The Tsarevich of Iowa City
Brian Ferentz is the failingest of fail-sons, but make no mistake: this is Kirk's fault
Looking back at the 2022 Michigan football season, if you had to allocate credit for the success of the team between the offense, the defense, and special teams, how would you do it? Pretty even between the offense and defense, right? Maybe 50/40 one way or the other, with 10% for the special teams? Seems pretty reasonable.
Now… quick. Grab a notepad, a pen, and the stopwatch on your phone. Set the timer for 60 seconds. Got everything? Okay.
You now have 60 seconds to list as many memorable plays from Michigan’s 2022 football season, in the format of [player’s last name] vs. [opponent].
Got it?
Go.
…
… aaaaand STOP.
Odds are you listed between eight and twelve plays, depending on your writing speed and how well you handle this kind of unexpected pressure. There was probably a great deal of overlap between your answers and mine, and I’m willing to bet that the vast majority were touchdowns, and that no more than one or MAYBE two were defensive plays.
Don’t feel bad. You’re not wrong, and you’re not a hypocrite. Everyone knows defense is important. But everyone also knows that touchdowns are awesome.
Michigan scored 66 offensive touchdowns last year, an average of 4.7 per game. Blake Corum, in 10.5 games, scored 19 by himself.
In 13 games last year, Iowa scored a total of 19 offensive touchdowns.
Iowa football has never been flashy or exciting. They aren’t the Crypto Bros of college football, promising massive return with no downside (looking at you, Josh Gattis). They aren’t conducting massive highly leveraged M&A deals or corporate raider-style hostile takeovers. They aren’t recreating their favorite episodes of Billions. No, for the last two decades, Iowa football has been making their money by arbitraging corn futures. That’s it. Every day they watch the price of corn and the price of corn futures, and they try to take advantage of market fluctuations to squeeze out a margin. It’s boring, repetitive, mind-numbing work, but it turns a small but reliable profit. It pays the mortgage.
Iowa fans know this. They’ve had to watch as other teams modernized, innovated, and evolved, and then they’ve looked back at a program that hasn’t changed its metaphorical socks since about 1994. They’ve accepted this proposition, and to an extent they have embraced it. They saw what happened to Nebraska under Bill Callahan and Michigan under Rich Rodriguez and Georgia Tech under Geoff Collins, and they understood the risks of change. They also saw the success of the Iowa program, however modest it may be, and accepted the cost of staying the course.
But everyone has their breaking point. And for many Iowa fans, that breaking point came in the form of Brian Umberto Ferentz de Bourbon, First of His Name, FailSon of Kirk, Duke of the ThirdAndLongs, Commander of the Armies of the Outside Zone, Father of Waggles and Breaker of Spirits.
Brian Ferentz was a nepotism hire. That part isn’t really up for debate. He spent three years as a Quality Control coach under Bill Belichick (a former coworker of Kirk Ferentz) and one year as the Patriots’ Tight Ends coach before being hired to his father’s staff at the age of 28.
But while nepotism hiring isn’t great, it isn’t necessarily the problem here. Hell, Jay Harbaugh was a nepotism hire; “Jim Harbaugh’s son gets a job on Jim Harbaugh’s staff at the age of 25 after a couple of years as a Quality Control coach under his uncle John Harbaugh” sounds just as bad. The difference is that, after several years of data, it turns out that Jay Harbaugh is really, really good at his job, and Michigan is probably only able to keep him around because his dad is the head coach.
Brian Ferentz is not good at his job.
The Iowa offense scored 14.2 points per game last year. That’s astoundingly bad. The year before last, they scored 19.9 points per game. The last full (i.e. non-pandemic) season before that, they scored 24.2 points per game. The non-scoring numbers are also quite terrible (#129 out of 131 teams in yards per play, #127 in yards per carry, #120 in yards per pass attempt, #121 in passer rating, #129 in 3rd down conversions, #124 in red zone touchdown rate, and #128 in offensive plays of 20+ yards), but its the scoring that seems most relevant.
This steaming pile of offensive poopery isn’t about money. Iowa athletics is towards the top of the Big Ten every year in terms of revenue, budget, and overall financial wherewithal. It’s not support; the university is given Kirk Ferentz the keys to the entire campus, including the nuclear-ethanol reactor that powers the state of Iowa. Its not talent, at least not yet; their recruiting classes have been in the middle of the Big Ten and their overall 247 talent composite ranking was #25 in the country in 2022 (with more of that theoretical talent playing on the offensive side of the ball). In 2021, Iowa receiver Charlie Jones was not in the top 50 receivers in the Big Ten in terms of total catches. In 2022, Purdue receiver Charlie Jones led the NATION in catches. This year, they had multiple four-star receivers and a Mackey finalist at tight end. There is no reason they should not be, at worst, a middle-of-the-conference, top-quartile-of-the-country offense.
But here we are.
By now, I’m sure you have heard about the downright laughable contract extension Brian Ferentz signed last week. And while lots of coaching contracts are laughable these days, most of them are laughable because of how much faith they put into the coach. Making Mel Tucker unfireable for the better part of a decade? That’s laughable. The Broncos paying Sean Payton $18 Million PER YEAR and giving him zero talent or draft picks to work with? Laughable. Jimbo Fisher’s… well, Jimbo Fisher’s whole situation? Laughable.
But rarely do you see a contract that so aptly demonstrates how LITTLE faith a school has in a coach, while simultaneously making clear that they’re going to let him keep foundering along. Setting the bar for an offensive coordinator in 2023 at 25 points per game, especially when you know the defense is going to chip in a few points per game and set the offense up for some tap-ins? That’s objectively funny. And asking your coach for 7 wins when 8 of the teams on your 2023 schedule finished outside the top 50 in F+ last year? Come on. How are you not entertained?
But while this thrills me as a Big Ten hashtag #CONTENT creator, it infuriates me on behalf of Iowa fans. Most of the Iowa folks I know are Internet acquaintances, but they (and the few diehard Hawkeyes I have known in the Human World) are lovely people who don’t deserve this.
For me, the biggest disconnect is what Kirk Ferentz said on National Signing Day, defending Brian (and his decision to continue to employ Brian):
I’ll share a stat for you: when we score 24 points, coincidentally, do you want to venture a guess at our record the last seven, eight years? It’s 55-3, which I think everybody would take that, but nobody likes the 24.
No, Kirk. They do not like the 24.
First, you fundamentally misunderstand what that number means. Saying “we win if we score 24 points, therefore if we average 25 points we’re golden” is complete lunacy. If you AVERAGE 24 points per game that means you are going to have some games OVER 24 points, and some games UNDER 24 points. Iowa failed to score 24 points 8 times last year, including in all 5 losses. Iowa hasn’t scored 24 points against a team that finished ranked in the Top 25 since 2018 against Penn State (in a game the Hawkeyes lost).
Let me put it this way: if you took Iowa’s final scores from last year and proportionally scaled up their per-game point totals so they averaged 24 points on the season, can you guess what Iowa’s 8-5 record would have been?
EIGHT AND F***ING FIVE.1
Second, do you know who else has a good record when they score 24 points? EVERYONE. Wisconsin is 45-2 since 2017 when they score 24 points. Minnesota is 33-6. Michigan is 47-5. Rutgers is 14-2. The circumstances that give rise to scoring 24 points are highly correlated to winning, especially in the Big Ten.
But beyond the stupidity of the math involved, that quote betrays either an ignorance of, or a lack of give-a-shit about, the relationship college football fans have with the sport. Kirk wants us to look at the final result and not care about how it is produced, as if he were simply making sausage. But the whole point of this damned stupid exercise is watching the sausage get made. Fans care DEEPLY about watching the sausage get made. We schedule our weekends around the turning of the crank. We get very upset when our loved ones decide to get married during Crank Turning Season. We feed so much time, energy, anguish, and money into watching that crank turn, and into feeling like we are, even in the slightest way, helping to turn it.
Iowa fans are like the rest of us. They like watching wins. But they also like watching things that are fun. They like watching touchdowns. What was the best Iowa game to watch in the last decade? The time they scored 55 points against Ohio State. That was awesome. They like watching their team blow out their rivals and take a selfie with the headstone. This is not unreasonable.
Now Iowa fans are told that not only is there no likelihood that they will get these nice things, they are being told that these nice things are not even the goal. Or even ***A*** goal. Score a mediocre number of points per game — even if they mostly come against Utah State and Western Michigan or off of Cooper DeJean pick-sixes — and win a modest number of games, and that’ll be enough to commit to this experience for another two years.
I get that Kirk Ferentz’s job is to win games. And sure, sometimes turtling is the right play (for example, when you’re playing Iowa). But setting the bar at objective mediocre for one of the most crucial parts of your operation on the grounds that it doesn’t matter? My man, it matters.
You know who likes having fun and scoring points? The fans you rely on to fill the seats and fund your program and to create that famous Kinnick magic. Maybe you’ll need them on your side at some point.
You know who else likes having fun and scoring points? Recruits. Iowa signed one Top 500 offensive recruit in this class after signing one Top 500 offensive recruit in the 2022 class. Maybe you’ll need some of those dudes at some point.
You know who else likes having fun and scoring points? Players. Probably their two most talented receivers, Arlan Bruce IV and Keagan Johnson, just transferred to the Big 12. Maybe you’ll need those dudes RIGHT NOW.
Being a college football fan is, on the whole, getting harder. Gameday experiences are more grating, largely because games themselves are getting longer. More games are being scheduled at inconvenient times to accommodate the whims of television partners. Tickets are more expensive, as is everything else onto which the sport can attach a price tag. Meanwhile, the draw of The Good Spot On The Couch, with its 4K HDTV and reasonably priced beer (conveniently located in a beer-make-cold box) and its ability to flip over to a different game while Fox shows us the same Ford F-150 commercial for the 37th time in a row, grows ever stronger.
Iowa fans have put up with a lot. I genuinely wonder whether they’ll put up with this.
And what’s worse, if you do the same exercise with 25 points per game (the Ferentz threshold, and a full point more than the magical “24 makes us Bama” number), they still would have lost all the other games they lost but would have gone to overtime with Nebraska. And NO ONE wants to see that. Sickos.
The Tsarevich of Iowa City
I'm just hoping they are 6-6 and 35 points shy of 325 when they play a MAC team in the Quick Lane Bowl. That is going to be some awesome television.