Wednesday's news conference in Iowa City was — nominally — about National Signing Day, a day that until recently was as close as one could get to a holiday in college football's offseason, a time for coaches to finally speak publicly about the recruits they'd been courting, to sow the seeds of optimism about how their teams Got Better Today, to assure fans that now the best days are just on the horizon.
To an extent, Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz did exactly that on Wednesday: he spoke about some transfers and late signees that he wasn't yet cleared to discuss during December's news conference to mark the early signing day, where the vast majority of collegiate recruits put pen to paper and sign up for the next stage of their lives.
But really, Wednesday was about last season, and the staff. And while Brian Ferentz wasn't present to speak, he was still the elephant in the room, and it looks like that'll be the plan for 2023 as well.
Kirk Ferentz's quote has already circled the college football globe plenty — the internet loves controversy, and this checks all the boxes — but one more time, for good measure:
"I anticipate no changes in our staff moving forward. I think we do have a terrific staff."
Absent context, it's innocuous, the sort of thing most college football head coaches would say two-thirds of the way through a February newser. And yet — mercy, the context.
Brian Ferentz's offense ranked second-to-last in FBS football in yards per game, including in the bottom 10 in both rushing and passing. Players not named Kaleb Johnson rushed 272 times for 455 yards (202 for 661 without the quarterbacks). The team averaged 17.7 points per game, ninth-lowest in the nation — and that's counting the six touchdowns and two safeties scored by the defense, which mercifully kept Iowa out of the bottom five alongside the likes of lowly Northwestern and Colorado. Third-down conversions? 25.9%, third-worst in the nation. Everything was bad.
To Kirk Ferentz's credit, little about his statements indicated any satisfaction with that offensive output.
"The bottom line is, the offense is about moving the ball consistently, scoring enough points to win, and the numbers bear out that it wasn’t good enough," Ferentz said Wednesday. "And the other part about that is we’re well aware of that and we own it. Nobody is running from that by any stretch of the imagination."
Running? Probably not. Nothing that ensued would be reasonably construed as an endorsement of scoring 17 points per game.
Scoring 24 per game, however, was a cause celebre.
"When we score 24 points coincidentally, do you want to venture a guess at our record the last 7-8 years?" Ferentz asked a reporter. "It’s 55-3, which I think everybody would take that, but nobody likes the 24 (points per game)."
Unmentioned were the 27 losses over the same timespan where Iowa failed to reach 24 points.
No, while Ferentz didn't seek to make 17 points per game palatable, he did spend considerable time contextualizing the 2022 season in a way that made it seem like an anomaly, a one-off that required little (if any) structural change to his approach.
Ferentz mentioned that of the 2020 recruiting class, Connor Colby was the only one of six offensive line recruits who was able to practice and prepare for the 2022 season, with players like Cody Ince, David Davidkov and Justin Britt* in particular having their collegiate careers derailed by ongoing health issues.
*Britt offered his own clarification regarding his future status:
Britt's long-term status has little bearing on his lack of availability for the decimated 2022 offensive line though, and Ferentz mentioned Beau Stephens and Gennings Dunker specifically as two players that were pressed into duty early.
"They did some good things," Ferentz said of his young linemen. "I don’t want to sit here and dis them, but just some of the snap decisions you have to make on the field at every position, it takes work. It takes experience."
Ferentz also mentioned the decimation in the receiving corps, and from a high-level view, it was dire.
Charlie Jones was a late transfer away from the program. Keagan Johnson only played 13 snaps on the season. Both Nico Ragaini and Diante Vines were injured and unavailable for several weeks during the early part of the season. Redshirt freshman Brody Brecht was unable to practice with the team until Week 1, due to baseball in the spring and injury in the summer.
"So you factor all that in, that left (Arland Bruce IV), of our top six, to shoulder the load out there, if you will," Ferentz said. "Again, the guys that played did a good job, but it was certainly a challenge."
This would have been an opportune time for Ferentz to talk about the challenge and necessity of his offensive coordinator adjusting the week-to-week gameplan to the personnel that was available, and an assessment of how that went.
There was enough smoke before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 season that it was fair (if ultimately incorrect) to assume Brian Ferentz's time as offensive coordinator was coming to a rapid end. The familial relationship with Kirk was never looked upon as kindly by most fans as it likely was in the Ferentz household, especially with athletic director Gary Barta forced to be Brian's direct supervisor due to state nepotism laws.
Once the offense's on-field production fell to its current subterranean levels, off-field issues like Brian's profane tirade in the press box and the racial insensitivity issues that ultimately led to an unspecified personnel note for Brian (plus, of course, the dismissal of Chris Doyle) became even harder to ignore.
But none of that was apparent Wednesday.
"To indicate that Brian is not qualifed — that's a bad narrative," Barta said during his appearance, closing the news conference. "I would indicate that he's uniquely qualified. He grew up around here, in this program. He played offense, in this offense. And over the past 10 years, arguably one of our best decades in Hawkeye football, he's been an integral part of that staff."
Barta then reiterated Kirk's earlier statements that 17 points per game was not in line with expectations, but that part will undoubtedly resonate less with Iowa fans than the athletic director offering a defense that won't be confused for a Phil Parker effort any time soon.
That undertone of dissatisfaction is what ultimately made Wednesday's news conference difficult for a sizable portion of the fanbase. Football's about wins and losses (you play to win the game, right?) and as Kirk Ferentz was ever eager to remind reporters (and their readers), Iowa's track record in the Ws and Ls has been as good as anyone in the Big Ten outside of the bluest (or, well, scarletest) of bloods -- third-best in Big Ten wins in the last five seasons, behind just Michigan and Ohio State.
And the thing of it is: Kirk is right.
Kind of.
Football may indeed be about wins, and the Iowa program has found a way to achieve above its proverbial weight class for nearly a quarter-century under Ferentz. He even mentioned his first year as Iowa's head coach in 1999 — when the program was in such dire straits after mentor Hayden Fry's last season that the Hawkeyes went 0-8 in Big Ten play. "I’m not going to say it motivates me," Ferentz said, "but it reminds me where we started this whole thing."
Ferentz didn't use the 1999 standings to ask for credit for building the program's standards as high as they've become in his 24-year tenure, but when he followed it up with an idle gripe about "microwaved, instant gratification," the message was clear: complain all you want, but it's not my job to listen. And that now-famous stubbornness from Ferentz has led him to 186 wins at the helm of Iowa football.
But while the sport may be about wins and losses, the money behind it is about entertainment. College football dominates the airwaves on Saturday, and puts 70,000 people in a giant brick stadium in Iowa City seven weekends a year, because it's meant to be fun. A spectacle. Something even the most casual of observers can tell is larger than life.
Chess doesn't sell out stadiums. Nobody's tailgating and paying seat license fees with commas in them to watch a rousing bout of thumb war. Vince Lombardi famously said "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," but Lombardi wasn't pulling millions of dollars a year off of TV money and fan donations to go 8-5.
So when Iowa puts a team on the field that struggles with the basics on offense, the fans will only care so much about the record — certainly less than Kirk Ferentz or any of his players care. It's these guys' livelihoods; it's everyone else's Saturday afternoons and evenings.
All of which makes it easier for fans to walk away from this ongoing operation than it does for any of the coaches.
With that, we can expect to see Kirk and Brian on the Duke Slater Field sidelines in the fall of 2023. But unless and until the offensive production becomes more oh-ffensive and less uh-ffensive, the fan support for this regime is likely to wane. And that's the outcome nobody in and around this program wants.
