Iowa Hawkeyes Football Trivia
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48 free Iowa Hawkeyes Football trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Iowa football has a Heisman winner who died in World War II, a coach who painted the visitors' locker room pink, uniforms borrowed from the Pittsburgh Steelers and a bronze pig that two states fight over every autumn. This quiz covers the whole program: the 1920s national titles under Howard Jones, the 1929 expulsion from the Big Ten, Forest Evashevski's Rose Bowl teams, the Forgotten Season of 1960, Hayden Fry's rebuild and Tiger Hawk, Kirk Ferentz's record tenure, the trophy games against Minnesota, Iowa State, Nebraska and Wisconsin, the famous upsets at Kinnick and the Wave to the children's hospital. ANF stickers and In Heaven There Is No Beer included.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which town do the Hawkeyes play their home games?
Iowa City
Kinnick Stadium holds 69,250, the 25th-largest college football venue in the country.
Q 02Kinnick Stadium is named after the school's only winner of which award?
Heisman Trophy
Heisman Trophy. Accepting it in 1939, Nile Kinnick thanked God that his battles were on football fields and not on the battlefields of Europe.
Q 03Nile Kinnick, Iowa's stadium namesake, died in 1943 serving as what?
Navy pilot
Navy pilot. He had turned down pro football for law school before enlisting, and at 24 he ditched his fighter in the sea off Venezuela on a training flight; the stadium took his name in 1972.
Q 04Which coach took over Iowa in 1999 and went on to become the winningest football coach in Big Ten history?
Kirk Ferentz
Kirk Ferentz. His first Iowa team went 1–10 and lost every conference game in 1999; three years later the Hawkeyes went unbeaten in the league.
Q 05Iowa's surprise 1939 team, led by Nile Kinnick, earned which nickname?
The Ironmen
The Ironmen. Iowa had won only two games in the previous two years; new coach Eddie Anderson had so little depth that his starters rarely left the field, and they went 6–1–1.
Q 06Howard Jones won 20 straight games at Iowa in the early 1920s, then built a dynasty at which school?
USC
USC. Jones left Iowa after 1923, spent a year at Duke, then won every Rose Bowl his Trojans played, while the Hawkeyes sank to the bottom of the league for most of the 1930s.
Q 07What did the Big Ten do to Iowa in 1929 over suspected payments to athletes?
Voted it out of the league
Voted it out of the league. The conference took Iowa back in February 1930, after the school had disqualified a group of its players.
Q 08Calvin Jones became the first Hawkeye, and first African-American, to win which award in 1955?
Outland Trophy
Outland Trophy. The guard had committed to his home-state university before following two high-school friends to Iowa; a year after winning it he died in a plane crash in Canada, aged 23.
Q 09Which team did Iowa rout 38–12 in the 1959 Rose Bowl?
California
California. Halfback Bob Jeter was the game's outstanding player, and the rout persuaded the Football Writers Association to name Iowa its national champion for the 1958 season.
Q 10Which team handed Iowa its only loss of 1960 and was sent to the Rose Bowl ahead of the co-champion Hawkeyes?
Minnesota
Minnesota. The Gophers won 27–10 when Iowa was the top-ranked team in the country, and because the Big Ten then let its teams play in only one bowl, the Hawkeyes stayed home with a top-three ranking.
Q 11Which former Iowa tight end, a fifth-round pick in 2017, set an NFL receiving record for his position a year later?
George Kittle
George Kittle. He caught only 48 passes in his whole Iowa career, then gained 1,377 yards for the 49ers in 2018, taking the tight-end record from Travis Kelce less than an hour after Kelce had set it.
Q 12Which Hall of Fame coach did Iowa hire after the 1978 season to revive its football program?
Hayden Fry
Hayden Fry. He vowed to resign if Iowa missed a bowl for four more years; in his third season the Hawkeyes shared the Big Ten title and reached the Rose Bowl, their first bowl in 23 years.
Q 13What color is the visitors' locker room at Iowa's Kinnick Stadium famously painted?
Pink
Q 21Which Iowa quarterback threw 'The Catch', the last-play pass that won the 2005 Capital One Bowl?
Drew Tate
Drew Tate. Iowa had led all day until its opponent went ahead with 46 seconds left; with the clock running out, the sophomore threw from his own 44 on what became the final play.
Q 22Which unbeaten, third-ranked team lost 24–23 at Iowa in 2008 on a field goal with one second left?
Penn State
Penn State. Safety Tyler Sash's late interception started the winning drive and Daniel Murray's 31-yard kick finished it, the Nittany Lions' only regular-season loss and the end of their national title hopes.
Q 23Iowa's first BCS bowl win came in the 2010 Orange Bowl against which team?
Georgia Tech
Pink. The coach who ordered it had a psychology degree and reasoned that the colour, sometimes used in jails to calm inmates, would put opponents in a passive mood.
Q 14Iowa's uniforms were modelled, with permission, on which NFL team's?
Pittsburgh Steelers
Pittsburgh Steelers. They were the best team in pro football and happened to share Iowa's colours, so a new coach inheriting years of losing dressed his players like winners.
Q 15What is the name of the logo on Iowa's football helmets, first drawn in 1979?
Tiger Hawk
Tiger Hawk. A commercial artist, Bill Colbert, drew it for a coach who wanted a distinctive helmet decal, and the team has since taken it off its helmets to mark moments of mourning.
Q 16What do the letters on Iowa's 'ANF' helmet sticker stand for?
America Needs Farmers
America Needs Farmers. The sticker first appeared late in the 1985 season as a farm crisis swept Iowa; NCAA limits on decals took it off in 1992, and it returned for good in 2009.
Q 17Iowa's 1985 team spent five weeks of the season ranked where in the AP poll?
No. 1
No. 1. The stay at the top included a last-play win over the second-ranked team in the country, and Iowa went on to win the Big Ten title and play in the Rose Bowl.
Q 18Which Iowa quarterback led the final drive that beat the No. 2 team in the country 12–10 in 1985?
Chuck Long
Chuck Long. He started from his own 22 with 5:27 left, and Rob Houghtlin's kick won it as time ran out; Long was only there because two plays in a bowl game as a freshman had not cost him a year of eligibility.
Q 19Which seventh-ranked team did Iowa upset 10–7 in 1981, a year after losing to it 57–0?
Nebraska
Nebraska. Punter Reggie Roby kept the Huskers pinned back with kicks averaging over 50 yards, and the upset launched a season that ended in Iowa's first bowl game in 23 years.
Q 20Whose last game before joining the Miami Dolphins was Iowa's last-play win in the 2005 Capital One Bowl?
Nick Saban
Nick Saban. The 56-yard catch that beat his defending national champions was senior Warren Holloway's first and only college touchdown.
Georgia Tech. Iowa's defence held an option attack that ran for over 300 yards a game to a single offensive touchdown, and Brandon Wegher's late 32-yard run sealed a 24–14 win.
Q 24Which Australian punter became a fan favourite at Iowa and won the 2023 Ray Guy Award?
Tory Taylor
Tory Taylor. The Melbourne native was called on so often in 2023 that he punted for 4,479 yards, breaking an NCAA single-season record that had stood for 85 years.
Q 25Which Big Ten power did Iowa rout 55–24 at Kinnick Stadium in 2017?
Ohio State
Ohio State. Amani Hooker returned an interception for a touchdown on the game's first play, and the Buckeyes' quarterback was picked off three more times in their first league defeat of the season.
Q 26Iowa plays a border rival each year for Floyd of Rosedale, a bronze statue of what animal?
A pig
A pig. Tempers ran high after the rival's rough handling of Iowa star Ozzie Simmons in 1934, so before the rematch its governor bet a prize hog on the result; Floyd of Rosedale was later cast in bronze.
Q 27Iowa and Iowa State play annually for which prize?
Cy-Hawk Trophy
Cy-Hawk Trophy. The rivals stopped meeting after 1934, and when they agreed to play again in 1977 a Des Moines athletic club donated the trophy to mark the occasion.
Q 28Iowa has played for the Heroes Trophy on which day each year since 2011?
The Friday after Thanksgiving
The Friday after Thanksgiving. Iowa's opponent had played a rival on that date since 1990, first Oklahoma and then Colorado; when it joined the Big Ten in 2011, Iowa inherited the slot.
Q 29Which prize have Iowa and Wisconsin played for since 2004?
Heartland Trophy
Heartland Trophy. The brass bull was first handed over in 2004, when Iowa's 30–7 win also clinched a share of the Big Ten title, though the two teams had been meeting since 1894.
Q 30Which Big Ten rival went 15 years without playing Iowa after Hawkeye fans pelted its players with apples in 1952?
Illinois
Illinois. The Illini had won 33–13 in a game marred by penalties and a punch, and the series was then shelved for a cooling-off period that kept the two apart until 1967.