Bronze pig is still worth fighting for

The Gophers had dinner with a pig this week, and that's not a crack about anyone's table manners.

Floyd of Rosedale sat at the head of the training-table serving line, making sure that pride and incentive were on the menu alongside the meat and potatoes. Take a plate, pick up some silverware -- and reflect on what it means to beat Iowa.

It's been a busy 11 months for Floyd, the bronze hog that, as it has each season since 1936, will go home with the winner of Saturday's Iowa-Minnesota football game at TCF Bank Stadium. The pig has attended the State Fair, toured Minnesota with coach Jerry Kill, visited the capitol and had portraits taken with hundreds, if not thousands, of smiling Minnesotans. "I've got a few pictures of it with my family," said offensive lineman Chris Bunders. "It's a great memory."

It is, but as the Gophers have trudged through a second consecutive season of football purgatory, the bronze pig has come to mean something more than that. In the minds of Gophers players, Floyd represents hope. It's a 98-pound monument to the benefits of hard work, and the value in not giving up.

"It says things like, the ones who buy in and hang in there, they will be rewarded someday," said senior safety Kim Royston, who was on the sideline recovering from a broken leg when his teammates, who lost nine straight games before closing the season with a shocking two-game winning streak, tore across the field in the final seconds of their 27-24 victory last November and claimed Floyd for the first time since 2006. "Winning those last two games was a huge reward. A lot of guys could have bagged it, but we kept working, and those last two games were a great feeling."

After a 1-6 start and three noncompetitive losses in Big Ten play, the Gophers are desperate to feel it again. And if a border rivalry, and his players' fondness for a statue of a pig, provides a little extra intensity on Saturday, Kill is all for it.

"You're talking about one of the richest traditions in the Big Ten," the Gophers coach said. "Certainly when you have these border rivalries, it gives you good motivation. It gives you something to look forward to."

"There guys who were here last year, who played in that game, that were around that game ... they know how that felt," said senior defensive tackle Brandon Kirksey. "It was ecstatic. You don't lose feelings like that. Those are feelings you come back to years from now and talk about."

Especially if it's personal. Kirksey's uncle, Christian Kirksey, leads Iowa with 70 tackles, second-most in the Big Ten, and is getting the hang of this rivalry stuff.

"We talked it up a little bit [Wednesday] night. I know [beating Minnesota] would mean a lot to him," said Brandon Kirksey, who is actually three years older than Christian, his mother's brother. "I used to live with him, and we're still really close. It's my last time to play against him, so everybody's pretty geeked."

That's not the word they're using in Iowa City. "Determined" is more like it. Living through the embarrassment of standing aside while the opposing team charges past your bench to swipe the trophy is pretty good motivation, too. Iowa has earned Floyd in eight of the past 10 years and 13 of the past 18, so Floyd's absence in Iowa City is remarkably grating.

"Any time you lose a trophy, if it doesn't impact you, you're probably not paying attention," said Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz, whose own team's trophy case -- the Hawkeyes play trophy games against Minnesota, Iowa State and Wisconsin -- is currently empty. "Last November, the way we played that day, it looked like none of us were paying attention, quite frankly. That wasn't much fun."