Just a reminder

It's Iowa day on BTN, so all afternoon/evening you can watch Hawkeye-related programming, including 3 of Iowa football "greatest games." The day ends with the 2005 Capitol One Bowl against LSU at 10:00, but the highlight of the night, at least for me, is a replay of last year's Insight Bowl which is airing at 6:00.

Here is the full schedule:

• 1:00 - The Big Ten's Greatest Games - Basketball: 2/7/04 - Iowa at Indiana
• 2:00 - The Big Ten's Greatest Games - Football: 2007 - Michigan State at Iowa
• 5:00 - Iowa Campus Programming: Iowa Magazine: #10
• 5:30 - Big Ten Icons: Nile Kinnick
• 6:00 - Big Ten Football Replay: 2010 Insight Bowl - Iowa vs. Missouri
• 8:00 - Big Ten Basketball Replay: Purdue vs. Iowa
• 10:00 - The Big Ten's Greatest Games - Football: 2005 Capital One Bowl: Iowa vs. LSU

The Game

The Basics

Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Head Coach: Todd Graham
Mascot: Panthers
Conference: Big East
2010 Record: 8-5 (5-2)

The Offense

Returning Starters: 6
Key Players: QB Tino Sunseri, WR Mike Shanahan
Key Losses: RB Dion Lewis, OL Jason Pinkston, WR Jon Baldwin

Under new head coach Todd Graham, Pitt's offense will be no-huddle and fast-paced (it was installed at Tulsa by Gus Malzhan, Auburn's current OC...so think Auburn minus Cam Newton). Graham was previously the head coach at Tulsa, a team who averaged over 500 yards of offense and over 40 points per game. That will be a drastic change from the more traditional offense that Pitt employed under Dave Wannstedt. However, the transition may not fully be complete by the third week of the year. Pitt may have more of a scaled back version of Graham's high octane offense.

Remember all of those awesome workout videos from last summer on GoHawks.com? So does the NCAA. Those videos inadvertently violated a NCAA rule that requires summer workouts to be voluntary and therefor not taped. The not taped part is so coaches can't use the film to determine who did or did not attend the workouts.

Iowa has self-reported the violation and educated the staff responsible for posting the videos. The videos from last summer are either gone or were edited to remove any film from an actual workout. The violation is pretty minor, so as long as it doesn't happen again there shouldn't be any real NCAA repercussions. It does mean though that we won't have the same awesome videos for this summer. However, the video staff is still putting together some quality stuff.

Though he didn't know it at the time, Ed from HawkeyeKoolaid.com issued a challenge to me when he tweeted that he'd like an app to make customized Iowa licence plates. Michigan blog Maize N Brew has been making plates using this app, but the app doesn't have the University of Iowa plate. So, here we go...

I threw something together to make custom UofI plates. The font isn't great. I had trouble finding on that matched well so I just picked one of the Google Web Fonts that looked okay. You should be able to save the picture after you add some text. You can then post it to the comments or wherever you'd like

NOTE: In Chrome it will save the image without the proper file extension. So you'll need to rename the image after you download it to "YOURIMAGENAME.png". I think in Firefox it'll prompt you to name the image before you download it.

The game times for the season opener against Tennessee Tech and the game against Pitt were announced yesterday and it's 11:00 for both. No surprise, the TTU game will be aired on BTN and the Pitt game will be picked up by either ESPN or ESPN2.

With the Iowa State game time announced last week, we're now up to 5 known kickoffs--4 of which are at 11:00.

• vs. Tennessee Tech - September 3| 11:00 AM | BTN
• at Iowa State - September 10 | 11:00 AM | FSN
• vs. Pittsburgh - September 17 | 11:00 AM | ESPN/ESPN2
• vs. Northwestern - October 15 | 6:00 PM | BTN
• vs. Indiana - October 22 | 11:00 AM | TBA
• at Nebraska - November 25 | 11:00 AM | ABC

I am still hopefull that there will be a bunch of 2:30 games to round out the schedule. The games against Penn State, Michigan, and Michigan State would be good candidates for a regional ABC game with a 2:30 start. And, BTN recently got the rights to air games at 2:30, which was was previously an exclusive time slot for ESPN/ABC for B1G games. This means the games against Louisiana-Monroe, Minnesota, and Purdue, which looked like obvious 11:00 BTN games before, could now be 2:30 BTN games. That sounds great to me.