Saturday, one of the losingest programs in college football history takes on one of the winningest. It’s a crude (and perhaps ungrammatical) way of putting it, but it’s an ugly truth. The numbers don’t lie.
And with Missouri’s conference future still up in the air, perhaps it’s time to pause and look back.
The NCAA FBS (Division I-A) 2011 record book is 128 pages long (PDF). The phrase “Iowa St” appears 68 times, including in the cumulative lists. A lot of those are directly attributed to Troy Davis in 1995 and 1996. On the other hand, a lot of those also involve the 1998 Texas game, with Ricky Williams setting yards and TD records and two ISU extra-point attempts returned by the defense.
To cut down on the length of this post, I’m going to limit this to the ISU team as a whole and also create a “More after the jump” link. (I will also be adding this to earlier posts retroactively.)
Here are the entries referring to the ISU football team:
- Fourth-worst win percentage in the 1990s: 27-80-3, .259; ahead of UTEP, Temple, Kent State. Third-lowest win total, 27, ahead of Temple and Kent State.
- #81 in win percentage in the 2000s: 55-68, .447; #80 in win total.
- #25 in the AP year-end poll for 2000
- #18 in the UPI year-end poll for 1976
- #17 in the UPI year-end poll for 1971
- Best in passing defense, 1958 (avg. 39 yards) and 1960 (avg. 30.2 yards)
- Second-toughest schedule in 2002, behind USC
- Sixth-toughest schedule in 2003
- Eighth-toughest schedule in 2010
- Iowa State ended Nebraska’s 33-game winning streak in 1901-06.
- Iowa State had a 16-game losing streak in 1929-30.
- As of the end of the 2010 season, Nebraska-Iowa State was the 20th-most-played rivalry/matchup in Division I-A (105 games).
- Missouri-Iowa State and Missouri-Kansas have both been played for 91 consecutive years, since 1919, ranking in the top 15 for uninterrupted series. MU-KU is the 2nd-most-played series in NCAA history and MU-ISU is 25th.
- Iowa State was 1-7 in overtime through 2010, the only victory being a triple-overtime win over Toledo in 2006. Iowa State is now 2-7 in overtime overall and 2-0 in 3OT.
Now, here’s where that top sentence comes back into play:
- Going into the 2011 season, Texas is fourth in all-time winning percentage (.717) and second in all-time wins (850).
- Going into the 2011 season, Iowa State is 105th in all-time winning percentage (.459) and 76th in all-time wins (494) — according to the NCAA. According to Iowa State, the Cyclones only have 493 wins. Could we please get this sorted out before win #500? This inconsistency appears unrelated to a disputed ISU-Nebraska game in 1907, because ISU credits that as a win while the NCAA and College Football Data Warehouse mark it as a loss — meaning that the records differ by TWO games.
- Of the teams that played more than 1,000 games before the start of the 2010 season, Iowa State had a better all-time percentage than only Rice, Northwestern, Kansas State, Indiana, and Wake Forest. (Multiple teams crossed the 1,000-game threshold in 2010.)
This will be the ninth game between Iowa State and Texas. ISU is 1-7, the lone win coming last year. For a refresher, here’s a 10-minute video recap.