Hawk Talk Monthly: Random Thoughts

Sept. 2, 2012

• 2012 UI Fall Football Camp Central
• Download your Iowa Hawkeye iPhone app!
• Download your Iowa Hawkeye Android app!
• Big Ten Network: Free Hawkeye Video
• 24 Hawkeyes to Watch

Editor’s Note: The following was written by Rick Klatt, the UI’s associate athletics director for external relations, and first appeared in the August 2012 edition of Hawk Talk Monthly presented by Transamerica. You can read the full edition of HTM, the UI Athletics Department’s new monthly e-magazine, by clicking HERE.

“The victory was historic from Iowa’s perspective because it marked three victories in a row against Michigan, which had never happened during the rivalry.”
–Pat Harty of the Iowa City Press-Citizen

I paused after reading this while enjoying sunrise and a blueberry muffin on the back porch earlier this month. The pause wasn’t a result of reading that Iowa’s victory over Michigan last November in historic Kinnick Stadium was the Hawkeyes’ third straight in the series. I already knew that.

No, I paused at Pat’s use of the word “rival.” I paused and said to myself, “Michigan…a `rival.’ I need to think about that a little.”

The Wolverines are, by definition, a “rival” of the Hawkeyes. Look it up. I did.

Rival: A person who is competing for the same object or goal as another, or who tries to equal or outdo another; competitor.

OK. By definition, the Wolverines are our rival. I won’t go to battle with Webster’s.

I would suggest, however that, on a scale of 1 to 10, Iowa’s rivalry with Michigan is a high 6 or a 7 or, maybe, at best, an 8. I’d also suggest that it takes a back seat to rivalries with Iowa State and Minnesota, two teams the Hawkeyes will square off against inside Kinnick in the first month of the 2012 college football season.

For me, the games against the Cyclones and Gophers are rivalries in the truer meaning of the word. From where I sit, those games are rivalries because, over time, there’s been a give-and-take, a ying-and-yang, a you-win-some-and-we-win-some. There is also a strong dose of geography to each that adds another layer of noise to the conversation among the fans and friends of the teams and institutions and the states. The fact that there is also some hardware to be won only adds to the chaos.

To my point, next Saturday’s Iowa Corn Cy-Hawk Series event will be — as it always is — the largest single-day event in the state of Iowa. It will also feature a pair of teams that have had their fair number of Saturdays in the sun, each rattling off winning streaks, the best of which coming in the 1980s and `90s when Hayden’s squad ripped off 15 straight, leading me to suggest at the time that a whole generation of Iowans had never witnessed a Cyclone victory.

For the record, Iowa has won 39 of the 59 games played in the series including 23 of the 35 played in the series’ “Modern Era.” Iowa will enter Kinnick on game day seeking its fourth victory in the last five meetings.

All things considered, a wee little give-and-take…a rivalry, if you will that, in all candor, is driven hard by geography.

On Saturday, Sept. 29, it will be the Golden Gophers’ turn to visit Kinnick. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb when I suggest that the visitors will be teeing it up against a pretty focused and determined collection of Hawkeyes. Back-to-back losses in the annual battle for Floyd of Rosedale will do that to a coaching staff and the young men they are mentoring.

If you need the numbers, this year’s game will be the 105th in the series. The tally is thumbs-up 42 times for the UI, thumbs-down 61 times. There have also been two ties and some streaks of success, some periods of coming up empty.

A little ying-and-yang.

Toss in the fact that fans of the Hawkeyes took favor to calling the Metrodome “Kinnick North” in the final years of that facility being the Gophers’ home and that the UM’s new TCF Bank Stadium has been a house of horrors for visiting UI teams, and you have a little more icing on the cake of a real died-in-the-wool rivalry.

Iowa versus Michigan: a rivalry?

Well, it’s certainly closer to one than ever before. Thanks to the outstanding work of Fry and Ferentz, the series against this Big Ten Conference opponent looks much more like a rivalry today than it did, say, 30 or so years ago. Iowa’s last two head coaches have been the guys in charge for nine of Hawkeyes’ 13 victories against Michigan with Fry owning the prize for the biggest win of all, Iowa’s 12-10 victory when No. 1 met No. 2 in Kinnick during the Hawkeyes’ 1985 Rose Bowl season.

As previously noted, Iowa has won the last three times the Hawkeyes have squared off against the Maize and Blue and that’s a feather in the cap of Kirk, his staff, and the student-athletes that made it happen on the playing field.

A big feather, mind you. A feather not, regrettably, from the tail of Hawk — that would fit all too nicely in this column. No. It has to be a feather from the tail of a bald eagle, the largest bird of prey on the planet. It takes a really big bird to get the best of a wolverine, a carnivore with a real mean streak, I’m told.

One of Iowa’s most real and most intense rivalries is its series with Wisconsin. That one is knotted at 42 wins for each team and a pair of ties. Interestingly, Iowa and Penn State have also split its games evenly with each team having won 12 times.

Perhaps these two series best represent what I’m suggesting about rivalries. Wouldn’t it be fair to say that both games are important to both fan bases…but, perhaps, the rhetoric ratchets up a little higher when the Hawkeyes are making their way to Camp Randall or the Badgers are paying a visit to Kinnick than when Iowa is prepping for a trip to Happy Valley? I think so.

One last thought on rivalries: For me, these are what separate college football from the rest of the sports pack. I’ve said many times in my 30 years at the UI that there is absolutely nothing like a football game-day on our campus. There’s also nothing like a college football game-day on our campus when the game is against a rival in the truest sense of the word. There is unmistakable electricity in the air on those game-days.