Some will say that the conflict between Iowa State University and the University of Iowa on the football field Saturday shouldn’t be mirrored off it.

Bullfeathers.

We won’t whine (too loudly) when we see family members with divergent allegiances hugging this weekend. And it’d be coldhearted to criticize reunions of high school friends who made their postsecondary choices based on legitimate (probably academic) criteria. No doubt university presidents Gregory Geoffroy and David Skorton will smile and shake hands on the grass just before kickoff (although we hope not to see a repeat of Skorton’s 20-second, 80-yard … um, thesaurus suggests “traipse” … to the end zone from last year).

All that is fine. But let’s review a couple important facts:

1. This is Iowa State.

2. Iowa sucks.

Really, we feel that second point is self-evident, and that further elaboration here is a waste of space — but our hand has been forced by the ceaseless stream of negativity, ad hominem attacks and outright lies about our school and our football outfit drifting across several counties, across Interstate 35 and within Ames’ pristine boundaries.

We have to respond.

As John Edwards might say, “Aren’t you just sick of it?”

There are so many ways to construct an argument against those silly Hawkeyes that it’s exceedingly difficult to know where to begin. They waddle like ducks. Their campus is concrete. In 2002, a Kinnick Stadium crowd booed the national anthem because it involved the ISU marching band. They don’t have an Olympic freestyle wrestling gold medalist.

The message-board types (you know who you are) will probably seize upon this, the collective opinion of an independent student newspaper serving Iowa State, as evidence that ISU sports fans are “obsessed” with beating Iowa because they are trying to overcome a little-brother complex.

We don’t think that’s exactly accurate — although it’s easy to mistake our fervor to prove our superiority for something else, particularly when your basis for comparison is the body of Iowa students and fans.

Yes, Iowa students and fans — a group of people so aloof that it apparently needed university administrators to declare this “Beat Iowa State Week” so that nobody forgot. Buttons are a popular way of showing your support for this concept over yonder.

Bottom line: This isn’t all that complicated, folks.

Beat Iowa.