The Preseason AP Top 25 was announced and the Iowa Hawkeyes come in at #22. In the Coaches Poll the Hawks were ranked #21.

There is nothing too surprising here. Obviously Florida came in at #1 with all but 2 of the first place votes. The Gators are followed by Texas, Oklahaoma, USC, and Alabama to round out the top 5 (exactly the same top 5, actually top 7, as the coaches poll). Ole Miss may be a little high at 8 and like the coaches poll, I don't think Notre Dame should be included. I also think Georgia and California are both a little high, but it's hard for me to think of an argument for who else I'd put in their places. All in all, #22 or #21 for the Hawkeyes sounds about right to me.

Juice Williams, you're not alone. There has been a lot of hatred towards the Hawkeyes lately. The good news is that most of it is the result of national-title-dream crushing and embarrassing beat-downs. So, maybe their just jealous.

Penn State is not too fond of Iowa:
I linked to a post from Zombie Nation the other day that says that Penn State fans absolutely hate Iowa the most. Well, yesterday, Nittany Whiteout has a post entitled "24-23 Never Forget". PSU is trying to get their revenge on and at least the fans are looking ahead to September 26. They even have a cute little video.

Wow, Minnesota REALLY hates Iowa:
This Jeff guy from the Golden Gophers Football blog really hates the Hawkeyes (but loves comment censorship). He later apologized from some of the harsher comments. But hey, it's a rivalry, so a little hatred is a good thing.

Suspended Wisconsin Player's Dad hates Iowa too:
This is kind of old news, but two Wisconsin senior safeties, Shane Carter and Aubrey Pleasant, were suspended by Coach Bielema last week. The players went crying to mommy and daddy and the whole thing is a big mess. Well, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with Iowa (it doesn't), but for some reason Pleasant's father threw out this quote:

I hate to say this, but you just can't treat people any old way. I think that is what he [Bielema] is used to doing. Maybe this is how they do things at Iowa.

I don't know why he had to throw in that last line about Iowa. Yeah, Bielema has a Tigerhawk tattoo, but honestly I think it's time for Badger fans to get over that.

Kirk Ferentz was interviewed on 97.1 The Fan, a sports radio station in Columbus, OH, today. You can listen to the interview here. It's about 7 minutes starting around minute 27.

Ferentz talked a little about injuries particularly along the offensive line, Stanzi's development, Moeaki's health, and the defense tackle position. The big new, however, is that Ferentz is hopeful that Jewel Hampton will be back on the field next week. He uses his typical coach speak, but the situation sounds much better than it did last weekend after the open practice. If Hampton has a shot at practicing next week, then the odds that he'll be ready for UNI are more in his favor. If he's not going to be 100% though, I'd be comfortable holding him out until the ISU game.

Bulaga update:
Like Hampton, OT Bryan Bulaga has also been sitting out from practice with a knee "tweak" but if you look at the scrimmage pictures from today, the last pic clearly show #79 in full pads ready to go. There's no pictures of him in action, but he probably wouldn't be in pads if he wasn't feeling better.

Can you believe college football is only 2 weeks away?! Sure our Hawkeyes don't play for another 16 days, but if you are dying to see some football you will have some options on Thursday, September 3rd (Indiana vs. Eastern Kentucky, Iowa State vs. North Dakota State, Boise State vs. Oregon, and a couple less interesting games). Anyway, with the season so close I'm starting to form a plan about what I'll be posting the next 2 weeks and then into the season.

First off, next week I plan on doing some kind of season primer. Realizing that not everybody has followed Iowa Football during the long off season, I'll try to recap the big news from over the spring/summer, look at the new names on the roster (freshman, new impact players, etc...), break down the offense and defense and probably special teams, and finally examine the 2009 schedule. That's a lot of writing I've got to do! So, hopefully by the end of next week we'll all be primed and ready to get into game week.

Alright, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do for game weeks. The first week will be a little bit different, but my main plan is to spend a couple days recapping the previous game, then a couple days looking ahead to the upcoming game, which makes sense, right? I also plan on doing my best to follow how our 2010 commits are doing in their high school games and generally keep up on any other news. This will be the first season for this blog, so bear with my while I get it all figured out. It should be a fun few months.

The Hawkeye Marching Band maybe playing the fight song.In case you hadn't noticed, this blog's title is inspired by the Iowa Fight Song. So naturally, whenever there is a fight song related happening I get excited and post about it. That said, the following is nothing to really get that excited about.

Today, in Camp Central hawkeyesports.com posted a brief (and I mean brief) video of the freshman singing the Iowa Fight Song. They're singing a little too fast if you ask me. I'll let it slide this time, since they are only freshmen.

In other fight song news...if you've been following the Big Ten Football Tour on BTN, and I suggest that you do as they are doing a pretty fantastic job of going around to all the fall camps and giving a good preview of each Big Ten team, then you may know that at each stop along they way they are giving out free tickets to the season opener (that's UNI for us Hawkeyes) for the first fan to spot the BTN Bus and sing the fight song (example here). So you better brush up on your lyrics (see the bottom right of this page) as the BTN is coming to town August 25th.