Iowa’s best tradition puts college football in its proper perspective

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I am, admittedly, an enormous sucker for college football traditions. I have made no secret of that throughout the years, especially this season. Give me marching bands, rivalry trophies, weird chants, fight songs, archaic stadiums, mascots with inexplicable origin stories, and rituals that would sound absolutely insane if you tried to explain them to someone who was not a college football sicko. I love all of it.

But, for my proverbial money, the best traditions are those that extend beyond the field. They aren’t meaningful simply because people have been doing them for a long time; they are meaningful because they connect people and inspire emotions that transcend football. And I don’t know that anything in college football does that better than the Hawkeye Wave.

At the end of the first quarter of every Iowa home football game, the nearly 70,000 people inside Kinnick Stadium — regardless of what team colors they are wearing — turn away from the field and toward the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital overlooking the stadium. Players turn. Coaches turn. Officials turn. The visiting team turns. And together, they wave to the pediatric patients and their families watching from the hospital’s 12th floor.

That’s it. They wave, and I inevitably start blubbering (like I am now while writing this). Nobody plants a flag. There are no pyrotechnics. Nobody rings a bell, smashes a rock, touches a sign, or runs onto the field accompanied by a live animal. For a few moments, everybody just waves. The simplicity of the gesture is part of its enormous power.

The tradition began during the 2017 season, the same year patients moved into the new Stead Family Children’s Hospital. The building’s location alongside Kinnick created the opportunity, and after the idea was suggested on social media that spring, Hawkeye fans embraced it, beginning with that season’s opener against Wyoming. It became so immediately and universally beloved that, in just its 10th season, the Hawkeye Wave feels so intimately woven into the fabric of games in Iowa City — and college football as a whole — that you would swear it had been part of the game-day experience for generations.

Like most lifelong Buckeye fans, I spend an entirely unreasonable percentage of my life caring about college football. Ohio State wins make my Saturdays better, and — conversely — Ohio State losses make them worse. I spend months anticipating games, hours writing about them, and an embarrassing amount of emotional energy worrying about whether a collection of 18-to-23-year-olds can convert 3rd-and-2.

And then the first quarter ends at Kinnick Stadium. Everybody turns toward that hospital, and for a few moments, the whole thing gets put into its proper perspective.

There are children on the other side of those windows dealing with cancer, major surgeries, chronic illnesses, and medical realities that no child or parent should ever have to confront. Their families are navigating fears considerably larger than whether Ohio State can convert in the red zone.

That doesn’t mean our investment in football is silly or meaningless; quite the opposite. Part of what makes sports so wonderful is that they give us communities to belong to, experiences to share, and something joyful to care about together. The Hawkeye Wave simply reminds us that, while those things are valuable, there are others worth caring about even more.

Of course, purely from a competitive standpoint, I am not entirely convinced that Iowa should be allowed to do this to visiting teams. You spend an entire week telling Ohio State’s players that they are heading into one of the most hostile environments in the Big Ten: Kinnick is going to be loud; the Hawkeyes are going to be physical; the crowd is going to hate you; you need to bring an edge.

Then, 15 minutes into the game, you make everybody turn around and wave to sick children. How exactly is a linebacker supposed to maintain the appropriate amount of controlled rage after that? One minute you’re ready to run through a brick wall; the next you’re thinking about calling your mom and donating to a children’s hospital.

Frankly, it feels like an unfair competitive advantage. Then again, this is the same program that, under legendary coach Hayden Fry, famously painted its visiting locker room pink in an attempt to neutralize opposing teams’ aggression. Maybe emotionally disarming visitors is just another cherished Iowa tradition.

But beneath the joke is the reason the Wave works so well: for a few moments, it asks everyone in the stadium — home fans, visiting fans, players, coaches, all of us — to put the game aside and participate in something bigger than themselves.

And that is why I love it. College football has no shortage of traditions designed to convince us that whatever happens between the white lines is the most important thing in the world; the Hawkeye Wave does something considerably more valuable. For a few moments on fall Saturdays in Iowa City, it reminds us that it isn’t. And somehow, that makes college football feel even more important.

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