Iowa City Athletic Officials Association - referee & nerd 🏈🏀🇺🇸🏳️🌈🖖
Iowa City, IA
Joined February 2009
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I lead a group of 300+ HS football, basketball, baseball and softball officials, with 30 years of experience. I won’t shy away from calling out good and bad examples of sportsmanship. It’s important for the avocation of officiating and it’s important for the sports we care about.
The perfect Halloween matchup doesn't exi...
@CycloneATH
ALT A promotional college football image split into two panels for 'The Halloween Game,' billed as the greatest uniform matchup of all time. The top panel displays Oklahoma State Cowboys gear arranged in a Halloween-themed setting with hay bales and pumpkins, featuring an orange jersey with number 8, an orange OSU helmet, orange pants, and black Nike cleats with skeleton bone graphics. The bottom panel shows an Iowa State Cyclones player wearing an all-black uniform with number 7, alongside a close-up of a black Iowa State helmet featuring a Cyclones logo, with white stripe accents on the sleeves.
Hate to hear this. Get better soon, Larry!
Football Zebras has unfortunately confirmed that Larry Smith, the umpire injured in yesterday's game in London, will be out for the rest of the 2026 season.
refs.ws/u102injured
John Mathias retweeted
La Tech and ULM haven’t played each other in 26 years. This was the first half.
If YSU is too embarrassed to show the visitors sideline bleachers, that’s fine… but they have to get rid of the upside down Penguin.
John Mathias retweeted
On The Death of the Regular Season
On Dec. 3, 2023, the College Football Playoff selection committee left an undefeated Power Four conference champion out of a 4-team College Football Playoff. The regular season you're mourning hasn't existed for a while now. We've spent the last two years hearing arguments and debates about why certain 9-3 teams deserve a spot in a 12-team field over some 11-1 and 10-2 teams.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be against a 24-team field, or that it won't impact the sport in many different ways. But the idea that the regular season has been killed is just a Pavlovian response at this point.
John Mathias retweeted
Ukraine blew up three buildings in Russia and a bunch of American Reddit arguments stopped mid-sentence.
The buildings were Yandex data centers in Vladimir and Kaluga. Yandex is basically Russia's Google. Its network collapsed twice after the strikes, and Kommersant reported the fried servers could take up to six months to fix.
Then people started checking Reddit. Several big US political subreddits lost a huge chunk of their activity within hours. One analysis found an Irish politics sub down as much as 80% in traffic tied to a single data center. German subs dropped too.
Now for the honest caveat. This is correlation. Real Russian users lost internet too, and a regular guy in Moscow going offline looks exactly like a troll farm going offline in raw traffic data. If the numbers bounce back in a week as operations reroute through VPNs, the story shrinks.
But one detail keeps nagging at me. Russia's digital development minister went to the Defense Ministry on Monday to talk about protecting Yandex's data centers. You don't ask the army to guard a search engine unless something more important than search runs inside it.
And think about how hard this normally is to prove. Reddit spent a year investigating the Internet Research Agency and banned 944 accounts back in 2018, and that took a special counsel investigation on top of the platform's own work.
A power outage did the same job in one morning, by accident.
John Mathias retweeted
I believe @nbcsnl had planned to run a brief Super Fans clip in tribute to Mike Ditka and ran out of time. I was contacted to suggest a favorite Ditka joke and this was my choice. It also has Michael Jordan and Todd(Farley)’s first televised heart attack! -RS
John Mathias retweeted
Iowa had an open receiver point to another even more open receiver on the last TD pass.
John Mathias retweeted
Mike Ditka, Hall of Fame tight end and legendary Chicago Bears coach, has died at 86.
@danpompei on the legend of Iron Mike: nytimes.com/athletic/2947063…
John Mathias retweeted
What’s long been an idea has come to life. The Monday of Homecoming week no less — which is the launch of Panther Fanatic.
Panther Fanatic is your new online home for UNI community, content, & conversation.
Join The Community ⤵️ Become a Fanatic❕
pantherfanatic.com
John Mathias retweeted
This is not a joke.
The Russian biological war research should have us all concerned and stopping ALL flight from Russia, and all Russians from entry.
The longer this goes on the more countries we will have to stop flight from.
FYI: the Russians were working on a plague that is resistant to antibiotics
Russia's plague outbreak is getting worse, now with 5 hospitals in Irkutsk quarantined, universities canceling classes and accusations from healthcare workers that the government is attempting a media cover-up.
Nearly 200 contacts of a 28-year-old anti-plague laboratory worker who died last week are reportedly under isolation or medical observation.
Irkutsk universities are canceling classes citing a “case of pneumonic plague,” while an aluminum plant introduced mandatory masks. A local government warning advising residents not to travel to Shelekhov was published and later deleted.
Healthcare workers claim doctors are discussing plague internally while avoiding the diagnosis in official documents.
Russian health authorities continue to deny any plague outbreak, attributing the woman's death to “pneumonia of unknown origin.”
Pneumonic plague is far worse that it's Bubonic cousin as its transmitted directly between humans.
