Not much time to pick a winner, I'm already a few beers deep and getting ready to head west toward Melrose and Kinnick.
The Hawks' offense doesn't skip a beat without Adam Robinson or Dace Richardson and the defense holds the Hoosiers in check.
Iowa 31, Indiana 10
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Iowa City West girls basketball preview
Just one game separated the Iowa City West girls basketball team from the Iowa High School state tournament a year ago.
And anytime a team gets close to reaching the pinnacle of a season’s worth of competition it becomes hard to forget how it felt to fall short.
Lady Trojans head coach B.J. Mayer would be the first to say the feeling was not a good one, but something the 2009-10 West High squad can build off of.
“In sports, it’s really difficult to get to the next level until you’ve been there,” Mayer said. “Nobody in the West High girls basketball program has ever been to the state basketball tournament. So to get to the [Sub-State Final] last year was a huge confidence builder.”
The biggest issue facing the Women of Troy, however, will be how they replace their two leading scorers – Emma Krieger-Kittle and Madison Sedecky – from a year ago.
Krieger-Kittle led the team with an average of 15.3 points-per-game last year and also led the way in rebounds with 152.
Sedecky was a close second with 150 boards and 10.4 points-per-game. She also led the team with 45 three-pointers and shot 36.6 percent from beyond the arc.
With that in mind, Mayer said his players are going to have to grow up quick, particularly with as many as three new faces in the starting line-up to start the season. However, the coach has confidence in his athletes’ ability to handle the pressure in stride.
“Just getting the kids to play together because we have such a new background of kids,” Mayer said. “Getting our sophomores and our seniors on the same page has been the thing we’ve been working on in open-gym right now.”
The team will rely on a trio of seniors to carry the load.
Mackenzie Reed, Kristin Fomon, and Courtney Fritz all made significant contributions for West in 2008-09 and will be looked upon by Mayer to get the Women of Troy rolling early.
“We’re really looking for them to be our leaders,” Mayer said.
As far as a game plan, Mayer said the Lady Trojans will be shorter than most teams in the Mississippi Valley Conference. Thus the Women of Troy will be relying on an aggressive press defense and their ability to shot the ball from three-point-land.
“I think we’re going to be a lot deeper. Our goal is to play 10 kids,” Mayer said. “We’re not very tall. Our tallest kid is probably 5-10 and that’s going to be one of our weaknesses – defending people inside. So that’s one of the things we’re going to have to do is to try to create that tempo to almost be a little chaotic and crazy.”
And anytime a team gets close to reaching the pinnacle of a season’s worth of competition it becomes hard to forget how it felt to fall short.
Lady Trojans head coach B.J. Mayer would be the first to say the feeling was not a good one, but something the 2009-10 West High squad can build off of.
“In sports, it’s really difficult to get to the next level until you’ve been there,” Mayer said. “Nobody in the West High girls basketball program has ever been to the state basketball tournament. So to get to the [Sub-State Final] last year was a huge confidence builder.”
The biggest issue facing the Women of Troy, however, will be how they replace their two leading scorers – Emma Krieger-Kittle and Madison Sedecky – from a year ago.
Krieger-Kittle led the team with an average of 15.3 points-per-game last year and also led the way in rebounds with 152.
Sedecky was a close second with 150 boards and 10.4 points-per-game. She also led the team with 45 three-pointers and shot 36.6 percent from beyond the arc.
With that in mind, Mayer said his players are going to have to grow up quick, particularly with as many as three new faces in the starting line-up to start the season. However, the coach has confidence in his athletes’ ability to handle the pressure in stride.
“Just getting the kids to play together because we have such a new background of kids,” Mayer said. “Getting our sophomores and our seniors on the same page has been the thing we’ve been working on in open-gym right now.”
The team will rely on a trio of seniors to carry the load.
Mackenzie Reed, Kristin Fomon, and Courtney Fritz all made significant contributions for West in 2008-09 and will be looked upon by Mayer to get the Women of Troy rolling early.
“We’re really looking for them to be our leaders,” Mayer said.
As far as a game plan, Mayer said the Lady Trojans will be shorter than most teams in the Mississippi Valley Conference. Thus the Women of Troy will be relying on an aggressive press defense and their ability to shot the ball from three-point-land.
“I think we’re going to be a lot deeper. Our goal is to play 10 kids,” Mayer said. “We’re not very tall. Our tallest kid is probably 5-10 and that’s going to be one of our weaknesses – defending people inside. So that’s one of the things we’re going to have to do is to try to create that tempo to almost be a little chaotic and crazy.”
Analysis of Vincent's piece
In the piece, “Equitable Media Coverage of Female and Male Athletes: Is There a Solution?,” author John Vincent makes a lot of good points in regards to media coverage of athletics.
Vincent talks a lot about how portrayal of female athletes in the media strongly reinforces gender-role stereotypes. He claims that female athletes are allowed to be in the spotlight as long as they are appealing in the sense of the heterosexual relationships. In other words, sports sections would get more readers or hits if they do a story on (and have pictures of) someone like Anna Kournikova as compared to Diana Taurasi or Lisa Leslie.
He also raises the point of the sports journalism field being dominated by males. It would be much easier for a male sports writer to frame a female athlete into the stereotypical gender-role than it would be for a female reporter. A male writer would probably ask more questions about her private or social life rather than focusing on performance or skills.
Perhaps what I found most interesting, though, was peoples’ interest in female sports. According to Vincent females “competing in the traditionally ‘gender-appropriate’ individual sports such as swimming, diving, gymnastics, and tennis, which represent a narrow, culturally stereotyped view of female athleticism, receive more electronic and print media coverage than female athletes competing in the traditionally ‘gender-inappropriate’ team sports such as field hockey, softball, and rugby,” (Vincent 3).
When it’s all said and done, I don’t know how realistic his recommendations are. I think if more women were involved in sports journalism you could see the field start to change its ways over time. However, I think it is hard for sports fans to get overly excited about female athletics not because they are not of an equivalent skill level to male athletes, but because of the traditions of sport that are instilled in the sporting world and our society. If people don’t care enough to watch the game live, they sure as hell won’t be waking up the next morning to read about it in the paper. For example:
The World Series: Major League Baseball. Men
The Super Bowl: National Football League. Men
The Finals: National Basketball Association. Men
I think for some people it is hard to get past the traditional gender-role stereotypes that come with sports. Which begs the question, how far have we actually come with gender equality in sport? Title IX was a step in the right direction. However, I think a lot of people could look at Title IX and say it’s more a punishment of male athletics than advancement for female athletics.
Vincent talks a lot about how portrayal of female athletes in the media strongly reinforces gender-role stereotypes. He claims that female athletes are allowed to be in the spotlight as long as they are appealing in the sense of the heterosexual relationships. In other words, sports sections would get more readers or hits if they do a story on (and have pictures of) someone like Anna Kournikova as compared to Diana Taurasi or Lisa Leslie.
He also raises the point of the sports journalism field being dominated by males. It would be much easier for a male sports writer to frame a female athlete into the stereotypical gender-role than it would be for a female reporter. A male writer would probably ask more questions about her private or social life rather than focusing on performance or skills.
Perhaps what I found most interesting, though, was peoples’ interest in female sports. According to Vincent females “competing in the traditionally ‘gender-appropriate’ individual sports such as swimming, diving, gymnastics, and tennis, which represent a narrow, culturally stereotyped view of female athleticism, receive more electronic and print media coverage than female athletes competing in the traditionally ‘gender-inappropriate’ team sports such as field hockey, softball, and rugby,” (Vincent 3).
When it’s all said and done, I don’t know how realistic his recommendations are. I think if more women were involved in sports journalism you could see the field start to change its ways over time. However, I think it is hard for sports fans to get overly excited about female athletics not because they are not of an equivalent skill level to male athletes, but because of the traditions of sport that are instilled in the sporting world and our society. If people don’t care enough to watch the game live, they sure as hell won’t be waking up the next morning to read about it in the paper. For example:
The World Series: Major League Baseball. Men
The Super Bowl: National Football League. Men
The Finals: National Basketball Association. Men
I think for some people it is hard to get past the traditional gender-role stereotypes that come with sports. Which begs the question, how far have we actually come with gender equality in sport? Title IX was a step in the right direction. However, I think a lot of people could look at Title IX and say it’s more a punishment of male athletics than advancement for female athletics.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Talkin' Hawks
A lot of things happened for the Iowa football program on Saturday night when the Hawkeyes stole a 15-13 win from Michigan State.
A lot of them happened for the first time in over 100 years of Hawkeye football.
Kirk Ferentz got his first win at Spartan Stadium when Ricky Stanzi hit Marvin McNutt for a seven-yard touchdown on the final play of the game. It was also Iowa’s first win against Sparty on Sparty’s turf since Sedrick Shaw, Matt Sherman, Tim Dwight and company did it in 1995.
The 2009 squad became the first team in school history to be 8-0, surpassing the legendary 1985 team of Chuck Long, Ronnie Harmon, and Larry Station who started 7-0 – a team that ended its season in Pasadena.
Iowa scored its first walk-off touchdown since Warren Holloway’s “The Catch” the 2005 Capital One Bowl against LSU.
The Hawkeyes also appeared in the BCS rankings at no. 4, jumping ahead of Boise State and Cincinnati from last week, marking the first time since the 2002 squad went into the Orange Bowl ranked fifth.
And while all of that is proof of the appeal of the Hawkeyes as a big-time BCS player, there are still reasons to believe that not everything is certain to up roses in Iowa City.
Iowa’s two head-scratchers against Northern Iowa and Arkansas State – which the Hawkeyes won by a combined four points – continue to hurt the Hawkeyes’ credibility on the national stage.
Eventually the Hawkeyes playing to the level of their opponents could hurt them, particularly with looming threats from Indiana, Northwestern, and Minnesota in three of the next four weeks.
Thankfully for Iowa, all three of those games are at home.
Well, kind of.
Kinnick Stadium is said to be a safe haven for Iowa, but the UNI and ASU games were both at home where Iowa’s average margin-of-victory is just four points in four games. Yet, on the road, Iowa has wins of 32 (Iowa State), 11 (Penn State) and 10 (Wisconsin). With just one road game left – at Ohio State, Nov. 14 – Iowa has to be confident in its ability to walk into a hostile environment and perform at a high level.
If the Hawks can drop the hammer on the Hoosiers, the Wildcats, and the Golden Gophers on their turf like they are capable of, then it wouldn’t be out of the question for Iowa to be one of three or four teams in the national title discussion.
Nor should it be.
The last time a Big Ten team won at Penn State, at Wisconsin, and at Michigan State in the same year was 1997, when Michigan beat Drew Bledsoe’s Washington State in the Rose Bowl and finished 12-0 to share the national title with Nebraska.
A lot of them happened for the first time in over 100 years of Hawkeye football.
Kirk Ferentz got his first win at Spartan Stadium when Ricky Stanzi hit Marvin McNutt for a seven-yard touchdown on the final play of the game. It was also Iowa’s first win against Sparty on Sparty’s turf since Sedrick Shaw, Matt Sherman, Tim Dwight and company did it in 1995.
The 2009 squad became the first team in school history to be 8-0, surpassing the legendary 1985 team of Chuck Long, Ronnie Harmon, and Larry Station who started 7-0 – a team that ended its season in Pasadena.
Iowa scored its first walk-off touchdown since Warren Holloway’s “The Catch” the 2005 Capital One Bowl against LSU.
The Hawkeyes also appeared in the BCS rankings at no. 4, jumping ahead of Boise State and Cincinnati from last week, marking the first time since the 2002 squad went into the Orange Bowl ranked fifth.
And while all of that is proof of the appeal of the Hawkeyes as a big-time BCS player, there are still reasons to believe that not everything is certain to up roses in Iowa City.
Iowa’s two head-scratchers against Northern Iowa and Arkansas State – which the Hawkeyes won by a combined four points – continue to hurt the Hawkeyes’ credibility on the national stage.
Eventually the Hawkeyes playing to the level of their opponents could hurt them, particularly with looming threats from Indiana, Northwestern, and Minnesota in three of the next four weeks.
Thankfully for Iowa, all three of those games are at home.
Well, kind of.
Kinnick Stadium is said to be a safe haven for Iowa, but the UNI and ASU games were both at home where Iowa’s average margin-of-victory is just four points in four games. Yet, on the road, Iowa has wins of 32 (Iowa State), 11 (Penn State) and 10 (Wisconsin). With just one road game left – at Ohio State, Nov. 14 – Iowa has to be confident in its ability to walk into a hostile environment and perform at a high level.
If the Hawks can drop the hammer on the Hoosiers, the Wildcats, and the Golden Gophers on their turf like they are capable of, then it wouldn’t be out of the question for Iowa to be one of three or four teams in the national title discussion.
Nor should it be.
The last time a Big Ten team won at Penn State, at Wisconsin, and at Michigan State in the same year was 1997, when Michigan beat Drew Bledsoe’s Washington State in the Rose Bowl and finished 12-0 to share the national title with Nebraska.
News and notes from week eight
Greetings from the hospital, Hawk Fans, as I recover from the stroke I had on Saturday night right before Ricky Stanzi's game-winning touchdown pass to Marvin McNutt as Iowa downed Michigan State, 15-13. If I can just convince the wonderful doctors here at the UIHC to shoot me up with some of the Hawkeyes' fourth quarter magic, I'd be up and kickin' in no time. But in the mean time, I've got some well deserved awards to hand out, and one big, angry finger to wag.
And the game ball goes to...: Marvin McNutt. McNutt didn't see the field much during the game and didn't accumulate the most flattering stats, but the sophomore ex-quarterback delivered when the Hawkeyes needed him most. McNutt made the first and last reception (his only two of the game) in Iowa's miraculous final drive, the first going for 16 yards moving Iowa to its own 45 and the other being the seven-yard touchdown catch that won the game.
Tip of the cap: to Ricky Stanzi. Stanzi struggled again to post Drew Brees-esque numbers, but he did his best Super Bowl XXLII Eli Manning impression, leading his team down the field in the final 97 seconds to preserve the Hawkeyes' perfect season. Stanzi was 11-27 for 136 yards and a touchdown against the Spartans.
Also to ex-Iowa running back Shonn Greene, who ran for 144 yards and two touchdowns on 19 carries for the New York Jets on Oct. 25.
Wag of the finger: to Michigan State defensive back Jeremy Ware. Ware dropped Iowa receiver Colin Sandeman mid-way through the fourth quarter with a vicious helmet-to-helmet hit. Then Ware proceeded to stand over the clearly injured junior wide out and taunt him as he lay motionless on the ground. Iowa was awarded a 15-yard personal foul penalty, not for the helmet-to-helmet shot but for the taunt after the play. If the Big Ten suspended Ohio State safety Kurt Coleman for his "hit on a defenseless player," they have to be consistent and show Ware to the door.
Final thoughts: Isn't it funny how the Hawkeyes are still ranked behind Boise State, TCU and(one-loss) USC in either the AP or ESPN/USA Today poll, yet in the unbiased, no emotional attachment BCS computer, the Hawks are ranked No. 4? Rankings don't mean anything until the end of the season, but isn't it ironic?
Next week: the Hawks host Indiana (4-4, 1-3) on Halloween in Kinnick Stadium at 11 a.m. The only thing that can help the Hoosiers would be a guest appearance by Michael Meyers.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Spartans big hurdle for Hawks
If you've followed Iowa football pretty closely the last week or so, you've probably heard the Hawkeyes are 7-0.
You may have also heard that Iowa has never been 8-0 in over 100 years of football.
Never, ever.
The Hawkeyes find themselves in unfamiliar territory as the Big Ten's top dog half way through the season.
They also take on a Michigan State team who has turned out to be more like them as far as resiliency. After a 1-3 start (including a loss to mighty Central Michigan), Sparty has rebounded with three straight Big Ten wins.
In fact, a win for Sparty this weekend would vault Michigan State into a tie for first-place in the conference with the Hawkeyes.
Want anymore pressure on you to win this weekend, Hawkeyes?
The Spartans are led offensively by sophomore quarterback Kirk Cousins and wide out Blair White.
Cousins sat out of Michigan State's 24-14 win over lowly Illinois on Oct. 10. The week before, he threw two picks and no touchdowns against a Michigan defense who Ricky Stanzi had his way with on Oct. 10.
The key for the Hawkeyes against MSU is to focus on going 1-0 this week, not being 8-0 on the season. The nation is foaming at the mouth for Iowa to stumble and this could be the week it happens, but no one handles doubters better than Adrian Clayborn, Tyler Sash and company on the Iowa defense.
You may have also heard that Iowa has never been 8-0 in over 100 years of football.
Never, ever.
The Hawkeyes find themselves in unfamiliar territory as the Big Ten's top dog half way through the season.
They also take on a Michigan State team who has turned out to be more like them as far as resiliency. After a 1-3 start (including a loss to mighty Central Michigan), Sparty has rebounded with three straight Big Ten wins.
In fact, a win for Sparty this weekend would vault Michigan State into a tie for first-place in the conference with the Hawkeyes.
Want anymore pressure on you to win this weekend, Hawkeyes?
The Spartans are led offensively by sophomore quarterback Kirk Cousins and wide out Blair White.
Cousins sat out of Michigan State's 24-14 win over lowly Illinois on Oct. 10. The week before, he threw two picks and no touchdowns against a Michigan defense who Ricky Stanzi had his way with on Oct. 10.
The key for the Hawkeyes against MSU is to focus on going 1-0 this week, not being 8-0 on the season. The nation is foaming at the mouth for Iowa to stumble and this could be the week it happens, but no one handles doubters better than Adrian Clayborn, Tyler Sash and company on the Iowa defense.
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