BIG TEN TO RETAIN IOWA IN FOOTBALL; Expelled Hawkeyes Will Receive Recognition Until Jan. 1, 1930, Griffith Says. MEETING SET FOR TODAY Commissioner to Confer With Officials of the University atIowa City. No Further Action Indicated. Iowa Officials Optimistic.
May 28, 1929
Credit...The New York Times Archives
CHICAGO, May 27 (AP).--The Big Ten Conference athletic eruption, occasioned by the expulsion of the University of Iowa, today had boiled down to silence and watchful waiting by member schools.
The Athletic also has an article,
Slush funds and spite: The story behind Iowa’s short-lived Big Ten ouster
By
Scott Dochterman
Oct 8, 2020
40
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Only once in the 125 seasons of Big Ten football has the league punished a school so severely it was not allowed to call itself a member.
That was Iowa in 1930. In an era when every Big Ten school save for one was accused of some level of impropriety, Iowa became the easy mark. It cheated, it got caught and it was expelled. That it was readmitted after one month away misses the point. Its suspension carried a stigma for generations.
Nearly a century’s worth of hard feelings with Minnesota and Illinois began over the incident. It was the only year since 1917 that Iowa hasn’t played Minnesota in football. Their mutual animosity escalated five years later when the schools needed a traveling trophy to simmer their rising tensions. With Illinois, only a basketball recruiting scandal in the late 1980s was perhaps more explosive between the border rivals. The roots of those hard feelings — and others — were born at a regularly scheduled Big Ten meeting in 1929. It caused a calendar year of chaos unlike any other in Big Ten history.
One year after Iowa’s dismissal was confirmed — and 10 months after the school was readmitted — an investigative report by The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette reporter Verne Marshall provided extensive background on the incident and which person was to blame. A detailed account in the book “75 Years with the Fighting Hawkeyes” by Bert McGrane and **** Lamb, documented Iowa’s path to a Big Ten suspension precisely with slight subjectivity. They supply the background of this 90-year-old saga.