Iowa Football Winter is Coming
There will be some pain for Iowa fans in the new look Big Ten. Just how long it lasts and how severe it feels is the topic of debate.
Hello, friends. It’s been a while. Then again, the Iowa’s offense has sort of sucked the joy out of writing about Iowa football for me. I would guess that if I polled the writers covering Iowa’s football beat, they would have a similar opinion, but they are doing their jobs and I admire their resilience.
Most of the Iowa fans I know have an incredible amount of respect for Kirk Ferentz. The same can be said of me. As I look back on the winding road that has been my professional career, meaning the portion of my life where I exchanged time for compensation, be it in sales, writing, or broadcasting, I feel as though I owe some kind of debt of appreciation to Kirk Ferentz.
When I started in the blogging game, the term ‘blog’ had just been invented. This was the late 1990’s, and the internet was most definitely NOT in every home. The first email address I had was in 1997, which was a couple of years before I began the Miller Timer Newsletter, where I would email my opinions on Iowa sports to family and friends and things took off from there. I had been on my first ever fan message board just a year before, in 1996, which were the old Big Ten Fan Forums.
The Fan Forums lived on the Big Ten’s official website so that in and of itself should let you know how ‘early stage internet’ we are talking about here, and those forums were every bit as hostile and volatile as what you see on message boards and social media today.
I drove up from Kansas City to watch the 2000 Spring Game in Kinnick, and I walked past Kirk Ferentz near the water tower. He had one person walking with him, and I stopped and introduced myself. I was 29, and not as self-assured as I would become, and said ‘Hello Kirk, my name is Jon Miller and I will be covering your team this fall, I look forward to talking with you more,’ or something along those lines.
I don’t remember exactly what Kirk said, but it was an exchange of pleasantries, and frankly, a nothing-burger on his radar with all he had going on at the time.
Fast forward to August of 2000, and I had somehow convinced Phil Haddy, Iowa’s Sports Information Director at the time, to grant me access to Iowa Football Media Days. At that time, I was the lone non-newspaper, radio, or television ‘media guy’ there. As I have said before in other venues, I received a lot of looks, most of them not friendly, from the other media folks. It was intimidating, but what I did not realize about myself at that young age was that I was built for the fight, I was built for being the outsider and I was built to keep coming back.
So while the sneers and side glances were coming my way, I was smiling, and I was in heaven. It was one of the biggest days of my life, something I had dreamed about since being a kid, and the cherry on top of it all was when I had my 10-minute opportunity to interview Kirk one on one, he looked up and said, ‘Hey Jon, good to see you again.’
That moment will always be seared into my memory. It impressed me and there is such a power in names, especially when someone you never imagined would remember you saying your name back to you months later.
At that point in time in my life, that small thing pretty much make me a Kirk Stan…and for the next 13 seasons, that’s what I was.
I defended Kirk at every turn in the road. I took great pleasure in seeing Iowa rise to stratospheric heights in 2002, but I was just as giddy walking in the bowels of the Alamo Dome after the 2001 Alamo Bowl, after seeing Kirk up on the victor's podium when he uttered the prophetic phrase, ‘The Hawks are back! Here we go!’. I was walking behind Iowa Quarterback Kyle McCann, who was humming ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ as we were shuffling past dejected Texas Tech players. Kyle has never denied that to me when I asked him to confirm that, he just smiled and changed the subject.
My dad reached out to Kirk in 2004, to see about getting me a Christmas Gift..and Kirk obliged, and I had a signed football from the 2004 Iowa football team, which remains my all-time favorite Iowa football team and season.
I was allowed to emcee an amazing event two years running following the 2002 and 2003 seasons, where fans paid money to get up close and personal with players and staff, learn some nuances of football, etc, and I spent a lot of time ‘behind the curtains’ with the coaches. There was a deep level of trust, and I felt invincible, as I was still just 32ish years old. I emceed countless I-Club events through the years, most often when Kirk was the featured speaker, and we had several personal, non-football conversations away from the cameras and the microphones and those were a treasure.
When my first child, Grace, was born on November 14th, 2002 which was the Thursday before Iowa played at Minnesota for the Big Ten Championship two days later, both Kirk and Chris Doyle reached out to congratulate me and my family. That leaves an impression.
When Kirk called me one year and asked me to NOT put one of his sons on the cover of Hawkeye Nation’s recruiting episode, and instead, feature any other player so that they could enjoy some spotlight, I didn’t have any problem doing that. Kirk gave Steve Deace and me so much one on one time when we did spring practice broadcasts from Kinnick, and elsewhere. He was just so accommodating, always.
I suspect I would not have had the chance to audition for a TV show on the Big Ten Network without a recommendation from Kirk to Gary Barta, and then Barta to the BTN brass; they opened the door for me and then I walked through it, even if for a short time, but that short time was enough to reach a goal I had set for myself when I was 13, and now later in life, I do not have that itch to scratch.
I could write dozens more anecdotes here, and I will always be grateful to and for Kirk Ferentz for the role he played in my career, as all of the experience (but most importantly, self-confidence) I gained from being a member of the Iowa Sports Media for as long as I was has been invaluable and instrumental to and for me as I transitioned back into a career in energy that has been rewarding.
It’s safe to say that I have a real, and true love and immense respect for Kirk Ferentz. And yes, I do feel the need to list out these caveats every time I am preparing to criticize Kirk, because my admiration for him is genuine.
So all of that is a preface for what comes next, words that are not enjoyable for me to write and something I actually loathe doing, but I am still hanging around this ‘business’, whatever that means, even if it is just to have a few fun weekends with good friends in Las Vegas every year…
What is dead cannot die. The Iowa offense is broken beyond repair. We all know this because you cannot truly repair something, you cannot keep it repaired, if you refuse to change the things that broke it in the first place.
If you bust a sprinkler head in your yard and upon repairing it, you just keep rolling over the entirety of your yard every fall with an aerator, you are going to keep breaking sprinkler heads.
Kirk Feretnz’s offense is very, very similar to what it has always been during his time as Iowa’s head coach which spans nearly a quarter century.
That offense is literally the laughingstock of college football. Any time Iowa is brought up on national television, halftime, or pregame shows, you are hard pressed not to experience some gallows humor at Iowa’s expense.
The statistics are worse than last year when last year saw Iowa put forth one of the worst offensive efforts the sport had seen in 20 years…again, it’s worse this year. The only two programs Iowa is ahead of as it relates to their passing game are Navy and Air Force, and those two teams don’t want to pass the ball; Iowa has 188 attempts through eight games, with Navy at 110 and Air Force at 33.
To put it another way, Iowa’s passing offense is so atrocious that the only two programs they are ahead of in that category are two programs THAT DO NOT WANT TO THROW THE FOOTBALL. They don’t profess to attempt to play Complimentary Football the way that Iowa does.
You cannot win championships like that in today’s modern game unless you are in the Big Ten West.
Iowa ranks 131st in passing, Minnesota 129th, Nebraska 128th with Northwestern 101st. Wisconsin is 84th and Illinois is 73rd, which means six of the division’s seven teams are in the lower half of passing offenses in the country.
Iowa has put a ton of defensive backfield talent into the NFL, so we can’t say that Iowa’s defensive prowess against the pass the past four or five years is entirely due to playing dogshit divisional opponents, but that has had to have helped.
This is the crux of the point for me writing this; Iowa has won a lot of football games over the past three seasons, while their offense has lowered the bar for what bad looks like in each subsequent season. Playing in one of the worst, if not THE worst division in Power Five football has been a factor in this equation.
Iowa went 10-4 in 2021 and I was ranting on the post-game bowl reaction show how bored I was, how this is not fun to watch, and how spoiled I sounded saying those things and feeling that way when Iowa had just won 10 games. Indiana, Iowa State, and Vanderbilt fans would be throwing trash at their screens reading this, I am sure, as those programs have never won ten games in any season.
Then came 2022 and Iowa’s offense was inexplicably worse. Then came this past offseason, Iowa lands a QB in the transfer portal, one who has won a Big Ten championship, added more talent to the offense and defense, and we were told things were going to be different. We were almost mocked by that quarterback, who infamously begged us all to continue to say how bad Iowa’s offense was going to be.
Do I think Iowa’s offense would be more productive if they had a healthy Cade McNamara along with a healthy Erick All and Luke Lachey? Absolutely. Do I think Iowa’s total offensive numbers would still be in the bottom 20 percent of the country? Absolutely.
McNamara, All, and Lachey would still be playing in this restrictive offensive system, one that former players have said is very complicated, which is why we rarely see young QBs take the field for Iowa, we have been told, when freshmen quarterbacks see playing time every college football weekend.
Iowa has drifted away from such heavy reliance on their outside zone scheme this year, probably because the offensive line they have is not collectively athletic enough to employ Kirk’s favored scheme.
McNamara goes down to a season-ending injury and the best Iowa can do thus far to replace him is to start someone who had a scholarship offer from Fordham and who has looked like the worst Power Five starting quarterback I have ever seen.
I hate writing that, too, because Deacon Hill is just doing what is asked of him. But in this scheme, this year, it’s the worst. Hill entered the Minnesota game with a completion percentage of just over 38% and that number went DOWN following the game. Deacon Hill at quarterback feels a lot like when John Lickliter took the floor for Iowa basketball in meaningful, game-still-in-doubt situations. In other words, it’s really bad.
This is the type of performance that would not be accepted in any other Power Five Athletic Department in the country, but it is at Iowa and any talk about bringing in another quarterback is met with snorts or dismissive replies, just like last year when such questions were met with answers like ‘what’s the upside?’
This is the type of overall offensive performance that would result in a change at the offensive coordinator position before the 2023 season kicked off. Kirk Ferentz has never fired a coordinator, and he has only fired position coaches or other key staff members when those staff members have done things that left him with zero choice.
His son is the offensive coordinator of this Ghost Ship of an offense, and frankly, the scheme is so antiquated and predictable that I can’t be confident that Brian Ferentz is not up to the task of being a Big Ten coordinator because I don’t think he is getting to employ the types of schemes he would choose to employ or take the types of risks he’d like to take, due to being confined in a scheme that may be a decade past its prime.
Could the Iowa scheme still work well (read that as being not so boring that you get a retina burn from watching it each week) in today’s world, when paired with elite defense and special teams? Probably, but that would require a quarterback who can also move the chains with his feet, something Iowa has not had since CJB was under center and something they will not have next year, either, as Cade McNamara has said he is going to come back.
While I cannot be confident that Brian Ferentz might not be an OK coordinator, I am confident that he would have been fired at any other Power 5 program in the country, and I am also confident that nepotism plays a part in all of this, on some level.
Due to the failure of Iowa administration from years gone by, along with some blame aimed at the Iowa Board of Regents, Brian Ferentz reports to the Athletic Director, which is a loophole that the Regents allowed Iowa to get away with.
So ok, the Athletic Director can fire Brian Ferentz, but up until this summer, that AD was also a Kirk Ferentz Stan, too…and Gary Barta made matters worse for the football program by putting in that stupid amended contract that Comedy Central might lead with each week, the drive for 325.
That drive is over, but that never meant that Brian Ferentz would lose his job, it just meant that his contract would not be renewed…that specific contract did not preclude him being offered a new contract.
Iowa doesn’t have a permanent Athletic Director right now. Beth Goetz is the interim AD, and by all accounts, I think she will get the permanent role.
Kirk Ferentz is a Hall of Fame coach, full stop. He has a great deal of goodwill cache with all the right powerful and wealthy people who are Iowa football donors. Kirk is a great guy, and like he ingratiated himself into my life, he has likely done the same with others and they know him a lot better than I do. None of that is nefarious by the way, Kirk is just a good dude and is great with people.
However, this is a full-on nightmare scenario for the Iowa football program.
They continue to be a laughing stock, the head coach is not going to fire his OC in season, especially when that OC is his oldest child, and that oldest child’s coaching future is probably not a guarantee after his Iowa employment is concluded. The head coach has near-lifetime immunity in the eyes of some instrumental donors as well as having very strong allies on the Board of Regents.
All of this is transpiring on the eve of tectonic changes in the Big Ten. USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon will join the league next year. There will be no more Big Ten West cupcakes to feast on year in and year out, even though Iowa did preserve three rivals in Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Minnesota. Here are the programs I believe to be on much stronger to stronger footing than Iowa’s as we look towards 2024:
Michigan
Ohio State
Penn State
Oregon
Washington
USC
That’s six right there. Wisconsin’s program is also ahead of Iowa’s, although they are going through some painful scheme changes right now. I could make a case for maybe one more, but even if we stop at those six, which are undeniable, the two best teams each year, beginning in 2024, will play for a Big Ten Championship. I don’t see any chance of Iowa breaking into that top-two grouping anytime soon and certainly not with this Zombie Raid offensive scheme they have. Sure, there will be an expanded playoff, but I think Iowa is entering a reality where a 9-3 regular season record will be something to be celebrated, near their annual ceiling, with a whole lot of 6-6, 7-5 and 8-4’s along the way. This feels like the dawn of a long, cold winter.
Even if Iowa’s offense was performing at its 2019 level, they are still going to be bucking the odds if they get anywhere near the Top Two in this league. I am 52 years old, and I pondered to several of my near-age friends this weekend that even if I live to 80, I might have seen Iowa’s last Big Ten football championship…they all agreed. Perhaps that wasn’t the time to ask, as our moods were foul at the moment.
For me, this is an opinion I have held since this summer, so it’s not some knee-jerk reaction to Iowa losing a game to Minnesota where they had 14 possessions and moved across midfield on only one of them, which was the first and scripted drive of the game. That means Iowa’s last 13 possessions gained 57 yards. Atrocious and unacceptable.
I see three scenarios moving forward as they relate to the football program to put it in the best possible situation to begin anew and prepare to compete in what will be an entirely different Big Ten than what we have ever known, starting next year:
Kirk Ferentz resigns after this season. I have felt since May that this would be the outcome. Kirk is a young 67, in great health, very active and he’s still very engaged. But after two straight years of the daily and weekly barrage of negativity, who knows what that does to someone? With the changes coming to the league next year, and the changes to the sport with NIL and collectives and buying players and all of that, I sort of see Kirk like the character Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption. He’s been institutionalized and massive changes are coming and I am certain he doesn’t like them…but then again, he’s been a football coach since his 20s. This would be the least painful scenario.
Kirk’s desire is to stay, and Beth Goetz is named the permanent AD and she does not offer Brian Ferentz a new contract. Kirk tells Beth that he wants Brian to remain his OC, and Beth respectfully declines the invitation, and Kirk resigns. This is the cleanest and easiest route in my opinion, though I would prefer the first scenario.
Kirk’s desire is to stay, and Goetz hires Brian for another one-year contract.
In my opinion, scenario three would make the hill that Iowa is going to be climbing in this new Big Ten more severe and longer lived. As I said before, I think the Iowa football program is limping towards a period of relative darkness, and I say relative as in compared to where they have been and what they have been doing, which has been mostly great. Trying to recruiting to an offense that is offensive to the sport of football isn’t getting any easier, too.
There is an old adage that if you keep doing the same things over and over again you will keep getting the same results. Sometimes you can work with that, but as it relates to the ever-changing landscape of college football, you cannot. I am not saying that what Wisconsin is attempting to do right now is THE way. It’s ‘A’ way, and the verdict is still out. I am not saying Iowa needs to switch to some version of an Air Raid; I have my doubts as to how well that will work when the gales of November come calling year in and year out at Big Ten latitudes and it’s not going to be a picnic for the four western teams, either.
Ferentz has more than put that adage to the test…it feels like it’s his manifesto. We’ve always done things this way, and we have been successful, and I think we still can be successful, is what I imagine him thinking. When you go 10-4 in 2021 with the 121st-rated offense in the sport, it probably feels like an ‘I told you so’ or ‘trust the process’ season. They went 10-2 in 2004 and shared the Big Ten title without a running game. They have had several seasons where their end record did not match up with the incompetency of their offense.
Complimentary football, they call it…and it has ‘worked’.
Iowa is 7-2 right now and is a very, very, very questionable officiating call away from being 8-1, and the most boring offense to watch that this sport has produced in decades. I guess for some folks, that’s great and fine. They play the games to win the games, after all.
But this is just not going to work anymore, beyond this season. There is a brand new and more challenging reality coming to the Big Ten next year. No more B1G West, no more divisions of any kind, and at least three programs coming in that recruit better than you do and at least two coming in that have had more relative success than you have had the past five years. Yeah, Iowa smoked USC in 2019 in a bowl game, but bowl games are hardly representative of an entire season…There will be some harsh realities for those programs, too, but when Iowa has played strong opponents these past three seasons, they have gotten their teeth kicked in. That style is no longer allowing them to hang with the blue-bloods and that style allows a bad Minnesota team to hang around and beat you.
#7 Penn State 31, Iowa 0
#4 Michigan 27, Iowa 14 (It was 20-0 midway through the 3rd quarter)
#2 Ohio State 54, Iowa 10
#2 Michigan 42, Iowa 3
That Petras to Ragaini TD from the 2021 Penn State game seems like so long ago. Yes, I know Iowa bloodied Penn State that year and beat Ohio State in 2017, but frankly, those memories are buried so far beneath the sludge of what we have seen since late October of 2021 that I need video proof to remind me that those things happened.
Offensive football is so much different now than it was even in 2017. Iowa’s offense is more than just a throwback or a relic, it’s a fossil…and I don’t think the current powers that be who are in place are going to fix it, because I think they still believe they can do ‘Iowa things’ with it.
All of that changes next year, and buddy, winter is coming.
Not making your coordinators available to the media for questions during the bye week, something you have done for quite a long time, is a bad look, too.
They might be able to hide from reporters, but they cannot hide from the offensive results. That’s called compounding failures, allowing one massive loss to turn into multiple losses, and I am not talking about Win/Loss record.
Lol, “zombie raid offense”, that’s right on the money Jon. I think the question that needs asked is “Has Kirk always been able to right the ship?”. His record shows that he has. I remain optimistic. Still a great article. Iowa still gets an emotional reaction even if it isn’t a serotonin dump.
Nice work, Jon.
Welcome to where I’ve been since we met several years ago at Kinnick