Every Sunday, we publish the SGI Medium Peach that highlights key articles for the week in one place for easy reading. This week is going to be so much fun. The SGI team will be at the Drake-Upper Iowa and the Cornell-Coe Games on Thursday night to kick off the season. We are still figuring out where our team of volunteers can make it to for Saturday games and will share more when we know.
This Sunday Column 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 30 days of @Sportsguysiowa have been so much fun. The response has been outstanding, and way more than we expected with over 12,000 readers. We launched our Instagram page SportsGuysIowa this last week so we hope you will follow that also.
Our podcast will be starting this week. 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 3 stories of the week (in read article ranking – please just click on the link to read)
SGI Preview – Wartburg Knights Football 2025 – SportsGuysIowa
Wartburg has a big fan base and is rated #9 nationally with a roster packed full of Iowa HS players (141 players). I think many people overlook the impact of having 141 Iowa HS School kids on the roster in the short and long term. Short term you get students in the hallway and families coming to your games home and on the road in force (families and extended families go watch their kids play) and wear your collge gear. These families are walking billboards for the College. Long term these Iowa Kids usually stay close to home after graduation and become supporters. donors, and fans.
The other thing Wartburg’s successful approach which includes a top-notch football team does is when SGI writes an article about them it goes to the top of our best-read article list immediately.
SGI Preview – Central College Football 2025 – SportsGuysIowa
Central College has been a DIII Football power for this past century. They are looking to get back to the NCAA DIII playoffs again this fall and are picked second in the coaches poll for the ARC just 3 points behind the Wartburg Knights. They have an estimated 80 Former Iowa High School players on their roster (61 listed but they have not added their incoming freshmen when we published this story…they are added now, so we will update that total when we can). They have a very big fan base and following for many of the same reasons we listed above for Wartburg. The Dutch are going to once again be a top team to follow this fall.
SGI Preview – Upper Iowa Football 2025 – SportsGuysIowa
The Peacocks are coming off their best season in DII ever since making the jump up in 2003. They are building a program in Fayette built on a foundation of Iowa High School Players with 52 on the fall roster. This program is building and I can’t wait to see them start the season live this Thursday at Drake in a big opening contest.
Week one Football kickoffs are happening next weekend at FCS, DII, NAIA, and DIII levels
Between now and the season start we will all the Iowa Small College and University previews completed (FCS, D2, D3 and NAIA) to share. We are going to put extra focus and coverage on those Iowa High School players on those 23 teams this fall.
Roster Analysis of NAIA, D2, FCS programs inside the State of Iowa. Please note the schools near the border do get a lot of local players from right across the river in neighboring states e.g. Dordt, Morningside, Northwestern and St. Ambrose all get many players from South Dakota, Nebraska, and Illinois.
*Also Please note Waldorf has updated their roster and has 18 former Iowa High School players on their fall roster which we will showcase in a preview this week and add to our tracking charts and database.
As reminder for this first year, we will 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.
