And then there was one.
Iowa dispatched an outmatched Purdue team with relative ease in icy Kinnick Stadium Saturday and clinched a spot in the Big 10 Championship Game as West Division Champs. That is a pick-your accolade (amazing, awesome, outstanding, shocking, historic, stunning, wonderful, Hawklicious, etc., etc.) accomplishment.
But there is one little, nagging bit of business remaining in the regular season.
One bloviating, still arrogant-despite-being-bad, lacking (k)nowledge, possibly crime-covering-up piece of nasty business to attend to.
I speak, of course, of our delusional friends from the western fringe of Big 10 country: the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Corn nation - in what can only be described as some sort of mass hallucination brought on by worshiping the undead corpse of Tom Osborne - is absolutely, positively positive that they are going to knock off unbeaten Iowa, show the college football world that the Hawkeyes are a fraud and salvage some small piece of relevance out of their joke of a football season.
They are wrong.
The moment these condescending (and in retrospect, hilariously incorrect) words passed from Nebraska Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst's lips, the Cornhuskers 2015 fate was sealed:
"But in the final analysis, I had to evaluate where Iowa was," Eichorst said, after Nebraska managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Iowa City last autumn. "As I looked back on the outcomes, I'm trying to look at who are championship-caliber football teams at that moment and how competitive were we in those games?"
Well Mr. Eichorst, Iowa will be playing for a championship in Indianapolis on Dec. 5 while your team struggles to become bowl eligible. If Iowa manages to somehow win that championship, they will in all likelihood get the chance to play for another, bigger championship. You remember those, don't you - from back in the 1990s?
I'd actually like to thank you for your misguided and wrong-headed insult so carelessly flung at the Iowa football program a day or two before you jettisoned a coach who only won 9 games a year and could beat Purdue. I do believe they were the catalyst to Kirk Ferentz and the rest of the Iowa football coaching staff to re-evaluate their approach and decide to look at what made past Iowa teams great.
I mean Kirk Ferentz HAS won two conference championships (2002 and 2004) since the last time Nebraska won one (1999) and notched a BCS bowl victory (2009) since the last time Nebraska did (2000). But things were getting a little stale in Iowa City. I mean, not as stale as in Lincoln - where talk of the greatness of the 1990s makes one wonder if all Nebraskans drive around in Saturns rocking out to Alanis Morissette on their Sony Discmans.
Kirk Ferentz comes across as a pretty mild-mannered, friendly guy. But over the past 12 months, he sure has brought last year's fateful Nebraska game up. A lot.
I am 100 percent confident that every single member of the Iowa football family - from Gary Barta down to the lowliest ball boy - has this game circled, underlined and italicized. They are going to do everything in their power to send a message to Nebby's loose-lipped AD. And this year they have a swagtastic quarterback, four horsemen of death stable of running backs and a lockdown corner aching to deliver that message.
The day after Thanksgiving, humble pie will be on the menu in Lincoln and I hope the Cornhuskers are hungry.
In an interview on SportsCenter earlier this week (Nebraska fans, SportsCenter is a television show where national pundits talk about relevant college football teams) C.J. Beathard was asked whether he and his Hawkeye teammates cared about being "disrespected" by so many talking heads. He just laughed it off and said 100 percent of their attention is on Nebraska.
"We want this, more than anything," he said of the Black Friday game and writing their names in the annals of Hawkeye history as the only 12-0 champion ever.
Yes we do, C.J. Yes, we all do.
Follow me on Twitter @ToryBrecht and follow the 12Saturdays podcast @12Saturdays.
Iowa dispatched an outmatched Purdue team with relative ease in icy Kinnick Stadium Saturday and clinched a spot in the Big 10 Championship Game as West Division Champs. That is a pick-your accolade (amazing, awesome, outstanding, shocking, historic, stunning, wonderful, Hawklicious, etc., etc.) accomplishment.
But there is one little, nagging bit of business remaining in the regular season.
One bloviating, still arrogant-despite-being-bad, lacking (k)nowledge, possibly crime-covering-up piece of nasty business to attend to.
I speak, of course, of our delusional friends from the western fringe of Big 10 country: the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Corn nation - in what can only be described as some sort of mass hallucination brought on by worshiping the undead corpse of Tom Osborne - is absolutely, positively positive that they are going to knock off unbeaten Iowa, show the college football world that the Hawkeyes are a fraud and salvage some small piece of relevance out of their joke of a football season.
They are wrong.
The moment these condescending (and in retrospect, hilariously incorrect) words passed from Nebraska Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst's lips, the Cornhuskers 2015 fate was sealed:
"But in the final analysis, I had to evaluate where Iowa was," Eichorst said, after Nebraska managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Iowa City last autumn. "As I looked back on the outcomes, I'm trying to look at who are championship-caliber football teams at that moment and how competitive were we in those games?"
Well Mr. Eichorst, Iowa will be playing for a championship in Indianapolis on Dec. 5 while your team struggles to become bowl eligible. If Iowa manages to somehow win that championship, they will in all likelihood get the chance to play for another, bigger championship. You remember those, don't you - from back in the 1990s?
I'd actually like to thank you for your misguided and wrong-headed insult so carelessly flung at the Iowa football program a day or two before you jettisoned a coach who only won 9 games a year and could beat Purdue. I do believe they were the catalyst to Kirk Ferentz and the rest of the Iowa football coaching staff to re-evaluate their approach and decide to look at what made past Iowa teams great.
I mean Kirk Ferentz HAS won two conference championships (2002 and 2004) since the last time Nebraska won one (1999) and notched a BCS bowl victory (2009) since the last time Nebraska did (2000). But things were getting a little stale in Iowa City. I mean, not as stale as in Lincoln - where talk of the greatness of the 1990s makes one wonder if all Nebraskans drive around in Saturns rocking out to Alanis Morissette on their Sony Discmans.
Kirk Ferentz comes across as a pretty mild-mannered, friendly guy. But over the past 12 months, he sure has brought last year's fateful Nebraska game up. A lot.
I am 100 percent confident that every single member of the Iowa football family - from Gary Barta down to the lowliest ball boy - has this game circled, underlined and italicized. They are going to do everything in their power to send a message to Nebby's loose-lipped AD. And this year they have a swagtastic quarterback, four horsemen of death stable of running backs and a lockdown corner aching to deliver that message.
The day after Thanksgiving, humble pie will be on the menu in Lincoln and I hope the Cornhuskers are hungry.
In an interview on SportsCenter earlier this week (Nebraska fans, SportsCenter is a television show where national pundits talk about relevant college football teams) C.J. Beathard was asked whether he and his Hawkeye teammates cared about being "disrespected" by so many talking heads. He just laughed it off and said 100 percent of their attention is on Nebraska.
"We want this, more than anything," he said of the Black Friday game and writing their names in the annals of Hawkeye history as the only 12-0 champion ever.
Yes we do, C.J. Yes, we all do.
Follow me on Twitter @ToryBrecht and follow the 12Saturdays podcast @12Saturdays.
