Counting down Iowa’s most-tantalizing 2021 football games: No. 4 Northwestern

For Iowa’s most-tantalizing games 12 through 5, go to this page.

And now, No. 4:

Nov. 6: At Northwestern

Iowa has a football building full of traveling trophies. A pig, a bull, and whatever the heck it has from beating Iowa State and Nebraska when last they met. I assume it’s more livestock, but it could be a teapot and a fire hydrant.

It’s easy to lose track when you seemingly have a trophy for every game you play. Except that Iowa doesn’t. One of its big rivals plays the Hawkeyes for something bigger.

Northwestern has won two of the last three Big Ten West titles, and has beaten the Hawkeyes in four of their last five meetings. It got trophies for winning the West in 2018 and 2020 after beating the Hawkeyes in both of those seasons. The pig and whatnot are someone else’s trinkets.

That’s Northwestern, home of a stadium that doesn’t scream “Big Ten!” in a location in which it constantly feels a need to remind us it’s “Chicago’s Big Ten Team,” with entrance standards that eclipse a garden-variety state university, even the Big Ten’s very good ones.

Underestimating the Wildcats often is a bad policy. Yes, they lost a lot of talent from last year’s team, including two NFL first-rounders. They never have much margin for error. We sure saw that in 2019 when a rash of injuries and poor quarterback play led to a 3-9 season.

But this is a program that has won four bowls since 2016, and routed Auburn in last season’s Citrus Bowl. For those keeping tabs, the Citrus is pretty high up the bowl charts, higher than Iowa has climbed since 2015.

Northwestern matched Iowa in scoring defense last year, yielding just 15.9 points per game (fourth-best in FBS) to the Hawkeyes’ 16.0.

That razor-thin difference was also seen when the two teams met in Iowa City last year. After trailing 17-0, Northwestern proceeded to a 21-20 win. Iowa threw 51 passes that day. Offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz had what I would consider a great season on the job. That game, however, was not part of the “great” part. He surely learned from it, and pronto.

The four Northwestern wins over the Hawkeyes since 2016 were all by one score. Which tells us Cats don’t crack.

So this is a West Division rivalry that is enticing. Neither team can lose this game and expect to reach Indianapolis in December. Neither ever has, in fact.

Iowa plays the Wildcats in Evanston the week after facing Wisconsin in Madison. If the Iowa-Wisconsin affair is as big a deal as it could be, even the evenest-keel Hawkeyes will need to get recalibrated for Northwestern the following week.

On the other hand, Iowa certainly won’t lack motivation.

On yet another hand — borrow someone else’s for this — if there is college football on Nov. 6 it means we are still muddling along through the COVID-19 era and haven’t been wiped out altogether, so whomever wins and loses may not seem quite as important as in years past.

Just kidding. Of course it will.

I like it when Northwestern is good in football. I like it when Stanford is good in football. Private universities that are more recognized for being universities than football factories mess with the whole system when their football teams also excel. They don’t send news releases when their students make conference all-academic teams. It’s a given that they will.

If Vanderbilt ever made a run at the SEC title, however, the college game would disintegrate on the spot. Just what they’d do with all those space-eating stadiums, I have no idea.