Every Sunday we publish the SGI Medium Peach that highlights all our articles for the week in one place for easy reading.

This is a fun homage to the DSM Registers Sunday Sports section, “The Big Peach,” which used to be printed on Peach-Colored paper and be sitting on your porch waiting to be read.

A big thank you all our readers as the first 18 days of @Sportsguysiowa have been so much fun. The response has been outstanding and way more than we expected. We will be launching more content channels on Instagram, Facebook soon, and expanding our website to allow you to sign up for a weekly email of our top stories if you wish.

We have more fun stuff to announce before the start of football season as the number of volunteers we have who want to help continues to grow. We are 100% volunteer so if you want to add some coverage of your favorite Iowa Small College or University or High School team please just contact us thru X or using our emails.

Our top 7 stories of the week (in read article ranking – please just click on the link to read)

1. SGI Preview – Drake Bulldogs 2025 Football – SportsGuysIowa – Our preview for Drake Football in 2025. Drake is coming off the best 2 years in their history winning the Pioneer League and advancing to the NCAA FCS D1 Playoffs in back-to-back years. They have a new HC Joe Woodley (who won the NAIA Natty at Grandview University in Des Moines last year). Our SGI previews are “Phil Steele” style with four-year statistical trending and a roster analysis of every former Iowa High School player on the roster (Drake has 30 former Iowa HS players this fall). The Boys in Blue have a lot of great storylines to follow this fall and we are excited to cover them.
2. SGI Preview – Coe College Kohawks Football 2025 – SportsGuysIowa This article and the Drake preview were in a statistical dead heat for our top read article of the week. We started our previews of Iowa’s NCAA DIII programs with the Kohawks because we have a lot of former Kohawk football players helping with the start of SGI. So, this one was fun with the same “Phil Steele” statistical analysis approach. Coe is coming off back-to-back NCAA Division III playoff appearances and is a top team in the rugged A-R-C. Coe has 57 Former Iowa High School players on the roster this fall. We wanted to show we are unbiased at SGI by placing this article in 2nd place even though it was tied with the Drake Article. We will do our best to be unbiased in our Central, Wartburg, Cornell, UD, BV, etc. previews that will be launching daily until the kickoff….Seriously, we promise to try and say nice things about the Knights, Dutch….
3. Henning Leads HLV/TC Football into 2025 – SportsGuysIowa – SGI Co -Editor B Lenny (Ghost) previewed his alma mater H-L-V’s fall high school season with a great interview of Coach Edy Hennings and staff. This was a fun to read and blew up reader-wise in the H-L-V district. As we like to say at SGI – Ghost in his high school BB career put the “three in H-L-V”, so having him write about his beloved Warriors is a lot of fun.
4. SGI Preview – Graceland College Football 2025 – SportsGuysIowa – This story was published yesterday, so it did not have the same time to climb the weekly rankings. The Graceland NAIA Football resurgence in Lamoni these past three years (22-24) has been something. They went 7-4 in 2024 and 17-16 the last three years with an improving record every year. You may be saying to yourself what’s the big deal, a just over .500 team the last three years? Well, the previous 33-game stretch prior to 2022 Graceland was 1-32 (with 28 losses in row prior to 2022). There is no better coaching and program turnaround in the United States than is what is happening in Lamoni. We are excited to follow the Yellow Jackets closely in 2025 (Included their Iowa HS player roster of 11)
5. Eight Pack of Eight-Player Programs Set to Practice – SportsGuysIowa This column that ghost wrote about Eight man football blew up.  The story about Week Zero games – Newell-Fonda at Boyer Valley, Griswold hosts East Mills, Stanton travels to Seymour, and Exira-Elk Horn-Kimballton taking on Sidney was a fun read. It gets you fired up for the season, and the number of readers made me go…whoa I did not know that many people lived in Western Iowa. That hometown Iowa pride for their teams shows through.
6. Colin Rice – Northwest Waukee Basketball Star commits to the Nebraska Cornhuskers – This article first ran the following week. As you may know, Colin is related by blood to many on our Sport Guys Iowa team, so that has helped this be the top article since we launched 16 days ago. One of the best things about C-Rice is his competitiveness, so we suspect he strategically retweeted our article last week to make sure he stayed in our top stories of the week. We, as an editorial team are strategizing this afternoon to find a way to counter his efforts. Colin issued us a challenge, and we as competitors will respond.
7. Waukee Northwest Football Preview 2025 – Last week in The Medium Peach we shared that our preview of the Cross Town rivals Waukee Warriors just out-paced or NW preview. The NW fans took that slight seriously and a few reposts later shot they shot past the Warriors this week. We love the fun rivalry. In this preview Coach Corey Kopatich shared some great details on his squad for the fall and on his coaching staff. The wolves look poised for a breakthrough with a strong QB, A Lineman who transferred in from Minnesota who is committed to Wake Forest, and a pack of other hungry and experienced Wolves.

Football kickoffs are just over the horizon

You can hear the Iowa Football train whistling in the distance. Each week the sound is growing. This week we will have a new Iowa Small College and University preview each day (FCS, D2, D3 and NAIA) to share. We are going to put extra focus on those Iowa High School players on those 23 teams this fall.

In our first three previews, we have highlighted the 98 former Iowa High School players playing for those 3 teams this fall. How many Iowans will be playing on Iowa teams this fall is going to be interesting as we go through each preview. Ghost and I have a friendly wager on what that number may be, but it’s going to be big.

For this first year we will likely have to just cover the young men and women playing inside the state borders, but there are many former Iowa High School players playing for schools outside the borders to follow also. We will do our best to cover the kids not playing at the high D1 level *Please note: We follow the In-State Clones, Hawks, and UNI Panthers and kids playing at other High D1 teams, but there are so many great reporters and publications out there covering those teams that are already available for you to read that we encourage you to follow those players on those platforms.

If you would like to join our team and contribute content for your favorite squad, please reach out to us on X with a message @sportsguysiowa or at my email below. Or please share our work on X as we appreciate the growing number of followers of our daily content.

As always, we thank you for the comments and support.