Iowa Football Quotes

There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in Western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me. It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

[upon hearing that the school received funding for the football field, but not for any of the arts] Well, we might never have another Great American Novel or amazing musicals written by Americans, but at least we will always be able to toss a ball between some metal posts. Our priorities are right on track.

I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me. It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

The coach of a college football team can make thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions of people many of them otherwise stable and superficially reasonable adults insanely angry. I experience churning gastrointestinal distress on Saturdays during the season until Michigan has a lead of at least seventeen points. In my idle moments, when taking showers and driving my three children around northern New Jersey, I spend more time mentally debating self-posed hypotheses such as. "Did Jim Harbaugh corner himself into a no-man's land between the Wisconsin Iowa system development model and the Ohio/Penn State talent acquisition model?" than I do thinking about any other question, including things such as, "Do I have the right career?" and "What are parents' and children's obligations to each other?" and "What happens to our souls when our bodies die?" This kind of fixation, conducive to neither peace of mind nor personal productivity, is very common. Why are so many people like this?

Why had Berkeley accepted him? Candice had gone to a small public school in Iowa, but her parents were professors. Louis was Asian, so he possessed the magic membership card. Charlie was black, but he went to some fancy boarding school on a football scholarship. Then there was Daron. If you were accepted, you deserve to be here.

Different regions evoke different images in the minds of high school students, often depending on where they grew up. In the age of cyberspace, college is still synonymous with a quaint New England town featuring the traditional red brick, white columns, and ivy all around. That enduring mental picture combines with the seemingly inborn cultural snobbery of the East Coast to produce millions of students who think that civilization ends at the western edge of Pennsylvania—if not the Hudson River. For Midwesterners, the situation is just the opposite: a century-old cultural inferiority complex. Many applicants from those states will do anything to get the heck out, even though there are more good colleges per capita in states like Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio than anywhere else in the nation. The West Coast fades in and out as a trendy place for college, depending on earthquakes, the regional economy, and the overcrowding and tuition increases that plague the University of California system. Among those seeking warmer weather, the South has become a popular place, especially since Southerners themselves are more likely to stay close to home. Collective perceptions of the various regions have some practical consequences. First, most of the elite schools in the Northeast are more selective than ever. In addition, a lot of mediocre schools in the Northeast, notably Boston, are being deluged with applicants simply because they are lucky enough to be in a hot location. In the Midwest, many equally good or superior schools are much less difficult to get into, especially the fine liberal arts colleges in Ohio. In the South, the booming popularity of some schools is out of proportion to their quality. The weather may be nice and the football top-notch, but students who come from far away should be prepared for culture shock.

considered Wisconsin’s Scout Player of the Year thanks to weekly honors for his efforts in the practices leading up to the Badgers’ contests against Akron on August 30, 2008 (38-17 win); at Iowa on October 18, 2008 (38-16 loss); and when they hosted the Minnesota Gophers on November 15, 2008 (35-32 win). Even though he wasn’t making the main Badgers roster who played on Saturdays, Watt was still invited to watch film in the office of defensive coordinator Charlie Patridge after dinner every night. During an interview with ESPN – The Magazine’s Elizabeth Merrill, Watt

All the great basketball schools—UCLA, Indiana, North Carolina, and so on—had long-standing deals with Adidas or Converse. So who was left? And what could we offer? We hurriedly dreamed up an “Advisory Board,” another version of our Pro Club, our NBA reward system—but it was small beer. I fully expected Strasser and Vaccaro to fail. And I expected to see neither of them for a year, at least. One month later Strasser was standing in my office, beaming. And shouting. And ticking off names. Eddie Sutton, Arkansas! Abe Lemmons, Texas! Jerry Tarkanian, UNLV! Frank McGuire, South Carolina! (I leaped out of my chair. McGuire was a legend: He’d defeated Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas team to win the national championship for North Carolina.) We hit pay dirt, Strasser said. Plus, almost as a throw-in, he mentioned two under-the-radar youngsters: Jim Valvano at Iona and John Thompson at Georgetown. (A year or two later he did the same thing with college football coaches, landing all the greats, including Vince Dooley and his national champion Georgia Bulldogs. Herschel Walker in Nikes—yes.) We rushed out a press release, announcing that Nike had these schools under contract. Alas, the press release had a bad typo. Iona was spelled “Iowa.” Lute Olson, coach at Iowa, phoned immediately. He was irate. We apologized and said we’d send a correction the next day. He got quiet. “Well now wait wait,” he said, “what’s this Advisory Board anyway…?” The Harter Rule, in full effect.