Saturday’s win was Hawkeyes’ biggest upset ever

Superlatives are subjective, memories are flawed, and your mileage may vary.

But I would suggest Iowa's 14-13 win over Michigan Saturday night was the biggest upset in the program's history.

Some point to the Hawkeyes' 9-7 win at Michigan in 1981. That was an upset, folks. Iowa had made no positive ripples in football in, well, decades. The Wolverines were the preseason No. 1 team in the nation.

While Iowa was 4-1 and had created a little pandemonium in Iowa City by defeating Nebraska at home — the Huskers won the Big 8 that year — that was a road game against a goliath. As much as any game, that was the one that transformed the image of Hawkeye football.

However, Michigan lost its season-opener to Wisconsin, and though it was 4-1 when it played Iowa, it hadn't been juggernaut-ish in winning four straight games leading up to the game against the Hawkeyes.

There haven't been all that many opportunities for humongous upsets between then and now, mainly because Iowa has been a steady and solid program since that year. It hasn't been in the position of heavy underdog often. When it was, in the beginning of Kirk Ferentz's tenure as Iowa's coach in 1999, it never mustered a threat to the Big Ten's good teams.

Iowa beat a third-ranked, 9-0 team in Kinnick Stadium in 2008, Penn State. But, the Hawkeyes entered that game with some momentum, were a very good team themselves, and were only 7-point underdogs.

The line on Saturday night's Michigan-Iowa went up to 24 points before kickoff. Twenty-four points!

What was ominous for Michigan is that 22-point favorite Pittsburgh, which was 5-4 like Iowa, had just won at Clemson, which was 9-0 like the Wolverines.

Michigan not only was unbeaten, but was a destructive force averaging 497 yards and 48 points per game while giving up peanuts. Iowa had just gotten flattened 41-14 at Penn State, surrendering 599 yards.

No one in the media that I'm aware of picked a Hawkeyes upset, as this clearly illustrates.

I walked around the Kinnick parking lots before the game, and talked to quite a few fans. No one — and this never happens — was telling me we were about to see an Iowa victory. The atmosphere was muted, as if the fans were there to witness a beatdown. They had spent the money on tickets, and the tailgating was still good, but they were apprehensive about what they were about to witness.

The only prediction of a Hawkeyes victory from a public person I know came from former Iowa kicker Nate Kaeding, who proclaimed this on Twitter four hours before the game:

The University of Iowa Hawkeye football team will win tonight.November 12, 2016

The University of Iowa Hawkeye football team will win tonight.

— Nate Kaeding (@Kaeding_Nate)

Now, Nate's a Hawkeye through and through. But he doesn't say what he doesn't believe, and he hasn't struck me as a big predictions guy. On Sunday I asked him what he knew.

'I knew nothing. But I felt something!'

So did his former team.