On Saturday afternoon, sometime before kickoff, Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz and Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald will meet in the middle of the field at Kinnick Stadium. They will shake hands and talk, just as they’ve done before every game between their two teams.

This coaching ritual will happen in every stadium across the country. What makes this meeting between Ferentz and Fitzgerald special, however, is that no pair of coaches in the country have done it as often.

Ferentz’s and Fitzgerald’s teams will meet for the 13th time on Saturday, ever since Fitzgerald brought his very first Northwestern team to Iowa City in 2006. No other two coaches can match that string of longevity.

Ferentz, 63, is the longest-tenured coach in FBS, taking the reins in 1999. He is the only college coach remaining who was hired in the last century. Fitzgerald, still just 43, is tied for sixth on the longevity list; both he and Rick Stockstill of Middle Tennessee State got the top job at their respective schools in 2006.

There are four coaches that fall in between Ferentz and Fitzgerald – Gary Patterson of TCU was hired in 2000; and Mike Gundy of Oklahoma State, Frank Solich of Ohio and Kyle Whittingham of Utah all got their jobs in 2005. But none of them have met another one every year since they were hired. Not even Patterson and Gundy, whose schools are both in the Big XII, because TCU didn’t join the conference until 2012.

No, Ferentz and Fitzgerald have been going longer than everyone else. In this day and age of annual coaching carousels, that’s quite an achievement.

When Ferentz succeeded the legendary Hayden Fry at Iowa, Bill Clinton was in the White House and the Big Ten had 11 teams. Fitzgerald came aboard seven years later, after the sudden death of head coach Randy Walker, when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office and Donald Trump was hosting The Apprentice.

There were some famed coaches in the Big Ten in 2006, when Ferentz and Fitzgerald first met. Jim Tressel was at Ohio State, Lloyd Carr was at Michigan, Joe Tiller was at Purdue and Joe Paterno was at Penn State. Some of the names might surprise you, too: Bill Callahan was still floundering at Nebraska (though they weren’t yet in the Big Ten), and both BTN analyst Glen Mason (Minnesota) and John L. Smith (Michigan State) would get fired at the end of the year.

Since that 2006 first meeting, when Fitzgerald’s Wildcats upset Ferentz’s Hawkeyes 21-7 to give him his first Big Ten win, 41 coaches have coached at least one season at the other 12 Big Ten schools. That’s an average of 3.4 per school, all while Ferentz and Fitzgerald just kept doing their thing.

Minnesota leads (if that’s the right word) with five head coaches since 2006; Illinois, Michigan, Penn State, Purdue and Nebraska have had four. And that doesn’t even count interim coaches who finished out the season after a firing.