The ISU athletic department announced with pride last week that it would be handing out yard signs to members of the National Cyclone Club as a campaign to promote ISU football.

Yes, campaign.

The cardinal and gold of Cyclone football will soon join the political hodgepodge of yard signs already lining the streets in anticipation of the November elections.

Apparently, the ISU athletic marketing team saw the success of the turnout at the political polls in the past few elections and wanted a slice of the proverbial pie. With belts being tightened following budgeting cuts, the expensive television commercials of the past have been replaced with cost-effective rectangles of cardboard. These signs are being freely distributed from the Athletic Marketing Office at the Jacobson Athletic Building.

The goal of the athletic department, according to a recent press release, is to have yard signs in each of Iowa’s 99 counties. The signs will then begin spreading around the country like a virus, going to California and Texas and New York. And then they will go to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then they will go to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House. Yeeeaaarrrggh!

It seems like a ridiculous way to promote a sports team. The signs are garish and unattractive and have the Cyclone football ticket hotline number plastered across the bottom of them. Any effort to make the signs look like a show of team support instead of mini-billboard advertisements was scrapped in order to provide this nugget of information.

The campaigns the athletic department have set out on in the recent past have gotten steadily worse. With the department desperate for revenue, what may start as a reasonable idea to get fans excited about a team becomes a plea to bring in more money. The advent of CycloneVision in the fall of 2003 was one such ploy.

CycloneVision is an online magazine that fans can subscribe to for a yearly fee of $79.99. These privileged fans are privy to behind-the-scenes footage of ISU athletics including exclusive interviews with coaches and athletes. Unfortunately, the campaign has stagnated. The online program only runs through Internet Explorer in Windows, and requests for a Macintosh version were never met.

A phone call in search of statistics regarding the success of CycloneVision was answered by a media relations representative who had no idea that such a thing existed. He played it off well and the call was forwarded to the associate athletic director for media relations, Tom Kroeschell.

Kroeschell said the department had yet to analyze the success of CycloneVision in its first year.

The ISU athletic department has proven time and again that it has the ability to come up with great promotional ideas. All-sport tickets, Cyclone Alley and the Lil’ Clone Club are outstanding examples of this.

But any self-respecting ISU fan should avoid giving in to this most recent advertising venture.

Buy a T-shirt or a keychain or a pennant to display team pride instead of going for this free embarrassment that your neighbors will hate you for.