Saturday, September 01, 2007

Fight! Fight! Fight! For IOWA!

Non-sports fans in Chicago probably noticed that there was a lot of people wearing yellow this Saturday. The reason? The Iowa Hawkeyes were in town to take on the Northern Illinois Huskies at the first college football game ever held at Soldier Field.

Now, Hawkeye fans are well known for traveling well, but I was still blown away by their turnout. Although NIU was technically the home team: wearing the colored jerseys, providing the PA announcer, scoreboard graphics, credentials, etc., you might as well have called Chicago "Iowa City East" for the day. Out of an announced crowd of over 60,000, I would have to say at least 50,000 were Hawkeye fans, and of those, at least 45,000 wearing some shade of yellow or black. Now I covered an extensive playoff run by the Bears last season, but it was arguably nuttier and louder at Soldier Field today than it is at a Bears game. So who's got great fans? Yeah.... IOWA.




So in my last post, I mentioned that after two NFL preseason games, I felt the rust was gone and I would be ready for a great regular season: in both the NFL and NCAA. Sure, the action tracking/shooting rust is gone, but it does no good when you have no luck! My job is to tell the story, and a big story line in today's game was Iowa's defense, who limited the Huskies to only 3 points en route to a 16-3 victory. However, I was not able to make a solid photo of any of Iowa's three sacks or three interceptions. I was either on the wrong side of the field, or even more frustrating, someone would run right in front of me (like a referee or another player) and block the play.... grrrrr....

Well, I like to say I got a C- in this game. I still did my best to tell the story, but they aren't necessarily the most compelling images for the story. I hate to make it seem like there is so much luck involved in shooting football just based on where you happen to be shooting from, but when shooting a game solo, there is just so much ground to cover, you can only make your best guess as to where the action is going to go. In retrospect, maybe I should have positioned myself to shoot more of Iowa's defense, but NIU had shown flashes throughout the entire game, so I didn't want to miss a big offensive play for them. Hmmmm, maybe I'm still rusty afterall....

So I may not have gotten a solid sack or solid interception picture, but at least I got a decent frame of the defensive back who got two picks. However, it would have been even better had I gotten a shot where the ball was a bit closer. Oh well...




Another story line was that Iowa introduced a new starting quarterback, and he came out and responded by throwing a touchdown pass. And there was much rejoicing.




Finally, Iowa had two 100 yard rushers, which helped keep the Huskies off the field. Here's one of them, breaking away from the NIU defense:



And of course, your token random action shots to help fill out the day's take:


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