The Iowa State Address: Five score and five years ago, our fathers brought forth to this university a new football team, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all players are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war and longtime losing streak, testing whether or not our football team or any football team (and its fans) so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

Every Saturday we meet on the great green battlefield of this war. We are going to dedicate a portion of Jack Trice Field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives and took their defeats so this team might live.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, who have struggled here for so long have consecrated it at a level far above our poor power to add or detract a few wins and many losses.

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what we have done here. It is for the living, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work of winning a game which they who fought here have thus far so nobly unachieved.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored players we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these losses shall not have been stompings in vain, that this team under Jischke and McCarney shall have a new birth of freedom and that this football team of the fans, by the fans and for the fans shall not perish from this earth.

Basically, we just want a victory.

– October 25, 1997, Jack Trice Stadium