Fun Facts: Nevada-Iowa, Sarah Michelle Gellar edition

The Nevada Wolf Pack of the Mountain West. It sounds like a motorcycle club. Maybe it is.

At any rate, here are Nevada-Iowa football Fun Facts:

1. First-year Nevada head coach Ken Wilson was an assistant coach for 19 years at the school, but didn’t work there from 2012 until this season.

2. This is the first meeting of the Hawkeyes and Wolf Pack. Iowa is 10-1-1 against current members of the Mountain West Conference. Nevada is 2-6 against current Big Ten teams.

3. Nevada averaged 346.2 passing yards and 77.5 rushing yards last season. This year, it’s averaging 174.7 passing and 161.7 rushing.

4. Iowa has no players from Nevada. Nevada has no players from Iowa.

5. Nevada is trying for its fifth-straight winning season. The first four were under coach Jay Norvell, a former Hawkeye player who left last year to become head coach at league-rival Colorado State.

6. This game is sold out (69,250 people). The crowd for Nevada’s 55-41 home loss to Incarnate Word last Saturday was 14,092.

7. Nevada has wins over Power Five conference teams in each of the previous three seasons in which it played one.

8. Iowa’s last game on a Sept. 17 was a 23-21 loss to North Dakota State in 2016.

9. Nevada running back Toa Taua averages 82 rushing yards per game and has 3,332 career rushing yards and 978 receiving yards. His brother, Vai Taua, is the Wolf Pack’s running backs coach. He rushed for 4,512 yards at Nevada.

10. Unlike any Big Ten school, the only highway needed to get from Iowa City’s campus to Nevada’s is I-80.

11. Iowa’s Lukas Van Ness blocked two punts last Saturday against Iowa State, marking the first time the Hawkeyes blocked multiple kicks in a game since against Syracuse in 2007 when Ken Iwebema blocked two field goals.

12. This is the first time Iowa scored just one touchdown over two games since 2007. Like this year, they won one of those two, 10-6 over Illinois. That was before a 31-6 loss at Purdue.

13. Nevada’s three opponents have committed an average of 100.7 yards in penalties per game against the Wolf Pack.

14. Nevada and UNLV play each season for the Fremont Cannon, the heaviest trophy in college football at 545 pounds. The winner gets to paint the cannon, either Nevada blue or UNLV scarlet.

15. The coach of the Nevada men’s basketball team is former Iowa coach Steve Alford. His team was 13-18 last season.

16. Besides Johnny Cash with his “Folsom Prison Blues,” others who have had Reno in their song lyrics include R.E.M., Beck, and the Grateful Dead.

17. The Wolf Pack practiced Wednesday in the Reno-Sparks Convention Center because the air quality in the Reno area reached hazardous levels recently because of the Mosquito Fire in California.

18. There is no 18th Fun Fact.

19. Iowa has a city called Nevada. It has a Starbuck’s restaurant that has no connection to the Starbucks coffee conglomerate.

20. A television series called “Wolf Pack” starring Sarah Michelle Gellar is coming. It involves werewolves. It’s fiction.