It Must Be Exhausting Always Rooting for the Anti-hero

Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press-Citizen / USA TODAY NETWORKOver the past few seasons, the Iowa Hawkeye football team has been cast in a role the program had avoided for basically its entire existence: that of the villain. Under Kirk Ferentz, Iowa has occasionally been viewed as a plucky underdog, a curious oddity that wins games with the final score of 6-4 or throws a Hail Mary to beat the defending national champion, or even the so-called “fake ID of college football”. Still, Iowa was rarely the bad guy in grand narrative of a given college football season, unless you happened to be one of its rivals or a title contender forced to play the Hawkeyes in a late-season night game in Kinnick Stadium.

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