1961

Head Coach Jerry Burns

ENTERING THE DARK AGES
Beginning his first season as head coach, Burns had a top-ranked team and some words of caution: “I am concerned about what being ranked so high will do to our fans. I hope they won’t take it for granted that we will win all our games, and then be disillusioned if we don’t get as many good bounces as we did last year and lose several games.”

The words turned out to be an omen for the nearly 20 years of ho-hum football that would follow at the University of Iowa.

Burns coached from 1961-65, tallying 16 wins, 27 losses, and two ties, plus one cancellation. Ray Nagel came next, coaching the Hawkeyes over a five-year period to a 16-32-2 record. Three-year coach Fancis X. Lauterbur followed Nagel, compiling a dismal 4-28-1 record from 1971-73. Then there was Bob Commings, a guard on Iowa’s 1957 Rose Bowl Team. He earned an 18-37 record in his five-year term at Iowa.

These were the dark ages of Iowa football. New academic standards made things tough for some coaches and Athletic Director Evashevski made life impossible for others. Described as a man who couldn’t tolerate losing, Evy reportedly even withheld ice from the team one year.

Feuding within the athletic department led to disgruntlements of all sorts, many of them public, while on the field, the ball almost always took its bounce against Iowa.

October 28
Purdue’s 9-0 shutout of the Hawkeyes marked the first time in nearly 80 contests that Iowa had failed to score.

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