What Are You Trying to Pull, Acie Earl?

There is a channel on the local Mediacom grid that inexplicably reverts to an all Iowa network, complete with weather warnings for the state and everything. Once in a while, you can see the state get a little nostalgic and play an old sporting event, like an Iowa Hawkeyes football game against the Michigan Wolverines from the 2003 season. Well, last night was no different, and the championship game from the 1995 Great Alaskan Shootout between Iowa and Duke was on. There were a couple things that were unusual about this game. First, Iowa actually lost the game, which means there wasn't a good reason to show this game. Second, I couldn't name a single player from the Duke squad in the couple of moments I saw. I actually recognized Ryan Bowen (I could watch a white kid from Iowa dunk all day) from the Hawkeyes before I picked out Jeff Capel from Duke. Capel is now the coach at Oklahoma.
I went to my computer and shared this conundrum with Steve, who didn't care and started looking up the Duke roster. Capel and Steve Wojciechowski were the only players whose names I recognized. So I started looking for some players from Iowa. If they made it to the finals of the GAS, then they must have had some talent, right? And clearly, I was losing my mind, right?
So I stumbled across a leaderboard with year by year leaders and I checked out 1995 and 1996 and I was able to compile some semblence of a roster. Ryan Bowen was there. Jess Settles was part of the squad in the midst of his half decade in Iowa City, which raised another interesting question. Why does Iowa seem to lead the country in 6th year seniors? Settles was there for about 6 years, same with Luke Recker and Jeff Horner. How is this fair? Is Iowa that exciting that young, athletic men want to spend the better part of the 20s there? It doesn't seem to add up.
So I was looking at the year-by-year scoring leaders to find more examples of the sweet deal the Hawkeyes seem to have set up to keep them less mediocre than at least 4 or 5 teams every year in the Big Ten. And then I found him. Acie Earl, scoring leader at Iowa in 1991, 1992, 1993 and.... 1996! What?! But there it was, in Helvitica font! Acie Earl must have been at Iowa for 7 years! How is that possible? Well, I aimed to find out, so I googled him. And I came across this page, which leads me back to the original question. What are you trying to pull, Acie Earl?