The University of Northern Iowa baseball team beat the Minnesota Gophers on April 1.
Again.
If you're keeping track, Rick Heller has an impressive 10-7 record against the Gophers during his 10 years as the head coach at UNI, including a pair of victories this season. He also has a 10-6-1 record against the Iowa Hawkeyes during the past 10 years, with a pair of games scheduled for later this season.
This is the program that top officials at the University of Northern Iowa want to cut, ostensibly for economic reasons. They want to cut a program that has a 10-7 record against the Big Ten school that borders UNI to the north, and they want to cut the program that has a 10-6-1 record against the Big Ten school that sits about 90 miles south of campus.
Minnesota was ranked 25th in the country when the Panthers rallied for a 9-7 victory in the Metrodome on April 1, and it was no April Fool's joke. It followed a 4-3 victory over the Gophers back on March 4, just a few days after the Panthers were told that their program would be dropped after this season due to hard financial times.
There have been a lot of high-level conversations the past few weeks as friends of the UNI baseball program work feverishly to save the program. Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, the Iowa Board of Regents, UNI President Ben Allen and UNI athletic director Troy Dannen have been bombarded with letters and e-mails, trying to convince them to save the program.
Dannen established an April 5 deadline for the Support UNI Baseball committee to raise $1.2 million in pledges to save the program for three years. The committee has raised more than $250,00 in pledges, an impressive amount, but will fall well short of $1.2 million unless a secret sugar daddy emerges at the last second.
There's still hope, however. The committee has made some intriguing offers to Allen and Dannen, and negotiations are continuing as this blog is being written on Friday morning, April 3.
Stay tuned.
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