Jake Christensen is Leaving, to No Surprise

A magazine from the summer of '08

Adam Rittenberg of ESPN.com got the story today (http://myespn.go.com/blogs/bigten) that Iowa junior quarterback Jake Christensen will transfer from the school. This doesn’t exactly rate on the shock meter. The shock would have been had he stayed. He was rumored to be on his way out of Iowa City since October.

Christensen had the quarterback job for a whole season in 2007. It didn’t go well. He was the quarterback for the entire second-half of the Pittsburgh game in 2008. It didn’t go well. He surrendered the job after that game, and it was Rick Stanzi’s to keep.

By all accounts, Christensen did nothing disruptive in the aftermath. I have never heard a teammate say a bad thing about him, and I don’t know anyone else in the Iowa media who has heard anything of the sort.

The quarterback-change was for the better as far as the Hawkeyes were concerned. But it wasn’t pleasant to see Christensen get raked over the coals last year playing on an offense that wasn’t very good or experienced as a whole. Stanzi became a good QB as this season went along, and brought stability to the offense. He gives Iowa fans reason to think the 2009 offense will be capable.

But how good would he or any quarterback have been last year with that 2007 offensive line or corps of mostly freshman receivers?

Christensen got more than a fair chance to keep his job, so there should be no grousing from his end, and we’ve heard none. Nor should anyone who claims to represent Iowa as a fan have anything nasty to say about him as he leaves the program.

He got booed in his home stadium. That was lousy. Here’s hoping he finds some success, peace and fun at his next stop.

Outback Bowl No Ratings Winner

The Outback Bowl was watched on television by a lot of people in Iowa and South Carolina and, uh, uh, uh …

Of the 34 bowl games, the Jan. 1 Outback Bowl ranked 17th in television viewers according to Nielsen, which knows a bit more about ratings than most of us.

The game had 4,093,000 viewers according to http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/sports-wrap-college-football-bowls-over-audiences/. That’s a 10 percent drop from the year before when the Outback’s matchup was Tennessee-Wisconsin.

The TV audience for the Georgia-Michigan State Capital One Bowl, which started two hours after the Outback Bowl, was 10.8 million. But that was a 27 percent drop from its Michigan-Florida pairing of the year before.

These weren’t great matchups for American interests.

Some of the bowls that had more viewers than the Outback, though … hard to believe.

The Emerald Bowl was ninth of the 34 bowls. It was a game between unranked Miami and unranked California. The Wisconsin-Florida State Champs Sports Bowl had the seventh-largest audience, over 7 million viewers on the night of Dec. 27.

Go figure.

The Outback Bowl is a crummy time slot for TV (It begins at 8 a.m. on the West Coast), so you know you’ll never have a huge audience no matter the matchup. It’s a hangover game according to one West Coast friend of the Hlog’s, someone who may have some first-hand knowledge of such things.

So if you think just because you play in a Florida bowl you’ll get a lot of sweet national exposure for recruiting and merchandising, think again. If that bowl is the Outback, anyway.