Iowa wide receiver Jarriett Buie is No. 0 in your program, No. 1 in your hearts

IOWA CITY — Until you hear otherwise, my favorite Iowa football player is redshirt freshman wide receiver Jarriett Buie.

Some of his hair is fuchsia-colored. Besides football, he said his favorite sport to play is water polo. He has never played water polo.

Buie, from Tampa, Fla., wore jersey No. 0 on Aug. 9 at the Hawkeyes’ media day, and No. 0 he is. It’s the number receiver Diante Vines (now at Old Dominion) wore for the Hawkeyes last year while Buie had No. 84. Buie wanted the No. 0 when Vines left.

“I know 84 and all the 80s are receivers,” Buie said. “Those are old school and everybody loves them. But personally, I’m a single-digit guy. I feel smoother in it.

“You feel good, you play good. I’m one of those guys that I’m feeling juiced, I’m going to play well.

“And also, if you power anything to zero, it’s a 1.”

I consider myself good at math, but I get lost in combinatorics. Which, as we all know, concerns the study of finite discrete structures. It deals with the study of permutations and combinations, enumerations of the sets of elements.

Any number to the zero power is 1. Why? Because any number to the zero power is just the product of no numbers at all, which is the multiplicative identity, 1.

Buie knew this. I most certainly did not.

“If you go 5 to the power of zero, what do you get?” he asked. “One.”

“You go 6 to the power of zero, what do you get? One.

“A little fun fact.”

The NCAA began allowing players to wear No. 0 in 2020. I asked Buie if he would have wanted jersey number 00 were it permitted. He would not.

“That’s just a little thick,” he said. “I need the compression.”