If you love the Iowa Hawkeyes (if so, we are bff), are a fan of Stanford, or like watching football in general, chances are you caught some of the Rose Bowl this past Friday. If the above are true, at the very least you heard about the halftime show. If not, you can watch it here.

Sure, Stanford won the game, by a lot and early on, but it is the band that everyone is talking about.

It’s all over the internet that Stanford made everyone mad for the third year in a row.  You’ll see in the video that they made fun of Iowa and Iowans – playing the farmersonly.com jingle while they had a cow run out on the field.  Apparently, they were booed by the thousands of Hawkeyes fans in the stands.  My friends on Facebook that were there, and those that were not, were completely appalled by their behavior.  At first, I was offended too.  Iowa is often the brunt of jokes – people assume I grew up on a farm, drove a tractor to prom, that there is no place to shop or that we are behind in every single thing happening in the rest of the country, among so many other stereotypes.

But then I was not.  Why?  Well, for starters – they didn’t even make fun of the right things.  Sure, a lot of the land is farm – but we produce mostly corn and soybeans, ranking #1 in the country.  (You’re welcome).  The cow that ran out?  It was a holstein – which is used for milk, not beef.  Don’t confuse us with Wisconsin (which is equally as great).

In college, I had a room mate from the southside of Chicago.  Campus was thirty minutes from my hometown, so we would sometimes watch my local news on t.v.  She used to make fun of the fact that they would report on the largest fish caught by local fisherman.  She thought it was ridiculous and laughable.  I would rather see news reports on something like fish, farming and dating sites for wholesome farmers than what she was used to seeing.

At the end of the day, Stanford was a better football team that day and won the game.  There is no denying that, or that they played well and deserved to win.

I understand why many people are offended by the band’s performance – it was a low dig.  But, I am proud to call Iowa home – no matter how “simple” the rest of the country may think we are.  I am grateful for the life I lived while growing up there.  A life that taught me how to dream big and catch the biggest fish.

~Linking up with Emily for Grateful Heart Monday.