UNDATED (AP) – The big change in the Big Ten this coming football season is the move to a 9-game conference schedule. What doesn’t figure to change is the dominance of the East Division.  Ohio State, Michigan and defending champion Michigan State all are positioned to make runs at being national top-10 teams, if not College Football Playoff contenders.

Last season, Michigan State went to the playoff and was joined by fellow East members Ohio State and Michigan among the top 12 teams in the final Top 25. Iowa, at No. 9, was the only West team among the top dozen. Commissioner Jim Delany says shuffling the divisions is not in the plans. He terms the East’s recent dominance of the conference a “little cyclical.” Iowa is the favorite heading into the season to win the conference’s eastern division.

Nebraska had five losses by five points or less, but a bowl win over UCLA left the Cornhuskers with a positive vibe coming out of a 6-7 first season under Mike Riley. If the Huskers can split back-to-back road games against Wisconsin and Ohio State, their Nov. 25 game at Iowa might decide the West.

Yasiel Puig has found the party in the Pacific Coast League. Days after a demotion to the minors, the unpredictable Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder posted videos to his Snapchat account Monday night of him partying with his new Triple-A teammates. The series of videos followed Oklahoma City’s 3-2 loss at the Iowa Cubs.

Puig began by posting a video of him shirtless in the team’s locker room, smiling and saying: “It’s so funny. We lose today, and everybody’s happy.” Videos posted later showed Puig and his teammates dancing, singing and chanting, often using profanity. A banner on one of the videos reads, “I Love this Team.”

Puig was optioned to Oklahoma City last week after the Dodgers could not find a taker for him before the non-waiver trade deadline. He went 2 for 4 in his first game with Oklahoma City on Sunday and was 0 for 3 on Monday. A major league All-Star in 2014, the 25-year-old Puig has been physically limited this season and largely inconsistent when healthy, batting .260 with seven homers in 81 big league games. The Cuban slugger signed a $42 million, seven-year contract in June 2012.

Northern Iowa coach Mark Farley says his focus in fall camp this year is a flip-flop from last season when they didn’t have to work as much to prepare the defense for the opener.  “Last year we spend a lot of time on offense because the defense was sound. The defense has a lot of good players on it and all you had to do was get them lined up right and let them run,” according to Farley. “This year, the defense is so raw and so new that I walk in the room and more than half of it, it will be the first time they take the field. There was a time in spring ball that there was only one guy who played a game for us in the starting 11.”

Farley says they’ll do a lot in practice to put pressure on the defense to get them ready. “We need to prepare them through how we coach them because we can’t test our team on the field. We’ve got to find out about them through the stress we put on them on the field. We will stress the defense,” he says. One key will be the linebackers, where the Panthers have some experience returning along with several new players who Farley says have to learn defense after being featured as quarterbacks or runningbacks in high school.

“When we’ve really got good linebackers, they were either quarterbacks or running backs in high school. And then we’ve got to coach the toughness into them, coach that play into them. Because, they have that athleticism, they’ve just got to get used to playing close to that line of scrimmage,” Farley says.

The Panthers open the season on the road September 3rd against Iowa State.

(Radio Iowa Sports)

Hawkeye offensive coordinator Greg Davis knows who they key guys will be on offense as they prepare for the season opener — his challenge is to find the supporting players. He said “We’ve got seven guys back who have played some ball, so that’s an encouraging thing. We we ant to do, is we want to get better each day as an offense, and then when we get to scrimmages and we play in game situations, we want to get into as many of those situations as you can without your quarterback being played live.”

The offensive game plan will come together after Davis sees who stands out. “You want to install the offense — there’s no question — but you also want to find out who is ready to help this year,” Davis says. “And then when you kind of know who is ready to help this year, then you can start trying to determine how many two tight ends will be play, how many three wide receivers.” Davis has senior quarterback C.J. Beathard to get everything started, and he says that gives them a lot of options.

“He’s a guy who can do a lot of different things, from under the center from in the gun, it doesn’t really matter to him. The biggest thing is he’s done it now. And we felt last year at this time when we were talking he would do what he did. But he hadn’t. Now he has,” Davis says. Iowa lost a couple of experienced receivers and moved redshirt freshman Ryan Boyle of West Des Moines over from quarterback to help give them more depth.

Davis says Boyle was moved to slot receiver in spring and now Boyle is starting to pick up the nuances of the postion. He also likes what he has seen of freshman Devonte Young. “I think it will end up being a pretty good group,” Davis says. Davis says the idea was to get Boyle on the field, and his change of position for now is a one year experiment.

“I didn’t see Ryan getting in the mix this year, and I didn’t see it hurting him when we come back in the spring,” Davis says. Davis says he’s confident the offensive line will be good again this year, and that’s why it’s key to find out who can play where at the skill positions to determine how to develop the offense. Iowa opens the season at home on September 3rd against Miami of Ohio.

(Radio Iowa Sports)

Atlantic standout basketball player Ryan Hawkins switched his college commitment last week to Northwest Missouri State.  Hawkins signed a letter of intent last Wednesday to play for the Bearcats.  The 6-7 Forward had originally committed to play at Wayne State College but changed his mind after a coaching change for the Wildcats.

Hawkins joins a Bearcats squad that went 27-6 overall last season and earned a trip to the Elite Eight of the Division II NCAA Tournament.  The Bearcats also went 19-3 in the MIAA Conference.

Hawkins finished his senior season at Atlantic averaging 22.2 points per game on 54.6% shooting from the field.  He also had 89 steals and 43 blocked shots for the Trojans.  He now will start with preseason workouts until practice with Northwest officially begins on October 16th.

The 7:17-a.m. Sportscast w/Jim Field.

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Iowa quarterback C.J. Beathard enters his senior season with a lot of pre-season attention after leading the Hawkeyes to a 12-2 mark in his first season as the starter. He says for the offense to improve, he will have to improve his play in every area. “More touchdown passes, less turnovers, smarter play getting the ball down, making decisions quicker. I have been working on all that this offseason and in the camp here and back to spring ball just trying to improve my game any way I can,” Beathard says. He played much of last season hurt and says he is in the best health he has been in since first getting hurt. That should add to his efforts to improve the offense.

“I am able to do some stuff with me feet, run the ball more, and get out of the pocket better. It helps me move in the pocket, so I think it will improve our offense as a whole in every way really,” according to Beathard. Beathard’s improved mobility won’t mean anything if he doesn’t have receivers to throw to, and he says that’s another part of the equation. He says they lost to key senior receivers in Jacob Hillyer and Tevaun Smith and they will need young receivers without a lot playing time to step up and pick up some of the load.

Beathard says he needs to work a lot with those receiver to bring them along. He is on all of the major watch lists heading into the season and says he doesn’t mind being in the spotlight. “You know my dad always told me to be thankful for it right now because some day they won’t care to know who you are,” Beathard says. “So, you’ve got to embrace it when you have it.” The Hawkeyes were both praised and criticized as they went through the perfect regular season and into the conference championship game. Beathard says that will help them deal with whatever attention they get as this season moves ahead.

“I think it does, I mean we did a good job at ignoring the noise — whether it be negative noise or positive noise — there was a lot of that going on early in the season and then later on in the season. I think we did a good job of tuning out when there were a lot of outlets we could have listened to, and people talking about how good you are,” Beathard says. “When you start listening to that stuff that’s when you start going downhill you start thinking that you’ve made it, that you’ve arrived, and once you think that, that’s bad.”

The Franklin, Tennessee native will lead the Hawkeyes when they open the season on September 3rd at home against Miami of Ohio.

(Radio Iowa)

The Iowa Hawkeye football team has opened fall camp with the hope of repeating the record-setting success of last season, while putting a blowout loss in the Rose Bowl behind them. Coach Kirk Ferentz talked with the media Saturday about the work ahead. “Last year was a really historic year in a lot of ways, more importantly a memorable year and a very rewarding year, and I think probably the important thing for us as a football team is to try to learn some lessons from it and hopefully we’ve done that as we approach moving forward,” Ferentz said.

The Hawks are ranked 15th in the preseason poll, after garnering little attention at the start of last year. Ferentz said his research shows how little the early polls mean. “Of the 25 teams that were in the preseason last year, eight of them didn’t make the cut at the end, and so obviously eight teams did make it, entered in,” Ferentz said. “Probably most noteworthy I think would be Houston won 13 games, we won 12, neither us were mentioned a year ago at this point. So the thing I think our players need to understand is that door swings both ways. It opens and it closes.”

Senior quarterback C.J. Beathard is one of the reasons Iowa is expected to make another run at the Big 10 West title. Ferentz says Beathard is a lot like former Hawkeye great Brad Banks when it comes to leadership. ” I don’t know if I can articulate what it was about him, but I know this, it was really powerful, and as he went, our team really went with him. C.J. has kind of got that same characteristic. There’s just something about him,” according to Ferentz. “And the commonality there is they’re both genuine people. They’re just really genuine guys. They’ve got all the right motives and agendas. They’re just out there to help the team win, and they care about their teammates, all those things you hope a quarterback can do. And then different skill sets but yet very effective players in their own right.”

Ferentz said the practices heading up to the first game will be key in determining if this season ends up as successful as last year. “You know as mundane as this sounds, the most important thing we can do is just try to capitalize on every day in front of us. If you just look back last year…I think our team really grew in August really on lot of levels, not just as football players, our leadership base group. It was just a result of doing things right, little things right, paying attention. That’s really the challenge that’s ahead of us right now,” Ferentz explained.

Escaping all the hype and positive things said about the team in the media and online is not easy. Ferentz said his players will read and hear things, but the coaches remind them it doesn’t mean anything at this point. “Just like last year, nobody picked us to do anything, we ended up having a really good year. And so it’s about our actions, it’s not about what people are saying negatively or positively. That’s what we try to educate our players to and then show them the illustrations that back that up,” Ferentz said.

Iowa opens the season September 3rd at home against Miami of Ohio.

(Radio Iowa)

ST. LOUIS (AP) – Mike Foltynewicz worked six strong innings, Nick Markakis and Erick Aybar had two RBIs apiece and the Atlanta Braves kept the St. Louis Cardinals down at home with a 6-3 victory on Sunday. Matt Kemp added two hits and an RBI to help the Braves take two of three, outscoring the Cardinals 19-8 the last two games. Atlanta has the worst record in the majors at 41-70, but has won seven of its last 11 overall.

Adam Wainwright (9-6) had a rare off-day against Atlanta, surrendering three runs in the first and second. He entered 8-2 with a 2.95 ERA against the Braves, who drafted him in the first round in 2000 and traded him to St. Louis in 2003 in a deal for J.D. Drew.

The Cardinals are just 26-32 at home after going 55-26 last season, but have been good on the road at 32-21. Foltynewicz (5-5) gave up a run and six hits. Jim Johnson earned his eighth save in 11 chances. Next up for the Cardinals is the Cincinnati Reds. Listen for the action Monday evening beginning at 6:20, with the 1st pitch at 7:15, here on KJAN.