Fun Facts about Iowa-ISU football series

OK, I'm stealing this bit, and doing a great disservice to David Letterman and his writing staff in the bargain.

But this is meant to alleviate some of the tension leading up to Saturday's epic football clash in Ames. Thus ...

Fun Facts about the Iowa-Iowa State football series:

This is the first time both teams are starting a running back named Robinson.

Only three of the last 15 meetings have been decided by seven points or less.

Kirk Ferentz and Paul Rhoads were both assistant coaches at their current schools, but both had been gone from those schools for 10 years before returning to become head coach.

Iowa City and Ames are 225,000 yards apart, give or take a football field.

The only time the two teams played each other at a neutral site was in 1929, when President Herbert Hoover had them square off in the White House's Rose Garden.

The Great Depression was an unrelated incident.

Since the series was resumed in 1977 after a 43-year hiatus, the only coaches to lead a team into an ISU-Iowa game without getting a win are Jim Criner, Jim Walden, and Jim Morrison.

Iowa has failed to cover the pointpread in its last five games against Iowa State. It did, however, cover the spread against Minnesota last year by 49 points.

Three hundred and eleven Cyclone fans successfully and legally bet on Iowa to lose at Pittsburgh last Sept. 20 before seeing their team get defeated at Nevada-Las Vegas that night.

Both schools have gold as a school color, yet there are no active gold mines in Iowa.

Morley Safer, Celine Dion and France President Nicolas Sarkozy have attended every Iowa-ISU game since 1986.

The school's mascots are named Cy and Herky. They sound like the names of someone's crazy old uncles.

A cyclone is an area of low atmospheric pressure characterized by inward spiraling winds that rotate counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere of the Earth. Not coincidentally, that's a verse in the Iowa State fight song.

The Hawkeyes were named for a character named Hawkeye from the novel "The Last of the Mohicans." Hawkeye was actually the character's nickname. Its name was Natty Bumppo.

The Iowa Natty Bumppos would have been a mouthful. So would have Carver-Natty Bumppo Arena.

To get from Iowa to Iowa State, you take Interstate 80, Interstate 35 and U.S. Highway 30. Or you can fly. What am I, your travel agent?

Richard O. Jacobson was the lead donor for the Richard O. Jacobson Athletic Building on the University of Iowa's campus, and the Richard O. Jacobson Athletic Building at the north end of Jack Trice Stadium. Both house their schools football programs.

If the great and kind Richard O. Jacobson would like to be the lead donor of the Hlog, that would be nice, too.

It is written in the Constitution of the State of Iowa that the Hawkeyes and Cyclones are never to participate in the Motor City Bowl. State legislators are debating whether the recent renaming of the event to the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl will give the Detroit game a loophole.

It's a myth that the record books get thrown out when Iowa and Iowa State play. It's never happened.

The two most-likely people in the history of the two programs to have called for civility and sportsmanship from their fans are Nile Kinnick and Jack Trice.

And now, you may return to trash-talking and hand-wringing. Fun facts, everybody!