If You Build It, They Will Come

With the highly anticipated 2024 WNBA ready to start today, let's look at the Iowa Connections in the WNBA this season, including this Fever rookie named Caitlin.  Washington Mystics    Julie Vanloo - Signed letter of intent to play with Iowa State in 2011 but the Belgium was not granted international eligibility from the NCAA. This is her first season with the WNBA.   Dallas Wings   Stephanie Soares - The #4 pick in the 2023 draft out of Iowa State, Soares will be playing her first season in the WNBA after missing laster year with an ACL injury.   Las Vegas Aces   Kiah Stokes - From Cedar Rapids, Kiah will be in her 10th season in WNBA. She won 3 NCAA titles with UConn and the last 2 titles with Las Vegas.   Megan Gustafson - Megan was AP Player of the Year with Iowa in 2019 and has played previous season with Dallas, Washington and Phoenix. This offseason she was Finals MVP for the London Lions in the WBBL final....

    Wild Card Weekend Picks (5-1): Miami (7) over  Kansas City  (4)   Buffalo  (6) over Pittsburgh (2) Houston  (4) over Cleveland (2) Detroit  (7) over LA Rams (6) Tampa  (7) over Philly (4) Green Bay  (7) over Dallas (2)

   Wild Card Weekend Picks (5-1): Miami (7) over  Kansas City  (4)   Buffalo (6) over Pittsburgh (2) Houston  (4) over Cleveland (2) Detroit  (7) over LA Rams (6) Tampa (7) over Philly (4) Green Bay  (7) over Dallas (2) Five for six is pretty good, but how do we justify that Kansas City win over Miami?  I think we can point to two factors that boosted KC's Iowa score.  First, KC is Caitlin Clark's favorite team, and she was unable to see the game as she was routing Indiana at the same time (on Fox, where this game was on Peacock).  Second, KC imported some good old Iowa weather for the game, and we appreciate that as well.

  Our initial list had 117 Iowa Connections in the NFL with Miami and Tampa leading the way.  Both are playoff bound, so let's update the connections at the end of the season and see who we should be rooting for. We added three new connections.  Perrion Winfrey joined the Jets, La'Michael Pettway to the Patriots, and Jake Gervase on Minnesota.  

 Congrats to Kiah Stokes (Cedar Rapids) on winning her 2nd consecutive WNBA title with the Las Vegas Aces!  

 We are down to our final two baseball teams this year, and just as expected it will be Houston vs. Atlanta ..... wait its actually Texas vs. Arizona?  Crazy year, the Twins won a playoff game and Max Scherzer is in the World Series with Texas instead of the Mets. As far as Iowa Connections go, we have 1 connection between the two teams, and its Dane Dunning of the Texas Rangers.  Dane pitched for the Waterloo Bucks back in 2014.   However, lets dig deeper and see who on these teams has those secondary connections.  By that, I mean players who played minor league ball for one of the Iowa minor league teams.  They include teams from Cedar Rapids, Burlington, Quad Cities, Clinton and of course Iowa (Cubs).   Note: I used Baseball reference to pull the list of players who played for each team this season Note: Italics for coaches, bold for current active roster/staff

   Here's my updated list for Iowa Connections on NBA teams.  There are 27 connections at the start of the 2023-24 season.  Connections are sparser than the NFL, so I will only list teams with connections.  Looks like we are cheering for a Milwaukee/ Phoenix Finals this year! (Shout out to Sacramento, Utah, Golden State, Dallas, Indiana and Atlanta)  Note: Coaches/Staff in  italics . Note: These players/coaches/staff are not with NBA teams this after they were last year:  Nate Bjorkgren  (Buena Vista),  Paul Jesperson  (UNI),  Mike Dunlap  (Iowa),  Dave Joerger  (Cedar Rapids River Raiders), Al McCoy (Drake), Aaron Nelson (ISU) Note: This will change as players get added throughout the season and as I discover assistant gms that went to Iowa colleges.  Some names to watch include: Tyger Campbell, Terry Stotts, and  Joe Wieskamp 

 Here's the initial list of players with Iowa Connections in the NFL in 2023. Some teams made aggressive moves to get more Iowa Connections on their team, including the Jets and the Lions.  Others remain happy in their current state of mediocrity, especially the Commanders who after a disappointing season with zero connections...remain at zero connections.  They are the only team this year without one. This blog is official rooting for a Miami / Tampa Bay Super Bowl.   Overall, 117 connections this year (117 last year by the end).  We will add a few as the season progresses.  

  The 2023 NBA draft is complete, and we have updates on the Iowa Connections available for this draft.

 For those who haven't followed my other schedules posts, I'm trying to find cards from each game played for a team.  Today that team is the Iowa State Cyclones football team.  Obviously this is a task that is not reasonable to complete as there are not going to be cards from every game, but it is still fun to see what % of games I can get to.  10%?  20%?  Who knows, but the collecting is always fun! Today I'm going to start with a bunch of Iowa State cameo cards.  A cameo card is when a player (in this case a Cyclone) is in the background of someone else's card. Also, bad run of cards for the Cyclones, all four are losses to some pretty tough competition.  

 Today I've got four cards that are not Hawkeye players directly, but cameos in the background.

 New post on Iowa schedule collecting.  A two-fer with Iowa State, and a bonus game collected!

 Collecting Iowa and Iowa State schedules are tough enough, what about a FCS school with not as many NFL players! Well, doesn't mean we can't try.  Here's the start of the Northern Iowa schedules: 2019 Panini Prizm Draft Picks David Johnson This card shows David Johnson in his away jersey at an outdoor location.  The scan here is difficult to see, but there are football players in the background that are black and gold.  This is from a game at Iowa.  DJ played two games at Iowa, in 2012 and 2014.  Luckily for us, the jersey changed between those years, and the 2014 version has a large purple patch on the sleeve, so this is from the 2012 game. 2012 at Iowa, September 15th, 16-27 loss Panther FB 2012 Update: 1 / 12 Games Hawkeye FB 2012 Update: 1 / 12 Games

  This 2007 Upper Deck Scott Chandler shows Chandler with his home uniform, and Hawk fans in the background. There is an opposing player behind him that is either a New Orleans Saint (ha!) or a Purdue Boilermaker. Chandler played for the Hawks in 2004, 05, and 06. Purdue visited Iowa in both 04 and 06.  In 2004, Chandler had 4 catches for 122 yards.  2006, he had just 2 catches for 9 yard and a touchdown.   In 2004 Purdue had linebacker Stanford Keglar, #59 ... who also played in the 2006 matchup. However, I think I figured it out.  If you watch this video of the 2004 game, you will see the moment Chandler catches the ball and is chased by Keglar. (about 1:18 mark) 2004 vs Purdue, November 6th, 23-21 victory Hawkeye FB 2004 Update: 1 / 12 Games

 I've been playing around with the open version of Chat GPT, and it strikes me that this tool is going to be super helpful and also super dangerous at the same time. Nothing you probably haven't read a million times already, but the vast amounts of knowledge that is available through that interface, and its ability to condense it and spit it back to us in a way that process information better is going to help out many people across many spectrums of work. Of course, I'm going to use it for dumb little ideas.  My favorite prompt so far has been "I want to create a board game based off the movie Die Hard With a Vengeance. Can you create set of rules for gameplay for this?".  Which it did, and with a few tweaks would be a fun game.  But, more specific to this blog, I've begun querying it for new Iowa Connections, because having thousands of collections doesn't mean I can't add a few more names. Here's the problem, Chat GPT lies to me often and with su...

 For loyal readers of this blog (really mostly myself), you know that I have a fast and loose interpretation of what qualifies as an Iowa Connection.  There are the obvious categories: Born in Iowa (i.e. Joe Burrow) Went to an Iowa College (i.e. Tyrese Haliburton) Lived in Iowa (i.e. Jim Harbaugh) Those categories are pretty impeachable.  Then there are the categories that stretch the rules a bit Coached in Iowa (i.e. Ryne Sandberg) Fictional Character from Iowa (i.e. Captain James T. Kirk) Played semi-pro ball in Iowa (i.e. Ozzie Smith) Played pro ball in a 2nd tier league like the CBA (i.e. John Starks) Played for a youth league in Iowa (i.e. Alec Bohm) Named for the state of Iowa (i.e. U.S.S. Iowa) Today I look to see if I want to stretch the rules even further.  

 Let's dig into the next four cards including one I'm unsure about. 2003 Press Pass Brad Banks has Banks in the away jersey.  Our only other clue is that there is a lot of red in the stands behind him.  The railings, padding, and fan apparel.  There is also yellow in those shirts, which could mean Iowa fans mixed in, or Iowa State.   The away games with red teams are as follows: 2001 Nov. 3 at Wisconsin 2001 Nov. 24 at Iowa State 2002 Sep. 7 at Miami (OH) 2002 Oct. 19 at Indiana I lean Iowa State on this one, but can't claim it yet. STATUS : Unknown

 I made a post recently about one of my non-Iowa collections.  It was my Minnesota Vikings Schedule collection, where I try to find a card with a photo from each game of the season.  It's probably never going to be a complete collection for reasons, but fun to collect non the less. I've been mildly working on that collection since Covid, and it took until today for me to have the most obvious of epiphanies.  "I can also collect the Iowa teams schedules!"   Probably I didn't think about this is because it is much harder to collect.  I'll use Iowa Hawkeyes Football for reference.  Each year there are about 0-4 players drafted which make up a majority of the college cards.  Each set does not use college uniforms, mostly early release sets or the SAGE types.  So the pool I have to pull from is much smaller. Who cares!  I'm going to see what I have! I'll start with Iowa Hawkeyes football, and rummage through my duplicates.  Let's se...

Little late getting this out, but we are still in the first round.   In determining who to root for in the 2022-23 NBA Playoffs, we need to review who the Iowa Connections are for the playoff teams.  Congrats to Milwaukee!  You are this blog's choice to win it all! 1 - Denver - Ryan Bowen, Coach (Fort Madison) 1 - Minnesota - Luka Garza (Iowa) 2 - Sacramento - Keegan Murray (Iowa), Harrison Barnes (Ames) 1 - Golden State - Klint Carlson, Coach (Waverly) 0 - Los Angeles Lakers 1 - Memphis - Brad Jones, Coach (Iowa Wolves) 0 - Los Angeles Clippers 2 - Phoenix - Al McCoy, Announcer (Williams), Kevin Young, Coach (Iowa Energy) 3 - Milwaukee - Mike Dunlap, Coach (Iowa), A.J. Green (Northern Iowa), Lindell Wigginton (Iowa State) 0 - Miami 0 - Boston 2 - Atlanta - Paul Jesperson, Coach (Northern Iowa), Kyle Korver, Front Office (Pella) 2 - Philadelphia - Dave Joerger, Coach (Cedar Rapids), Georges Niang (Iowa State) 0 - Brooklyn 1 - Cleveland - Josh Broghamer, Coach (Iowa C...

 What wonders a collector's brain can come up with when left with boxes of commons and nothing but time.  That's what happened to me during the years of Covid home work time and boxes of commons that I went through over and over again. I grew up rooting for the Vikings since my dad grew up in Minnesota, and my brother started collecting Buffalo Bills because Thurman Thomas was awesome when we were kids.  We still collect these teams today, maybe a little less so, but still have decent collections.   Decent collections lead to lots of duplicates.  Decent collections lead to look at weird things like other players on cards.  Even on other team cards.  This Mike Singletary card seems to have him tackling Darrin Nelson, do I add this card to the Darrin Nelson collection? Then one day, you look at a card and think, "I wonder what game this was?"  Then the trouble question crosses your mind.  "I wonder if I can a card with a photo from EVERY g...