FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

If people know anything at all about Iowa football, they know two things. First, they know the punchline to the joke "If there's three Hawkeyes in a car, who's driving?" (They know that mostly because that joke is older than Joe Paterno.) Second, they know that the visitors' locker room at Kinnick Stadium is painted pink.

It has not always been thus, of course. Hayden Fry, once he'd earned a little political capital in Iowa City, ordered the visiting locker room swathed in pink. Fry claimed he remembered that pink had a calming effect on people, and that (wink wink, nudge nudge) was his sole motivation behind the curious color choice. Oh, sure, occasionally some opposing coach would get a little worked up about it, but really, that was just part of the psychological gamesmanship Fry was noted for.

See? Just for fun. But any joke fails once it's taken too far, and in 2005, that's what happened. Hayden may have spent his political capital to get the opponent's locker room redone, but then there was some actual capital involved, and, well, suddenly it wasn't so funny.

The university put pink everywhere in the locker room, applying it with the same sort of enthusiasm you'd associate with a three-year-old given a squeeze bottle of ketchup. Not just on the walls, but on the floors, in the showers, and places pink shouldn't be. The actual lockers themselves were pink. Even the urinals were pink, for cryin' out loud. (Something tells me you have to special-order a pink urinal, and boy, would I have loved to have been a fly on the wall when that invoice came through the plant.)

Critics pointed out (correctly) that there was something less than sporting about slathering a locker room with pink in this fashion, and they were no longer buying the "calming effect" argument. Two faculty members filed complaints, alleging that the use of a color culturally associated with women and homosexual men was the sort of conduct in which a university ought not engage.

That might be going too far, but what was once a funny bit of Big Ten lore is now played out, mostly because it has gone over the top. And anyway, the studies now say that mint green is the most calming color of all. So clearly it's time for a redo. Maybe the university can get an HGTV crew to pitch in.

Actually, maybe they'd better start with their own locker room first.