I say that realizing the Hawkeyes will be playing in a 107,501-seat stadium known as The Big House.

I say that realizing Michigan, with a 6-1 season record and a 3-0 Big Ten record, has a pretty good team.

But….

I’ve been in The Big House for games more than a dozen times, and it’s not as intimidating as people think.

For my money, it’s not the toughest stadium for a visiting team to play in the Big Ten. Ohio State has that distinction.

Ohio Stadium is louder. With a big game on the line, it’s more of a challenge to win there than at Michigan Stadium.

One other thing. Michigan’s Lloyd Carr is a decent enough coach, but rarely is he referred to as being a giant in the industry.

An old Bobby Stoops he isn’t. A young Forest Evashevski he isn’t.

That’s my way of saying I think Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz—who is on his way to being named the Big Ten’s coach of the year--can easily hold his own in X’s and O’s against Carr.

The Hawkeyes (7-1 and 4-0) have already demonstrated that they’re legitimate Big Ten championship and Rose Bowl contenders. Sure, they played only one good quarter of football Saturday while beating Indiana, 24-8, and, sure, they didn’t perform particularly well against either Purdue or Michigan State in the two preceding weeks.

But this is an Iowa team with talent on both offense and defense, and it’s the most surprising in the Big Ten.

I don’t think the Hawkeyes have yet played their best game of the season.

It could happen Saturday in Ann Arbor.

[My prediction: Iowa 24, Michigan 21]

With the brutal schedule Coach Dan McCarney and his players have faced, to be 6-2 overall and 3-1 in the Big 12 is quite an accomplishment.

The Cyclones aren’t as good as some of their faithful thought a week ago, but they’re good enough to finish the regular season 8-5 overall, 4-4 in the Big 12 and get invited to a good bowl game.

[Don’t forget, there are no bad bowl games].

As far as I’m concerned, Seneca Wallace is still the leader in the clubhouse for the Heisman Trophy. Even after Saturday’s horrible performance, he’d get my vote.

Iowa State, which handed Iowa its only loss, 36-31, on Sept. 14, is now below the Hawkeyes in both the Associated Press and coaches’ polls.

The Cyclones are ranked No. 17 by the AP after being No. 9 last week and No. 18 by the coaches after being No. 13 last week. Iowa is No. 13 in the AP poll after being No. 15 last week and No. 14 in the coaches’ poll after being No. 16 last week.

Iowa State took its big hit in the polls after seeing its record fall to 0-47-2 against teams ranked in the top 5.

Air Force has no business being on the same football field as Notre Dame. Air Force’s players are preparing to fly F-16 jets and protect the world. Notre Dame’s players are preparing to play football on Sunday.

With a 7-0 record under first-year coach Tyrone Willingham, it’s obvious Bob Davie, who preceded him in the job, is right where he deserves to be—in the ESPN television booth.

With the talent Notre Dame has, it’s hard to believe Davie had a 5-6 record in 2001. But it’s not hard to believe that Davie was fired.

And for all the Notre Dame haters out there, they’ll have to depend on Florida State to beat the Fighting Irish on Saturday.

It’s going to happen.

Specifically, what word you say.

Rev. David Mumm of Des Moines e-mailed me a story about Hendrick Motorsports crew chief Chad Knaus being fined $5,000 by NASCAR for using the "f" word in a post-race interview.

In a post-race interview on TNT, Knaus used the word to describe his team’s plans for the rest of the season.

He was penalized under a section in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series rule book that says: "Actions detrimental to stock car racing—use of improper language."

Here’s one, titled "The Paper Nobody Should Depend Upon’’ by the author:

"After reading the article in the latest issue of PointBlank, I went online to track down your articles about the Register. I, too, have been appalled at what the Register has been passing off as news….or not printing at all.

"Having spent my pre-college years in the Chicago area, I read the Tribune on the Internet on a daily basis and pick up the Sunday edition on the newsstand. I also read other news sites on the net and I am always amazed when I see something in the Register I read two or three days or sometimes a week after I read it elsewhere. And I’m not talking about opinion columns or feature stories, but about actual news reports! Maybe it’s because there’s so much stuff in the Register that’s written elsewhere they have a hard time using it all in a timely manner? I never understood why, when faced with competition from the Internet and all sorts of cable news networks, one of the first things the Register did was cut back (or force out) a large chunk of their local writing staff – the very thing that would differentiate them from those competitors! (Of course, I used to work in the production department of the ‘local’ cable company before they cut that down to nothing. So I guess it must be an established business practice).

"I subscribe – but only to the Saturday/Sunday editions as there’s usually a copy or two of the paper floating around the office that I can read during the week. (And why is it that, unlike most other subscriptions I have, it costs MORE per paper to subscribe than if I picked up a copy on the newsstand?)

"Around the middle of June, I came home from work to find a message on my machine from the Register’s circulation department telling me that if I called them back I could receive the Monday through Friday Register as well as A CALCULATOR in the lovely decorator color of my choice. I was kind of ambivalent about the Register, but how could I pass up that calculator? So I called and was told that this free delivery would commence immediately and last until the July 7 expiration of my current subscription. At that time, they would automatically renew my subscription unless I called and told them not to. Of course, what they were hoping for was that I wouldn’t notice that the renewal would be for seven days a week and not the weekend subscription I’d signed up for.

"So this free delivery stuff kicks in on Monday and I awoke to find not only the Monday Register but another copy of the SUNDAY Register. (Sound familiar?) Everything is fine the rest of the week, but come the following Monday, once again there’s the news of the day AND the news of yesterday. I’m starting to feel a little guilty, so I call up the circulation department and tell them what’s going on and that I really didn’t need another copy of a paper I’d read the day before. I explained to the person I talked to that the only reason this was happening was because of their free offer, which I was going to cancel as of July 7 anyway. He told me that he would stop that second Sunday issue, would mark me down to have the free issues stop on July 7 and also gave me the amount for renewal back to the weekend plan. I finally stopped getting two Sunday papers (not until after another week of double delivery) but, sure enough, when my renewal notice came in the mail, it gave only the price for the 7-day delivery. So I crossed it all out, wrote in ‘WEEKENDER’ (I love being a ‘weekender.’ Makes me feel so cosmopolitan) and sent in the check for the Weekender price which would cover my subscription through some time around the beginning of October.

"Well, you guessed it. I still kept getting the daily paper and in August I received another renewal notice. I called the Register, told them that I had sent in the amount for the weekend subscription, had marked WEEKENDER on the invoice and that my subscription was not scheduled to run out until October. They looked up my account, discovered that I was right and told me that everything was taken care of.

"The kicker is that the daily deliveries did finally stop—early this month. So I figure their little plan to trick me into becoming a 7-day subscriber cost them a few bucks AND I got this lovely blue calculator!

"Idiots!"

[That pretty much tells the story of a sad-sack operation. No further comment from me is necessary].