Burning Man and Comic-Con.

The argument for going big is that more teams means more access and the regular season remains meaningful because, the Big Ten insists, only the top 24 teams get in. Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti has reportedly been bewildered that he keeps having to explain this to people. There’s a reason he does: It doesn’t make sense.

When 24 of 138 FBS qualify for the postseason, and the top eight of those 24 get a bye, you’re essentially telling half the Power Four that they’re in as long as they don’t lose to Rutgers.

The SEC, to its credit, has been perfectly happy going to 16 teams and stopping there. Everyone else seems to think 16 is a sensible, workable total.

Unlike many in my state, I don’t have a cat in this fight. (People always say “a dog in this fight.” It’s discriminatory to cats, though I much prefer a dog. As long as it’s a lover, not a fighter.) I don’t care for the SEC, but I don’t think the Big Ten is higher ground. Both want to be the Amazon and Google of college sports, both are succeeding, and to that I say this:

Go pound sand. Which the Big Ten can now do since it has two members in Los Angeles.

My new favorite conference is the Pacific-12. It’s back, baby! It has eight teams for football later this year. They are Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, Oregon State, San Diego State, Texas State, Utah State and Washington State.

Do you see a similarity among the eight? That’s right, all have “State” at the end of their names. A near-similarity: Seven of the eight aren’t on the Pacific Coast. It’s like baseball’s Class AAA Pacific Coast League, which has 10 teams, nine of which are unable to see the ocean from their homes, and many can’t from their time zone.

Here’s what would make some sense in a playoff expansion: Rewarding top seeds with home games. No. 1 Indiana didn’t play at home in last year’s playoff. No. 8 Oklahoma did, and lost, so it didn’t get to play No. 1 Indiana in a quarterfinal in Pasadena.

You can fix that in a 16-team bracket. You don’t need 24. In fact, I’m willing to make a wild prediction. If there ever is a 24-team playoff, no team seeded 17th through 24th will ever win it. Just like no team seeded 13th through 16th will. And quite possibly, no team that isn’t seeded fourth or higher.

By the way, next month’s World Cup in North America will be the first since the event expanded from 32 teams to 48. Another wild prediction: The winner will not be Cape Verde, Curacao, Jordan or Uzbekistan.

Or the United States.

And now, back to college football.

There definitely will be more playoff teams, starting in 2027. That’s because they keep adding games, chasing revenue, writing documents with the word “compromise” in the title that aren’t really compromises at all.

And we’ll lap it all up because it’s postseason football, no matter how watered down. If a peak of 6,000,000 people watched last year’s Rate Bowl between Minnesota and New Mexico — and it did — we’ll watch an opening-round game of a 138-team playoff between Delaware and Hawaii.

So I suppose the Big Ten knows exactly what it’s doing.

I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Please sample the talents of my fellow collaborative members. If you can afford to be a paid subscriber, that would be great. If not, the vast majority of content is free.

This column will always be free, but if you would like to buy me an electric car to help lower my gasoline bill, my Venmo account is @Mike-Hlas. It would help the environment.

Here are 100 things I’ve been thinking over the last few days. Be glad it wasn’t 200.

1. Let’s start this with a moment of silence to observe whatever you want.

2. The Kentucky Derby lasted slightly over two minutes. Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 will go about three hours. Next year, let’s reverse that and see what happens.

4. Caitlin Clark has made all 23 of her free throws over her first four WNBA games this season. The WNBA record is 66, by Eva Nemcova in 1999-2000. Reportedly, Jordan Bohannon is encouraging her to miss her 67th try on purpose if she gets to 66 in a row.

6. It’s always odd when you’re at a dinner party and someone says “Excuse me, I must be going. A pickleball court awaits my arrival.”

9. The 2028 Summer Olympics will have flag football, but it won’t have break dancing, which was in the 2024 Games. Somewhere, flag football players are training extremely hard and breakdancers are questioning every choice they’ve ever made.

13. America changed for the worst once sports stopped having off-seasons. Good goobledy-goo, the Big Ten announces in May which of its men’s basketball teams will play each other twice and which will play each other just once in the 2926-27 season that is a half-year from starting, and it’s treated like actual news. Stop!

14. Stop, I said!

16. A favorite sport of University of Iowa fans and media is ripping former Hawkeye men’s basketball coaches after they’ve left the state. Fran McCaffery, Todd Lickliter, Steve Alford … it never ends. OK, Maury Kent doesn’t get many verbal darts these days. But the dude was only 42-36 from 1914 to 1918, and never got a team to the Sweet 16.

17. My neighbor Walt joined a pickleball league. He has opinions about pickleball equipment. He bought a special bag for his pickleball gear and garb. I plan to avoid him for the duration of my time on my earth.

18. There is no No. 18.

19. Fifty driverless Waymo cars invaded a quiet Atlanta neighborhood last week and spent hours circling the same cul-de-sac. Empty cars. Just circling. The residents put up a sign to block them, which caused a traffic jam of confused robots reconsidering their lives.

20. Waymo lost one of its driverless cars last month after it entered a flooded lane in San Antonio and was swept into Salado Creek. The future is here and it is an idiot.

35. The Iowa women’s basketball team landed a player from Sweden and a transfer from Division III Knox College on the same week. That’s the first time any basketball program in the country has done that in the history of our solar system. No, I’m not going to show my work that supports that claim. If you can’t trust me on these things, we have no future together.

58. A gentleman from Parnell, Iowa — a true gentleman — wrote a letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette last December saying the paper letting me go was a bad decision, but at least I would have “more time for poker.” Alas, he was right about the second part. My top pair losing to a set of threes last week was what golf experts call “par for the course.”

59. Penn State football coach Matt Campbell riled up a few easily-riled types in central Iowa recently when he said “Hopefully the people in Ames, Iowa won’t be mad that I say this, but sometimes you felt like you were in a little bit of a food desert in Ames, Iowa, so number one there’s multiple options for dinner here. There’s multiple places to go out to eat and the food has been outstanding.”

60. I’ve been to State College a dozen times or so on assignments and don’t remember it being a foodie town. Of course, I always stayed in Altoona, 40 miles from Penn State and considerably cheaper for hotel stays on football weekends than State College. No, the Sheila E. song “The Glamorous Life” didn’t automatically pop in my head as I typed that.

76. Which is harder on a fan base? A coach establishing success and the potential for a lot more and leaving after only two or three years, or a coach stacking 10 years of pretty good times and then taking off? Either is a lot better than what Iowa State had football-wise for nearly all of the previous 118 seasons.

77. I like the Knicks. I like the Cavaliers. I like the Thunder and Spurs. I used to never have trouble choosing teams to root against. I used to hate the Knicks. And Celtics. And Lakers. Now there’s so much to find loathsome outside of sports that I can’t muster any loathing for a basketball team.

100. You can always tell a pickleball player at a dinner party. Not because they bring it up. Because they bring it up within four minutes, without exception. By Minute 6, they’ve offered to teach you the game. By Minute 8, you’ve agreed to meet them on the following Saturday to learn to play. By the afternoon of that Saturday, you have a strained quadricep.

I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Please sample the talents of my fellow collaborative members. If you can afford to be a paid subscriber, that would be great. If not, the vast majority of content is free.

This column will always be free, but if you would like to buy me an electric car, my Venmo account is @Mike-Hlas. It would help the environment.

Iowa football consultant/advisor Tom Moore and Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz (Photo courtesy of Hawkeyesports.com)

On Tuesday, Iowa’s football program announced Tom Moore had been hired as senior consultant to the head coach and offensive advisor.

Moore is a former Hawkeye player and a 1960 graduate of the UI. He is 87. He has lived a football life. He spent the last seven seasons as an offensive consultant for the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

I’m all for 87-year-olds working if they want to work. Especially if they’re capable, and Moore certainly is qualified. A 70-year-old head coach hiring an 87-year-old offensive advisor is getting some derision online, but I stopped throwing those kinds of stones around the time I got my first AARP card. Which I never use, because the thought of getting a discount for being old makes me hostile, not grateful.

Paul McCartney is 83 and has an album coming out later this month called “The Boys of Dungeon Lane.” Kenneth Womack of Salon.com calls it “a rich assortment of storytelling and nostalgia befitting the world’s greatest living songwriter.”

A song from the record called “Days We Left Behind,” has been released. It is beautiful.

The part of this Tom Moore story that interests and amuses me isn’t age-related. It’s that it’s yet one more human working for the football team, one in a group that has grown and grown.

Let’s have this be said plainly and clearly right away:

This isn’t an Iowa thing. This is a major-college football thing, expecially at the Big Ten level.

Iowa obviously has a.head coach and 10 assistant coaches. According to the football staff directory at Hawkeyesports.com, it also has five senior analysts, five analysts, an analyst director and a senior consultant to the special teams coordinator.

Director of football performance (strength and conditioning) Raimond Braithwaite has an associate director and three assistant directors.

There is a chief of staff/general manager. And a director of player personnel. And a director of football recruiting. And a director of football recruiting operations. And a director of recruiting research and strategy.

There is an associate director of football operations. And an assistant director of football operations. And a director of football administration.

There is a director of player development and an assistant director of player development. There is a director of branding and creative media and an assistant director of branding and creative media. There is a director of football video operations and an assistant director of football video operations.

They are all different people.

Several other UI athletic department employees work with the football program but aren’t necessarily exclusive to it. Like trainers, equipment managers, a nutritionist, a dietician, a sports psychologist consultant and a sports therapist.

The entire football payroll is hard to specify given split duties within the athletic department, as well as bonuses for things like bowl game appearances — an annual event for Iowa.

It’s probably at least $20 million. If you want to find out individual salaries for the fiscal year 2025, go to this site and plug in names.

Meanwhile, the number of players on a team hasn’t changed much. From 1992 to 2005, that was 85 scholarship players and as many walk-ons as a program wanted. A year ago, the NCAA changed the limit. You can have only 105 players in a program, but all can be on scholarship if the program desires.

I will say the ratio of UI football players to football employees is a lot smaller than the ratio of UI students to teachers. So that’s a good thing for the players.

There are more people employed by Hawkeye football (or Badger football or Buckeye football or Duck football) than by some Google data centers.

About 20 years ago, football staffs were considerably smaller. As was television money for major-college football. This is the list of everyone listed in the 2006 Iowa football media guide after the coaches, strength and conditioning coach, and quality control director:

Now? Big, big staff.

Whatever it takes to try to get an edge, huh? So Tom Moore is aboard as Iowa adds to its think tank. He may make one suggestion in November that is the difference between getting invited to a good bowl game rather than a mediocre one.

I think renting an All-America caliber quarterback is a good way to capture college football’s Holy Grail, and Indiana Coach Curt Cignetti agrees. See Mendoza, Fernando, 2025.

But know this: Cignetti also has a director of graphic design and an assistant director of graphic design.

I lifted this the following from Barry Piatt, one of the Iowa Writers Collaborative’s many shining stars:

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