Winning football games is far from an easy task.

It will often take many years for a college football program to establish a winning culture. Once that culture is established, greed usually sets in.

The Chicago Bears, an iconic NFL franchise notorious for its struggles in the 21st century, fired head coach Lovie Smith after the 2012 season despite winning 10 games. While many fans rejoiced at the decision, the Bears would crumble from a potential Super Bowl contender into a perennial cellar-dweller in just two years. Chicago has recorded just two winning seasons since, and just clinched a winning campaign for the first time in seven years this weekend.

Yes, that’s the NFL, but Midwestern college football fans don’t have to look far to find the collegiate counterpart. The Nebraska Cornhuskers, a program once noted for its excellence and championship-level teams, don’t even closely resemble that anymore.

Nebraska’s move to the Big Ten Conference in 2011 remains a colossal mistake, but the Huskers were still winning games with controversial head coach Bo Pelini – at least nine games per season to be exact.

But everything changed on a cold November day in 2014.

Pelini’s Nebraska squad overcame a 17-point second half deficit to defeat rival Iowa and finish with another respectable 9-3 record. It wasn’t good enough to net the Huskers a berth in the conference championship game or gain a BCS bowl bid, but a warm January bowl destination would still await.

Rather than be satisfied with the consistent results, then-Nebraska athletic director Shawn Eichorst decided to fire Pelini with the hopes a new head coach could elevate the program to the next level.

Eleven years later, the Huskers are barely gasping for relevancy. They’ve only beaten Iowa once since that 2014 game (2022) and have now lost seven consecutive games to their rivals at Memorial Stadium. That’s the second-longest streak by a visiting team ever, and the Hawkeyes will have the chance to tie that mark in 2027.

If you’ve read this far, this article is not about Nebraska’s downfall, it’s praising the consistency of Iowa’s program.

Head coach Kirk Ferentz has been chastised by his loyal fanbase over the course of his 27-year tenure on the sidelines for not elevating the Hawkeyes to the 10 or 11-win plateau, but Iowa proved its superiority to its desperate border rivals with a dominant 40-16 win in the 15th edition of the Heroes Game on Friday.

Iowa’s win moves it to 8-4 on the season. That’s a sentence that disappoints most Hawkeye fans these days, but winning eight games is something that most college football programs, especially Nebraska, would kill to have right now. In fact, Iowa is one of just four teams to win eight or more games in every full season (the Hawkeyes would’ve done it in the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season anyway), joining blue bloods Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio State.

Those programs have all won national championships in that time span, but Ferentz is winning consistently at Iowa. The Hawkeyes were an established program when Ferentz took over in 1999, but the consistency they once had under Hayden Fry was long in the past.

While Nebraska continues to cycle through head coaches to chase its fever dream, Iowa doesn’t have to do that. Most schools would’ve moved on from a consistent coach like Ferentz, but the Hawkeyes stayed the course and appreciated their success.

That was on full display on Friday. Iowa quickly fell into a 13-10 hole, but never lost hope. Ten plays and 75 yards later, the Hawkeyes were back on top. Nebraska obviously had tons of time to respond, but culture ultimately came out on top.

It’s simple. Iowa has culture and consistency on its side, while Nebraska does not.

As the final seconds of this game trickled away, the CBS broadcast panned to an emotional Ferentz on the sidelines. Who knows what will unfold in the next few months, but this could be the final regular season game of Ferentz’s illustrious career.

Only Ferentz knows when that statement will turn into reality, but until it actually happens, here’s a word of advice for Hawkeye fans:

Appreciate consistency while it’s here, because all it takes is one small move to reverse that. Nebraska sure wishes it could’ve heard that 11 years ago.