Nostalgia

Let's go full Draper.

This post can only really start with the scene, and the line:

“At my first job, there was this old pro copy writer, a Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘NEW’. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of Calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

Teddy told me that, in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.

This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. Goes backwards and forwards, and takes us to a place where we ache to go again….It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we were loved.”

The guys making the videos for Iowa Athletics got me in the feels Sunday night but good.

That thirtysomething man in an unfinished shed, for the uninitiated, is former Iowa quarterback Ricky Stanzi. In a sport measured in inches and recorded in minutiae, Stanzi stands as something close to a folk hero.

The video opens at Ricky’s first moment of transcendence, the 2008 ‘dart through the uprights’ that beat then-undefeated Penn State and kickstarted the longest winning streak in school history. Then, of course, there’s ‘Seven got Six’ at Michigan State, when Ken O’Keefe was drawing plays on his hand on the sideline like it was playground ball. The Orange Bowl win, still probably the most prestigious victory in Kirk Ferentz’s quarter-century tenure. And that’s all before a single word is said.

We get swarm, swarm, swarm. Stanzi’s teammate, Brett Greenwood, fighting his way out of the tunnel after a catastrophic injury, team surrounding and supporting him. The obligatory Bob Sanders kill shot. Beathard in Ames. But the next discernable voice is Brent Musberger’s Iowa-famous narration of Adrian Clayborn’s blocked punt in the following season’s Penn State game (say it with me, “BLOCKED. SCOOPED UP. THIS IS GONNA BE A HAWKEYE TOUCHDOWN. THIS IS CLAYBORN, THE BIG DEFENSIVE END.”) Cut to ‘85 Michigan, to the Goalposts in Minneapolis, but then to 2010 Michigan State, Sash to Hyde, the masterpiece that ended that era. Ricky Stanzi’s version of Beethoven’s 9th.

And then he said it: “You either love it, or you leave it.”

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The story of those teams is well-told, by me and others: Iowa hit new heights in the early aughts, but went through a two-year drought entering 2008, with poor offense (and poor quarterback play) the primary culprit. Negativity swirled around the program, from actions both on and off the field. Iowa, eventually and reluctantly at first, turned to Stanzi and leaned on Shonn Greene. By November, the Hawkeyes were beating Penn State and running the table, and Shonn Greene was running away with the Doak Walker Award and an NFL career.

The 2009 team conjured wins from magic: Back-to-back blocked field goals to beat Northern Iowa in the opener, the Clayborn block-and-scoop-and-score to beat Penn State in the revenge game, a three-point win over Arkansas State that is frequently forgotten, and that’s just September. A come-from-behind win over Michigan, the Seven Got Six game at Sparty, and the Tyler Sash pinball interception (“TRICK OR TREAT, IOWA CITAAAAY!”) jumpstarting a 35-point second half got Iowa undefeated through October and up to fourth in the BCS standings.

And then Cinderella lost her slipper on a play action bootleg in the end zone against Northwestern, and while Iowa won the Orange Bowl because Norm Parker was never losing to a triple option team with a month to prepare, the magic never really materialized again. The 2010 team had tons of hype and was effectively done by mid-October, that Michigan State blowout a brief glimpse of what might have been before the star collapsed on itself.

There’s lessons in that sequence for this year’s team, depending on where one thinks Iowa is in that sequence. We’re not even two years removed from the Hawkeyes being ranked second in the country in mid-October. Was last season’s malaise the 2010 denouement to a miracle run? Or is the new season, and quarterback change that comes with it, a prelude to another Era of Good Football?

Do we even want another 2009? The reason Ricky is a folk hero is that his is a Paul Bunyanesque tale of individual exploits over statistics. Stanzi threw three Pick Sixes before mid-October, and that Indiana comeback was necessitated in part due to his five interceptions. Iowa was 86th nationally in scoring offense that season, 89th in total offense, and 99th in turnovers. The 2009 team scored 303 points; a replay means Brian gets fired, right after winning the Orange Bowl. However, due in part to that statistical ineptitude, their run to the top of the polls is all the more magnified, because it demanded the sorts of feats discussed above. It required ping-pong interceptions and double blocked kicks, because everything else was aligned against it happening. It was the most entertaining season imaginable.

Do we want another 2009? We could only hope that every season was a 2009.

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It’s a 95-second hype video where the first image of a current player doesn’t come until the 49th second. But for a fan base with as much history with not just its football program, but this particular iteration of its football program, it hits every note. It tugs every heartstring. It renews the pain from the same old wound.

And this is where I have to admit the thing that I typically rail against: Iowa is just about the only program in the nation that can do this anymore. The number of Power Five programs that could talk about the 2008 season — where the video begins — and still be talking about the same coach leading the program today? Four: Iowa, Utah, Oklahoma State and Alabama. And Bama only hired Saban in 2007. With Fitzgerald’s firing at Northwestern, Kirk Ferentz now holds a six-year advantage in the longest-tenured head coach rankings. He holds an entire standard coaching tenure over everyone else.

There’s a throughline at Iowa you really can’t get anywhere else. A video like this doesn’t have the same impact if there isn’t one. If Iowa has a new coach to go with a new generation of talent, a throwback look to a team from 14 years ago doesn’t have the same emotional weight, even if we still love them. The reason this works, more than anything, is that we — and only we — can go back there. We could start down that road again in four days. The guy who led us there before is still here, and he still knows that path, and he can take us back again, to a place we knew we loved.

Old Teddy the Greek would have been proud.