With the 2009 season complete, BHGP looks back at the ten most sublimely absurd moments of the past decade for this sublimely absurd team, counting them down over the next two weeks.
Travel back in time to the wild, heady fall of 2004, when a running back-depleted Iowa football team was riding a seven-game winning streak and Big Ten Championship into the Capital One Bowl... and some plucky rookie quarterback from the other Miami by the name of Ben Roethlisberger was taking the NFL by storm, going undefeated in his first nine starts. In fact, young Rothelisberger (looking about 50 lbs. lighter in those days, back when he only had one chin) was riding a personal winning streak of twenty-two games, having piloted arguably the best MAC team ever (damning with faint praise, but hey) to a 13-1 record the previous year. That one blemish? Why, the 2003 Iowa Hawkeyes, of course.
So NFL Countdown dispatched Kenny Mayne to Iowa to discover the secrets of the last team to hand Big Ben a loss... and what he found was two minutes and change of comedy gold. From Chad Greenway's nostalgic reminisces about the arrival of cable television in Iowa to Sean Considine's annoyance at football pre-empting BassMasters to Scott Chandler using his brother's legacy as a pick-up line, it was the the most intentionally funny moment of the 00s for Iowa football. But what put the segment over the top and seared it into the brainmeats of anyone who saw it was, of course, Matt Roth: "Two words: Iowa Hawkeye pride." Hey, we didn't give him a scholarship for his counting skills.