I know the athletic departments won’t go for it, but I’m going to suggest and write about it anyway: Iowa State should set up a home-and-home with Northwestern in football, playing in Evanston in 2020 and Ames in 2022.
Why? Because 2020 is the 125th anniversary of the year Northwestern was Struck By A Cyclone.
I’ve touched on 1895 before, in the blog post “The ISU-Purdue game that doesn’t exist”. Thirteen days after playing Butte Athletic Club, the Iowa Agricultural College* football team was in Evanston for its second game ever outside the state of Iowa, Sept. 28, 1895. (In fact, the 1895 team did not play a single home game.)
I.A.C. won 36-0, and the next day’s Chicago Tribune headline, bolded above (subhead: “It Comes from Iowa and Devastates Evanston Town”), became the inspiration for the team’s nickname.
Iowa State has played Northwestern seven times since, and has lost seven times since. The last meeting was in 1956, and the two teams never played in Ames.
Both teams have unfilled slots in their 2020 and 2022 schedules, but here is where the logistics stop being favorable for my proposal. The one big non-conference game each team has scheduled in both those years is a road game — ISU at Iowa, and Northwestern at Stanford, each in multi-year arrangements. Each team would end up having two true road games against non-conference BCS/power-conference opponents in a year, and that doesn’t happen much if ever nowadays. (Aside from the neutral-road setup with Florida State and Iowa in 2002, the last time ISU did it was 1990.)
Along with and related to that, the Big Ten will start playing nine conference games in 2016, and the Big 12 has done so since 2011. Also, Northwestern may not be as enthusiastic about remembering the event as ISU.
As long as that setup continues, and as long as six games garner a bowl, it is highly unlikely that the one remaining non-I-AA slot** on ISU’s schedule will be filled with anything besides a team from the MAC or Mountain West. While I would love to see Northwestern — or Illinois, or Kentucky, or another typically less-powerful power-conference team — on the Cyclones’ schedule alongside Iowa, some things just aren’t going to be.
*It became Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts in 1898.
**Northern Iowa is on the schedule every odd-numbered year through 2023, plus 2016.