Iowa football: The storied history of the Floyd of Rosedale

The Iowa football program faces rival Minnesota Saturday to battle for the Floyd of Rosedale. Here is the history behind the longest rivalry in Iowa history.

The Iowa football team is set to face the Minnesota Gophers Saturday at 230 PM (CST) at TCF Bank Stadium in the 112th matchup of these two universities. Not so surprisingly, this is Iowa’s longest tenured rivalry, right in front of Wisconsin, which Iowa suffered a loss to a little over a week ago. The winner of this rivalry game stakes claim to the Floyd of Rosedale, a beautiful bronze pig.

Both teams enter this October 6th matchup with 3-1 records, which we will highlight later in the week, but today we wanted to focus on the history of this matchup.

In the 111 games preceding Saturday’s contest, the Iowa football team has only came out victorious 47 times. Recent history, however, has been on Iowa’s side. Since taking over for the legendary Hayden Fry, Kirk Ferentz possesses a 13-6 record over the Gophers.

The Hawkeyes are looking forward to adding the 48th win in this series Saturday as they slowly chip away at Minnesota series lead that was primarily built in the first half of the 20th century. Iowa only won 11 times from the start of this rivalry in 1891 until 1950.

The 21st century has been quite the stark contrast to the beginning days of this trophy game. While Minnesota may have been the superior team in the beginning years of this rivalry, Iowa has seemingly become the dominant team since the turn of this century. Since 2000, the Gophers have only finished with a better record than the Iowa football team four times.

The way this year is going so far, despite the similar records, it seems as if the Gophers aren’t likely to finish better than the Hawks for the fifth time.

Iowa has a very strong team this year, and although they suffered the setback to Wisconsin a week ago, they are very much in the thick of the B1G West Division race. The first step is ensuring they take care of business Saturday and keep the Floyd of Rosedale for a fourth straight year.