Hello, Goldy.
You thought you could get rid of me, didn't you? You thought you could just change stadiums and coaches and presidents and we would just leave you alone, that you could remove the object of our scorn and send the hatred with him to the sidelines of the FX Game of the Week. You may have exorcised Tim Brewster and his parade of coordinators from your program and replaced him with a furry little man with lip hair and Midwestern ruggedness, but you haven't bought our sympathy. You're still Minnesota. We're still Iowa. You have our pig, and we're coming to take it back.
You say you hate Iowa, but your hate is bred from envy, from lust, from looking south for 30 years and wondering why you can't do what Iowa does. The answer to that question lies within you, Gophers, in your weakness, your demand for immediate gratification. You watched Kirk Ferentz be paraded off your field on the shoulders that had pummeled you into submission, with a rose in hand, and responded by hiring a huckster. You watched Robert Gallery and wanted one of those, not realizing that Robert Gallerys and Shonn Greenes and Amari Spieveys are the result of patience and growth and cultivation only when mature. Now, as your prized recruits flounder, another generation of Iowa-developed players -- players who Brewster wouldn't even consider recruiting -- are going to steamroll you again. Amari Spievey is now Shaun Prater. Shonn Greene is now Marcus Coker. And Robert Gallery has been replaced by Riley Reiff (our Scout dot com player of the week) (/makes cash register-handle-pulling motion). You can replace the used car salesman with his complete opposite, but your new coach can't change that basic component of your constitution that ensures that you are too impatient to ever be good. The conductor may have changed, but your shitty pop song remains the same.
You can continue to hate Iowa in your superficial, envious, XXXL homemade t-shirt sort of way. You can keep parading Floyd around to every high school and county fair in the state, implicitly acknowledging that you won't have the opportunity again anytime soon. You can keep calling for the firing of your new coach because he has the audacity to say your program isn't any good. You can take all of that denial and ignorance, roll it up in a little ball of hate, and send it our way.
Because yes, we hate you. We hate you right fucking back. We hate you because you still chant "WHO HATES IOWA" while losing to South Dakota State. We hate you because your endless Floyd parade only proves that you've never been here before and don't know how to act like it. We hate you because you're Minnesota, and we're Iowa, and no matter what you do to make your program and yourselves more likeable, you still have goalposts and you still have our pig, and they belong to us.
Tomorrow, we take back what is ours. We'll take our pig, and we'll take our goalposts, and we'll take our seats near the field during the final minutes of another Iowa romp in your stadium, and if you're lucky we won't rip out the seats and sack the place on our way out of town. Tomorrow, we hate, and there's not a thing you can do to stop it.
Free Floyd. Free the hate.