Sept. 11, 2010
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- Vote for R. Stanzi as a Premier Player
- 24 Hawkeyes to Watch
- Take the Hawkeyes with You: Iowa Podcasts
- Download your Iowa Hawkeye iPhone app!
- gohawks.com
- Iowa Football wallpaper
IOWA CITY, Iowa – The University of Iowa will be one of four stops on the first-ever “Big Ten Road Trip” for ESPN’s popular SportsNation show featuring Colin Cowherd and Michelle Beadle.
SportsNation will be broadcast live from Hubbard Park at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 21. ESPN will also originate Cowherd’s daily radio show, The Herd with Colin Cowherd, from the same location on the UI campus beginning at 9 a.m.
Iowa City and the UI is the second of four stops for the SportsNation tour of select Big Ten campuses. It starts on Monday (Sept. 20) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and continues with visits to the campuses of the University of Michigan (Wednesday, Sept. 22) and Penn State University (Thursday, Sept. 23).
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Friends of the UI and fans of the Iowa Hawkeyes are invited to be part of the audience for the live broadcast of SportsNation. The first 1,000 to arrive at Hubbard at 2 p.m. will receive a free souvenir t-shirt featuring the official logo of the Hawkeyes’ “Throwback Game” against Ball State on Sept. 24. Tickets to all of Iowa’s remaining home football games and other door prizes will also be given away to randomly selected spectators.
SportsNation is well into its second year and has proven to be very popular in great measure because of the “connectedness” of today’s world: The show combines communications technology with the hottest topics in sports. Throw in two hosts that gel together and a few videos of chipmunks playing soccer, and you’ve got a hit.
“We wanted to do three things with the show,” Kevin Wildes, one of the producers of the show, said in July. “Inform, amuse, and interact. So every segment we do, we try to be informative first, interactive with SportsNation.com, and finally we try to amuse you a little bit. I’d say we’re doing a halfway decent job so far.”
“We want to embrace the Internet and every social media out there,” Beadle said. “Everyone behind the scenes is young, cool, and hip–more so than we [Colin and I] are! And they are in charge of figuring all of that out.”
Because of SportsNation’s user-friendliness, the show has attracted nearly 700,000 followers on Twitter while co-host Beadle has 65,000 users awaiting her next 140-character thought.
Cowherd joined ESPN Radio in 2004 with the debut of “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” with a west coast-only hour airing from 6-7 a.m., Pacific time. The Herd features topical commentary on the day’s most important sports news, perspective on the top stories, interviews with the biggest newsmakers, and entertaining daily segments including “Spanning the Globe” and “Rants of the Day.”
In the past year, Colin has adapted parts of his show onto other platforms, including a version of “Spanning the Globe” on ESPN’s SportsCenter, and his opening rant presented with video on ESPN3. Colin also has hosted various programs for ESPN2, ESPNU, and ESPN Classic including, SportsNation.