The 1895 Iowa State Agricultural College football team included three players from Traer. (ISU Special Collections)
The established history of the “Cyclones” team name at Iowa State springs from the Chicago Tribune after the Northwestern game in 1895 that had the headline “Struck by a Cyclone”:
Northwestern might as well have tried to play football with an Iowa cyclone as with the Iowa team it met yesterday. At the end of fifty minutes’ play the big husky farmers from Iowa’s Agricultural College had rolled up 36 points, while 15 yard line was the nearest Northwestern got to Iowa’s goal.
The full text of this article is behind a paywall. It’s a fitting creation story. (Even if Iowa State hasn’t played Northwestern now for 40 years.)
But. There’s a but. And it’s a beaut of a “but” from Butte.
Ten days before that Sept. 29 Tribune article, the weekly Ames Intelligencer printed an interview with one of the Iowa State players about the game against Butte Athletic Club. The unnamed player, who gave a recap of the game but mostly talked about the unfair officiating, said, “We drove the Butte over the ground as though a cyclone had struck them.” (Emphasis added.)
How likely is it that the Tribune sports writer knew about that? It’s possible that the word was on many people’s minds because there were many “cyclones” spotted in Iowa in 1895.* But that makes two games in a row in which someone used the same word to describe the teams’ play. In that case, calling the team the “Cyclones” almost seems preordained.
Articles from those two games are reprinted here. There’s a missed field goal, bad/unfair officiating, and a victory in a game Iowa State had no business being in only to get thumped the next week — almost everything that makes up the DNA of 119 years of Cyclone football.
*In today’s meteorological terminology, the team would have ended up being called the Tornadoes. The original text of The Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, said it was a cyclone that whisked Dorothy from Kansas.