It’s Hawkeye football media day, and is there ever a lot of Hawkeye media
Aug. 10, 2023 11:20 PM Friday is a high holy day here. Iowa Hawkeyes football players and coaches are available in mass quantity to talk to media creatures about, well, football.
Every major-college football team has a media day. How else would you know another season was nigh? At these annual events, we seek interesting comments to flesh out our story angles or fill our airtime. Then we process and scrutinize what we’ve learned, at least until the next time the media sees the team.
Which in Iowa’s case will be less than 24 hours later at Saturday’s Kids’ Day at Kinnick Stadium. Things are different at Iowa than most places not named Alabama or Nebraska. The amount of media outlets for a team in a market this small is a little mind-bending.
If you made a pie chart showing everyone trying to make a buck off Hawkeyes news, the slices would be as thin as the credit cards we want you to use to buy 12 months of coverage you can’t get anywhere else. This isn’t to pretend I’m part of something nobler than anyone else. I work at an Eastern Iowa newspaper/website.
Sure, we in dear old media still file occasional Freedom of Information Act requests to get news that may not be sunshine and lollipops for your dear old school, but we also pump up the volume on the happier news to grovel for page views with everyone else. Newspapers/TV/radio had a good, long run, but time never stands still. Like cable television and the Internet, sports coverage now consists of a thousand silos.
Some sites have thorough recruiting coverage to feed that ever-hungry beast. Some have unapologetic fanboy-ism. Others have sharper edges.
As far as what’s worthwhile, that’s in the eyes of the beholders. Perhaps the most-popular Hawkeye-related enterprise is Hawkeye Heaven. It has 162,000 followers to its free Facebook feed.
It’s a site featuring news items it gleans from other sites, photos submitted by fans, and other Facebooky stuff that isn’t exactly as weighty as a bag of flour. Is it heaven? To each their own. One person’s supreme bliss is another’s bowl of lukewarm oatmeal.
Hawkeye Heaven won’t be at media day, but HawkFanatic, Hawkeye Report, Hawkeye Insider and Hawkeye Nation will. Perhaps their work will be enjoyed at Hawkeye Electric, Hawkeye Chiropractic and Hawkeye Vapor in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor. Observations from what the Hawkeyes tell us Friday will be dissected on podcasts across Hawkeye Planet.
HawkeyePlanet. com, by the way, appears to be an available URL. Take note, Elon Musk.
A podcast hosted by three former Hawkeye football players is called Washed Up Walkons. The absence of the word “Hawkeye” in the name may be a violation of Hawkeye law. You can find Hawkeye-related podcasts at the Des Moines Register’s HawkCentral.
com. The Gazette’s Hawkeye podcast, meanwhile, is called Hawk Off the Press, a word play on “hot off the press. ” That phrase originated from newspaper printing in the early 1900s.
Was Hawkeye Hieroglyphics already taken? I’d change the name to HawkeyePlanet, because it sounds as big as Hawkeye life itself. But they haven’t listened to me here since Caitlin Clark was swishing 3-pointers in third grade. Some Hawkeye podcasts are Hawkeye media talking to Hawkeye media.
That’s fine, but I prefer comedians talking to comedians. Why? Because they’re funnier. Duh.
I once told former Iowa Athletic Director Gary Barta I was writing a book called “Bad Stuff About the Hawkeyes. ” In that moment, I was trying to be a comedian. It didn’t go well.
Of course, I never would have said such an unserious thing on the Gazette’s “On Iowa Sports” Facebook page. Or back when I was on KCRG’s “On Iowa Live” or KFXA’s “I On the Hawks. ” Or when conducting business with Hawkeye Weld & Repair, Hawkeye Sleep Center or Hawkeye Harley-Davidson.
Will Iowa be imitated in Los Angeles next year when USC and UCLA enter the Big Ten and their fans get a feel for all the fabrics that comprise the Hawkeyes’ rich, multilayered media quilt? Or will the media moguls and general population of southern California keep focusing on, you know, other stuff? Now please forward this essay to a friend and let’s get this baby going viral. Go Hawks! .