Two winning football programs cannot exist in the same state in the same year. Period.

That’s just the way it is all over the country. After all, it’s like that in Iowa, so it just must be a fact of life. The “survival of the fittest,” one could call it.

This argument has been stated by many over the years, most notably by Iowans, who see it as an excuse to explain futility.

One person who explored this topic as it relates to Iowa was Des Moines Register sports columnist Marc Hansen.

In the fall of 1997, Hansen wrote an editorial discussing the fact it was normal that Iowa State, at the time winless, and Iowa, with a perfect record at the time, had opposite records.

Hansen based his argument upon research he did by looking back at the two schools’ records over the last few decades. Since 1970, the Hawkeyes and Cyclones had .500 or better records in the same season only twice.

He showed that when Iowa State was good, (yes, there was a time), Iowa was bad. And from then on, (as everyone knows) the Hawkeyes flourished while the Cyclones struggled.

The reason most people cite to explain this phenomenon is similar to “the rich get richer theory,” or in football, “the good get bigger, faster and stronger theory.”

The major factor which leads to this phenomenon relates to in-state recruiting, it assumes that all of the best high school players in the state will attend the same, already successful, school.

In an attempt to prove or disprove the theory, I examined this as a final project in my political science statistics course. I took five states with two major Division I schools (Iowa, Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma and Michigan,) and cross-examined their overall records during the last 27 years.

The states were also chosen because of relatively similar recruiting bases and state populations. (In most years nearly the same number of football stars hail from the Iowa cornfields as the Arizona desert or the Oklahoma plains.)

And the results? The only state to show a strong inverse relationship between the schools: Iowa.

Interestingly, in Kansas and Oklahoma when one team was poor, so was the other, and when one team was good, the other was more likely to be strong.

Arizona and Michigan showed little relationship between their major college schools. Therefore, predicting one team’s success when knowing the success of the other is nearly impossible and is ultimately rendered useless.

So back to the original statement: Two successful teams cannot exist in the same state at the same time.

Wrong. It is possible. It just seems that in Iowa people tend to view the world based on what happens between two rivers and ignore the events which occur outside the state’s borders.

So when you’re ready to dismiss the ineffectiveness of the ISU football program as a natural occurrence because of the University of Iowa, just talk to someone from Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma or Michigan and see what they have to say.

Is this everywhere? No, it’s Iowa.

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Drew Harris is a senior in journalism and mass communication and political science from Peosta.