Which Team do you hate more Iowa or Wisconsin?

Who do you hate more as a gopher fan?

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my take -

Iowa fans are more focused on Iowa football. in Wisconsin, you have the Packers, Brewers, Bucks and other sports teams to follow. but in Iowa, about 80% of the state is obsessed with the Hawkeyes.

you have a pocket of Iowa State fans, but almost everyone else is Hawkeyes 24/7.

so the Iowa fans IMHO are more intense and that makes them harder to deal with.

I lived in Wisconsin for about 5 years and I lived in Iowa for five years. I got along with the Wisconsin fans much better than I did with the Iowa fans.

(personal note - my sister married a Badger fan and one of my nieces married a Badger fan. they're both good dudes and we get along great at family events. good-natured joshing, but nothing over the top. my brother-in-law even comes on Gopher Hole now and then to see what Gopher fans are talking about. Hi Brad.)
 

Growing up in southern MN, it was Iowa. After moving to the metro, wisconsin ever since. Way too many wisconsin fans (including packer and brewer) on campus and in the metro in general
 
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Gophers1992 said:
Ah, I see you're one of those guys who thinks someone is a lesser fan if they are not an alum.

Academic elitism is not cool FYI.
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Quite the opposite actually. While I did graduate from college I'm as blue collar as they come. I think it's great that programs like Wisconsin & Iowa, and Michigan & Ohio State on a larger level have so many fans that are not alumni. I root for a team of a school that I did not graduate from.

I just think that those fan bases also bring along the large groups that are there to drink a lot just as much as they are there for the game. And in my experience that is where 75% of the trouble is.
 


For me Wisconsin fans are the worst. Tons of Minnesotans that went to school in Madison and came back living in the metro. They only come out when the Badgers beat the Gophers or the Gophers lose to someone. They suck.

Iowa fans are like Nebraska fans - super annoying but man you gotta respect how they love, spend money and follow their teams
 


Iowa, for a few reasons.

1. I have family who are Badger fans (my mom was born and grew up in Madison), so there is some familial bias. I do now have in-laws who are Iowa fans and are wonderful people, so this point is less impactful recently.
2. I've been to many Gopher-Badger games over the years, and have not had an overwhelmingly bad experience interacting with Badger fans. Obviously the drunk college students can get annoying, especially if they win, but I have yet to meet a fan base where that doesn't happen.
3. While I have not attended a game @iowa, my interactions with the fans that travel to the game when it's in MN have not been pleasant. As a band memebrr one year we had to have security with us while playing in the tailgate lots because there were Iowa fans posting online that they were traveling for the game and that they were going to throw food on us with the intention of trying to ruin our uniforms. Nothing every actually happened, but we never had anything similar come from Wisconsin fans (which I attribute to their appreciation for their own band).
 


As I get further away from my college days, I know fewer and fewer IA/WI fans, so my hate has possibly lessoned. However, Kirk has become more annoying the last 5 years, so there is that.
 

FredCoxRocks said:
Yup. Growing up in small-town Minnesota way back when, all I heard were Iowa jokes...even on the radio. Any encounter with someone south of the border was a volley of insults and one-liners.
Then as a young adult in the early 90s I worked in St. Paul and was exposed to a litany of daily border-crossers from the east that had a lot of bad things to say about Minnesota except for the source of their income. My inherited hate for Iowa was but a memory and I instead had to face a wave of "die-hard" Badgers fans who recently came out of the woodwork...they really liked what this new guy, Alvarez, was doing. One of the nice ones told me that just a few years prior the only reason fans stuck around at Camp Randall was to watch the U of W marching band perform after the game. Even he had to joke how quickly they forgot that.
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This is exactly what my Dad says. If it comes up in a conversation, he's always like there was no real rivalry before Alvarez. It took that huge winning streak by Wisky to just pull even in the series. Reminds me of the Packers as well when Favre came on the scene and won that first Super Bowl. All of a sudden there were people I knew who were telling me that they were lifelong Packers fans when I had never heard them mention the team once. Maybe being obnoxious bandwagon jumpers is in the blood.
 



short ornery norwegian said:
my take -

Iowa fans are more focused on Iowa football. in Wisconsin, you have the Packers, Brewers, Bucks and other sports teams to follow. but in Iowa, about 80% of the state is obsessed with the Hawkeyes.

you have a pocket of Iowa State fans, but almost everyone else is Hawkeyes 24/7.

so the Iowa fans IMHO are more intense and that makes them harder to deal with.

I lived in Wisconsin for about 5 years and I lived in Iowa for five years. I got along with the Wisconsin fans much better than I did with the Iowa fans.

(personal note - my sister married a Badger fan and one of my nieces married a Badger fan. they're both good dudes and we get along great at family events. good-natured joshing, but nothing over the top. my brother-in-law even comes on Gopher Hole now and then to see what Gopher fans are talking about. Hi Brad.)
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I have a similar experience. Been to probably a dozen games at Camp Randall. Good natured ribbing, but very tolerable. Been there for a couple Gophs wins and the fans have been cordial in losing.
 

Xerxes_ said:
Of course Minnesota and Iowa State fans are going to get along very well. They rarely play each other in football & both hate Iowa. For Iowa State they are without a doubt public enemy #1 and for Minnesota they up there but probably overall not quite at Wisconsin level.

I won't argue about their traveling fans being awful. You take a lot of small town folk who think they're big fish in whatever small pond they crawled out of and give them a short drive and relatively affordable weekend to a big city (Minneapolis is huge to them) and watch Iowa play and you're going to get a lot of the lower gene pool of the state.

Wisconsin & Iowa have large portions of the fan base that are not alumni and have zero affiliation with the university outside of following their football team. So get a lot of what I refer to as Walmart fans in both fan bases who don't have much respect for anything, including themselves.
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I think Iowa has far more of the "Walmart" crowd than Wisconsin though. That said, the two Iowa fans that I know that live here are both great guys and very reasonable.
 

Gophers1992 said:
Ah, I see you're one of those guys who thinks someone is a lesser fan if they are not an alum.

Academic elitism is not cool FYI.
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I do think it can make for a different type of fan if they are not an alum. In my experience they are more like a pro sports fan, maybe a little more fair-weather. Not saying they are "worse" per se. Just a different outlook.
 

College football was invented and perfected in 1992. Every team aside from the badgers before and after1992 is straight garbage.
 



Iowa, I can at least understand why people would choose to live in Wisconsin
 

disco said:
Definitely. Iowa State fans are a much nicer crew than Iowa fans.
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Iowa St. fans are like Gopher fans... They don't expect the world because it's been forever since they've had sustained success. The small amount of success that Iowa has had in the last 25 years has completely inflated their egos and perceived footprint in the college sorts landscape.
 
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You cannot polish either turd. They are equally worthless. Iowa fans at least know the game of football, with the exception of fair catch rules. Most Wisconsin Badger fans did not come out of the woodwork until Barry had his run.
 

Iowa. To main reasons. 1) Went to a small college there in the 1970's. Learned to dislike them in terms of sports. That has not changed. 2) My dad's brother and family live in Anamosa. Huge Hawk fans and are damn annoying.
 

Not a fan of either but for whatever reason I agree with the majority here who dislike Wisconsin more.
 

For me, it's Wisconsin. Just cuz.

For my wife, it's Iowa by a mile. It started at the infamous 2002 game in the dome. Two obnoxiously drunk Iowa chicks seated in front of us were extremely profane and proceeded to mock my wife on a couple questions she asked me about football (she's not a huge sports fan). It's been a white hot hate for anything Iowa since then.
 

I voted Wisconsin, but Iowa is closing the gap after their ridiculous complaining about refs correctly enforcing rules last year.

Edit: Nevermind, it should be Iowa. For some reason I always remember it as Wisconsin trying to steal our goal posts, but I just looked it up and it was Iowa in 2002. I was at that game. I guess I must have repressed memories from that incident or whatever they call it.
 

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I picked Wisconsin as I now live in Wisconsin. When I was in Iowa, I would have probably said them.

My experiences have been better at Iowa for road games. Certainly the normal annoying fans that heckle. But at Wisconsin I've had drunk students get in my face on multiple occasions.

But for home games, it's been the opposite. The traveling Iowa fans have been much worse.
 

Jeshurun said:
I voted Wisconsin, but Iowa is closing the gap after their ridiculous complaining about refs correctly enforcing rules last year.

Edit: Nevermind, it should be Iowa. For some reason I always remember it as Wisconsin trying to steal our goal posts, but I just looked it up and it was Iowa in 2002. I was at that game. I guess I must have repressed memories from that incident or whatever they call it.
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You obviously suffer from opponent dyslexia and are unable to easily identify a difference between a badger and a hawk.
Fortunately you cheer for a team where that works!
 

Panthadad2 said:
For me, it's Wisconsin. Just cuz.

For my wife, it's Iowa by a mile. It started at the infamous 2002 game in the dome. Two obnoxiously drunk Iowa chicks seated in front of us were extremely profane and proceeded to mock my wife on a couple questions she asked me about football (she's not a huge sports fan). It's been a white hot hate for anything Iowa since then.
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Your wife has the right mindset!
 

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