It is a game unlike any other in the state of Iowa.

Fans circle this date on their calendars while players and coaches strive to earn year-long bragging rights for their respective schools.

“It is just a great rivalry,” quarterback Austen Arnaud said, “and the one thing that sticks out for me is that Iowa has no pro sports teams, so this is Iowa’s game for the year, in a sense. Basketball can’t fit nearly as many people in their arena as we can on the field at Jack Trice or at Kinnick. It’s just a great atmosphere to be around.”

The rivalry has been intense from the beginning. The first Iowa-Iowa State football game took place more than a century ago, in 1894.

Since that first game, the series has been cancelled twice due to the intensity of the event. The last time, after the game in 1933, resulted in a 43-year hiatus from the rivalry.

When the teams got back together in 1977, it was immediately apparent that the rivalry had lost little of its luster as ISU coach Earle Bruce had “Beat Iowa” stitched across the front of his players’ jerseys for the game.

Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz’s first taste of the rivalry came in 1981, his first year as the Iowa offensive line coach under legendary Hawkeye coach Hayden Fry.

“I know in ‘81, that year jumped out. It was not a good experience,” Ferentz said in his weekly press conference. “It was bad on the field. I remember that even before the game got started it was bad on the field.”

Since then, the rivalry has cooled off some, partially due to the fact that the Hawks took all of the suspense out of the game with a monster 15-game winning streak against the Cyclones, starting in 1983.

The rivalry began to heat up once again in 1998, when the heavily favored Hawkeyes dropped a stunning contest in Iowa City.

“It was a fabulous day,” said Paul Rhoads, ISU head coach and then-secondary coach. “We had kids that decided that they were going to win that football game. It ended a lot of years of frustration for Iowa State fans everywhere. I remember Dan McCarney would tell the football team and other people associated with it that it was not a rivalry at that time. For things to be a rivalry, both teams gotta win and lose every now and then, and it just wasn’t happening at that point.

“As I walked off that practice field that Friday, I didn’t give us a snowball’s chance of winning that football game. Our last practice was so awful on that day, and I remember Marcus Powers and Jeff Waters put their arms around me and said, ‘Coach, we’ll be OK.’”

Since then, the series has been more evenly matched with Iowa State edging Iowa 7-4 in the last 11 contests. But the resurgence of the competitive rivalry between the schools has manifested itself in a much more comely manner than the meeting did early in its history, according to Ferentz, who took over for Fry in 1999.

“The 10 years I’ve been back — unless I’m forgetting something — the sportsmanship’s been good on both sides,” Ferentz said. “But it’s been extremely intense, extremely fierce in terms of the competition part. But I don’t remember bad sportsmanship.”