As some of you may know Carfino'sWay and I are making a trip up to State College this weekend for our first ever game at Beaver Stadium. We're staying with a friend of mine who works at PSU and is being a very gracious host in addition to providing an all day (breakfast, lunch, post-game desserts) tailgate spread. In the spirit of camaraderie I decided to make that New York deli classic, the black and white cookie, to add to the bounty.

But after decorating 3 dozen of those beauties, I still had 5 or 6 cookies that were a tad undercooked and a lot of black icing left. I decided it was time to get a little creative.

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I just found out yesterday that my interminable period of underemployment is coming to a swift and satisfactory end.  Unfortunately my new job isn't in Iowa City, or Iowa, or even in the midwest.  I have to move to the suburbs of Philadelphia.  So I'll apparently be in Penn State football country. I'll also be surrounded by jackasses, communists, and Catholics according to Rambler.  So to differentiate myself from the PSU fans I've decided that I am going to be vain and get vanity plates.  Unfortunately, the obvious choice "KINNICK" has already been taken.  At least I know there's at least one other Iowa fan in the state.  So I've been thinking about other possible choices and figured that since I have problems making decisions by myself that I'd get the input of the BHGP commentariat and lurkers.  Let me know what you think.

So the NIT selection committee has decided that my other black and gold alma mater, UW-Milwaukee (UWM), should travel down I-94 to take on jNW at Welsh-Ryan on Wednesday night.  I thought I'd poll the BHGP readership to see if our hatred of jNW was strong enough to overcome our desire to see the B1G succeed in all things postseason.  I'll state my (obviously biased) case and let you decide.

First the case for UWM.  For those of you who don't know (i.e. 99% of you), UWM plays in the Horizon League.  Yes, where Butler reigns supreme.  After clinching the conference's number one seed UWM got a bye to the semifinals and hosted the finals where they came out tight and fell behind early, never getting closer than 4 points before losing 59-44 to the hated Butler Bulldogs.  So we should love them because we have mixed-to-negative feelings towards Lickliter who came from Butler.  Second, UWM is led by Rob Jeter son of Bob Jeter.  Yes that Bob Jeter.  Iowa tie #1 and further reason to support UWM.  Third, UWM is led by point guard Kaylon Williams, he of CR Kennedy and Kirkwood fame(?) who was passed over by both Lickliter and Fran.  Finally, wouldn't it be nice to see somebody wearing black and gold beat our Armani overlords?

The case against jNW.  Wizgerald, potato, Shurna's awkward shooting stroke, the potato, Wootenacolypse, concussed Greene, Armani, etc.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I thought I would share five things I love about the 2010-2011 Iowa Men’s Basketball team.  Yeah, I would probably love them a little more if they had won last night, but that’s life.  No, this isn't going to be a post in the vein of "All Stanzi All The Time" for those of you for whom that wasn't your cup of tea.  I should also put out the disclaimer that I haven't actually been able to watch more than maybe 120 minutes of game time this whole year.  I'm not dedicated enough to DVR any basketball team, and I work third shift.  So don't judge me without asking yourself how many games you would watch if they all tipped off between midnight and 6am.

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Am I the only one who is confused by the poll in the upper left hand corner of this site?  I think it was pretty obvious during football season that we were giving our impressions of Captain Kirk and his intrepid crew.  But it doesn't seem to make sense that that's what we're giving our opinions about now.  Is it the Hawkeyes across all sports?  Are we thinking about Bluder's Bunch?  Brands and Co.?  The Frantastic Voyage?  Or are we all interpreting it differently?

If it is about the football team I'm kind of surprised by the results of the poll recently given a lot of the sentiments expressed in the comment threads.  Then again, I'm pretty sure that there's a selection bias inherent in trying to generalize from the comment threads to the readership as a whole. Maybe the lurkers are more optimistic than the regular commenters.

First off, let me say that I'm a strict social constructionist and I'm as skeptical about objective reality as the next guy.  That debate is for another day.  The fact is that there is a general agreement in our culture that data based on observation is valid and is sound grounds for debate.  In fact, in bureaucracies both private and public, these facts are required to be the basis of daily decisions to a certain extent.  So I think we can all agree that our society is based on an objective reality that can be measured and used to make decisions.

However, this "agreement" is often violated in debates.  Political debate, civil discourse (or uncivil discourse if you prefer), and, most importantly to this post, internet chatter are driven by compelling anecdotes.  Those who try to argue counter to an anecdote based meme are chastised by people who "can't quite put their finger on it" or those who grant the validity of the overall data but still like to argue about a certain instance that goes counter to the overall trend.

Ok, for those of you who are still with me: What is the point of this post?  My point is to argue about the effectiveness of the 2010 Iowa offense.  A meme has developed on BHGP and elsewhere that is quite frankly starting to irritate me.  That meme is that the 2010 offense was bad, that Ricky had a bad year, and that Ken O'Keefe and Kirk Ferentz continue to cling to an offensive system that is outdated and makes it difficult to win football games.  My concession is that comparatively the Iowa offense isn't anywhere near as successful as the Iowa scoring defense (which is also outdated and needs to be replaced apparently).  A 50th ranked scoring offense and a 7th ranked scoring defense speak for themselves in relation to the other FBS schools.  Fine, we aren't Tulsa or Boise State on offense.  We don't run the spread and we don't innovate new offensive schemes, and we really haven't since Evy literally wrote the book on the Wing T in the 50s.  But the fact remains that the 2010 Iowa offense, with all the returning talent, with a senior QB, with a fairly green offensive line, was a better offense than 2009.  Let me say that again, the 2010 offense improved over the 2009 offense.  This is what you would expect to see with a bunch of returning starters.  Unfortunately, it seems that many people have turned their backs on Ricky and crew and the facts just don't support the anecdotes.  Specifically hkobb7 posted a comment that inspired me to write this post:

A prime example would be this year, when Iowa had an offense with serious production problems in spite of returning nearly everyone (forget the offensive line, they performed well all year, save for [Southwestern state redacted]) except for a single running back (who was replaced by an arguably better back by November)

We'll address this after the jump.

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The end of December brings us some excitement.  The Midlands Tournament gets underway at jNW's Welch Grapejuice Arena, and we (finally) get to close the book on the 2010 football team.  I thought it might be interesting to find out what everyone is looking forward to on the 28th-29th.  Are you so fed up with the football team that you're going all in on Brands and Co.?  Do you still refuse to care about the most successful program on campus?

For those of you fortunate enough to have tickets to the game on Saturday, news that will make you get your butt to your seat (or feet on your seat as the case may be).  If the regular festivities aren't enough (the swarm alone is worth foregoing that last beer), news today that there will be a fitting, all-American, piece of fantastic during the national anthem, that's right; a flyover.  On top of that, this week's honorary captain?  Dan Fucking Gable.  Seriously, what more incentive do you need?

[Bumped. I'm watching online at bigtennetwork.com ($$$) and I'll be in the thread for the second half. Let's do this.--AJ]

Not that many of you get to watch it, but Franball is making it's debut at CHA this afternoon.  After a truly bizarre partial outage by Mediacom (only Fox, ABC, CBS, ESPN, ESPN2, Comcast Sports, and Mediacom Connections) that prevented me from watching some football, everything is functional again for the time being.

So far: sloppy but up tempo.  I guess that's what we expected to see, especially at this point in the season.  Marble has scored his first career points, Basabe has cleaned up some errors.  Looking forward to the new regime.  Hopefully we don't lose the exhibition, because that would suck.

Also, the fact that Gatens is wearing a suit was apparently worth a few seconds of commentary, so it's interesting banter day at CHA.

[Edit: the game is on Mediacom Connections, Ch. 22 in Iowa City.]

[Also, even though the game isn't available for many, we have to enforce this all the same: no links to pirated streams in the comments. It gets BHGP in trouble. Sorry guys. --AJ]