Football is threaded into the University of Iowa’s DNA, and the importance of that connection is never clearer than during the height of football season. The sport also forms a crucial throughline in this semester’s Main Library Gallery exhibition, Hawkeye Histories | Sporting Stories, curated by Dr. Jennifer Sterling of the Department of American Studies and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“There are so many football histories to tell,” says Sterling. “It is Iowa’s oldest continuous sport, the first sport at Iowa to begin the process of African American desegregation, and it has been a fan favorite on campus since its late-1800s inception.”

Below, we offer a closer look at three of the football histories included in the exhibition.

Game-time decisions

The official history of Hawkeye football began in the 1880s. During those first few decades, the team played the majority of its games against other in-state institutions. But as football’s popularity spiked nationwide, so did the number of serious injuries endured by players. There was a clear need for regulation to mitigate the safety risks of the contact sport, and multiple Midwestern universities joined together in 1896 to form the organization that would become the Big Ten Conference. The University of Iowa signed on in 1899 and joined the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the process. By joining these regulatory bodies, Iowa became a leader in shaping the longevity of football as an intercollegiate sport.

In 1902, the university established its Board in Control of Athletics, a committee charged with ensuring that Iowa Athletics adhered to the standards set forth by the NCAA. Hawkeye Histories | Sporting Stories contains original copies of the handbooks used to regulate multiple sports, including football, at Iowa.

Putting football on the map

Data compiled from the Iowa Letterwinners Club and University of Iowa Athletics, first seasons through 2022–23. Research and data entry: Jennifer Sterling, Olivia Baier, Maria Copozzi, students from Spring 2024 SPST 1847 Hawkeye Nation class. Mapping and visualization: Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio.

These two heat maps use aggregated data to tell a story about the reach of Iowa football’s reputation. The map on the left shows the hometowns of players from Iowa football’s beginnings in 1880 to the building momentum of the mid-20th century. The map on the right offers the same data for the years 1950–2022. By placing these two maps side by side, we can see the emergence of a trend: while the first Iowa football players were overwhelmingly from Iowa, today’s players are increasingly coming to us from locations across the country.

Beyond household names

While the exhibition features items and stories related to some of Iowa’s best-known players like Nile Kinnick and Duke Slater, it also devotes much-needed attention to athletes whose names are less familiar to today’s fans. Among them is Mayes McLain, a member of the Cherokee Nation who transferred from the Haskell Institute (now called Haskell Indian Nations University) in Kansas to play at Iowa during the 1928 season. He received an “I” letter, but his career at Iowa was cut short when the conference ruled that he had already met the three-year limit for players.

According to Sterling, “[McLain’s] history is also intertwined with the cusp of regulatory changes in intercollegiate athletics, which left him unfairly targeted and his playing days at Iowa shortened.”