Many thanks to the esteemed dean of the Iowa OTE, Mr. Grizz, for writing this! I apologize for not getting it out during Corn Week. The staffer who is responsible has been sacked and the exec who sacked them has also been sacked.
Hi, Mr. Grizz here. It’s the time of the year when for a respite from work, I check the sports blogs/sites I follow and don’t see much, because not much is happening. (Absolutely nothing was when I wrote this back in June). Except the uniquely B1G mid-summer holiday known as 6-4 Day.
The joyously futile occasion celebrated in June has been summarized in this little corner of the sports blogosphere before. But a great feature last season covering big games of 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago brought back not just the cause celebre but also the roller-coaster season of 2004 Iowa football of which 6-4, while the most memorable game, was just a piece. Some of what follows is personal memory, part is an excellent piece by Scott Dochterman in The Athletic, and part is from a summary booklet of Ferentz’s wins commemorating his passing Hayden Fry as Iowa’s winningest football coach.
PROLOGUE
Hayden Fry’s Iowa program, after an out-of-nowhere breakout decade in the 1980s, had begun to show signs of decline. There was another Rose Bowl, in 1991, and a few highlights here and there, such as finally beating Washington in a bowl game, but success was not as great or as consistent as before. A last hurrah of sorts was 1997, a team with talent but which still fell short of Michigan and Ohio State. A bad Sun Bowl loss to Arizona State foreshadowed the year that followed, Hayden’s first losing season since his first two at Iowa. Unknown at the time, both he and his defensive coordinator were fighting cancer, each sneaking into University Hospitals for treatment early in the mornings. Hayden retired, in an emotional press conference which was hard to watch…