IOWA CITY — The 2024 season is here. For the dean of FBS head coaches, it must feel about as familiar as an alien invasion.
On Saturday, for the first time in 26 years, Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz will not lead his Hawkeyes out in a swarm. He's not retiring — he says he doesn't even know how he'll spend the day, and there's no reason to doubt that — but rather serving a self-imposed one-game suspension for the 2022 recruitment of starting quarterback Cade McNamara.
Iowa should beat visiting Illinois State with ease, and by 12:01 Sunday morning, Ferentz's suspension will be nothing more than a strange footnote on a Hall of Fame career; the sort of thing rival fanbases will care about more than any of the principal parties in Iowa City.
Once that hiccup has passed, though, Ferentz will be returning to a landscape that still bears scant resemblance to the world when he took the Iowa job, the big one, in 1999.
College amateurism is in its death throes, and not a decade too soon either; a series of legal defeats culminating in the House settlement has cleared the table for direct payments to "student-athletes" from schools, along with hard-capped roster limits instead of scholarship limits. 85 free rides are gone; 105 roster spots need to be filled, and whether any/how many of those are walk-ons is up to each school now.
The constantly eroding restrictions on Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rights for amateur athletes have also led to a new era of self-promotion and monetization for athletes — and how well coaches accommodate that activity is a recruiting factor. Iowa has embraced this new paradigm with the Swarm Collective, but the Kadyn Proctor saga and Ferentz's first and only major recruiting violation are enough to leave a sour taste in some donors' mouths that no amount of branded water will wash out.
Gone is former offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, no longer on his father's coaching staff for the first time since 2011. Indeed, Kirk will now coach against his son, an analyst with the Maryland Terrapins — Iowa's Week 13 opponent. In his place is Tim Lester, eminently likable and armed with a 21st-century offense.
On-field rules continue to prioritize television over the sport. The clock runs more often. There's a two-minute warning now. God help anyone if their game makes it past two overtimes and turns into the sort of two-point conversion parade that would make any longtime football coach wonder what happened to the game he loved.
Does Ferentz feel like he and Iowa have been singled out, the powers-that-be making an example of a historically spotless regime? Perhaps he should. The gambling investigation that cost DT Noah Shannon his sixth year of eligibility was revealed as a shockingly cynical, legally dubious ploy by law enforcement that has resulted in dropped charges and federal litigation, and it remains a singular black eye for the state of Iowa. The less said about the invalid fair catch the better. Now this, an NCAA investigation on recruiting violations in 2024, which is about like getting a bill for late fees from Blockbuster... in 2024.
Hell, there's 18 teams in the Big Ten now. Eighteen!
If that sounds like enough to drive the "old guard" out of college football, it might yet be. Kirk Ferentz said he'd coach as long as he enjoys it, and he doesn't present himself as a guy who enjoys change in college football.
It's just that the biggest change of them all has placed Iowa in a situation it's almost never experienced in August: dark horse playoff contender. Who wouldn't stick around for that?
The terrific, harrowing movie No Country For Old Men takes its title from the opening line of a poem by William Butler Yeats titled "Sailing to Byzantium." The first stanza of the poem reads as follows:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
Few if any people know what it's like to do Kirk Ferentz's job for a day, much less nearly ten thousand of them. Brutally competitive, time-and-life-consuming, with stakes that would be objectively silly if they weren't so consequential. All of this while he's in charge of 100+ young men, all simultaneously trying to excel on the field and (ostensibly) in the classroom, while they navigate their own young lives in the spotlight, with little privacy reserved for mistakes.
Wooderson meant it in a skeevier way, but that's the thing about being a college football coach for as long as Ferentz has been at it: you get older and older, and the kids stay the same age.
Ferentz’s tenure at Iowa is now older than anyone on the team, with room to spare. That's an age gap of 45-50 years, and these things don't tend to shrink over time.
Yeats' poem talks about the tension between youth and wisdom, pleasure and growth, the moment and the world. Football aside, Ferentz's job lives in that tension. The bad coaches let it break them. The good coaches know how to navigate it. The great ones teach their players how to. And it's no accident how many assistant coaches have played for Ferentz over the years, to say nothing of the dozens of former players coaching elsewhere — from youth to the NFL and every level between.
Ferentz's job is simple: win football games. He won 10 of them last year, his players grinding out close victories with a frequency that defies logical and mathematical expectations.
His calling, though, is simple but decidedly different: ensure that youth is not wasted on these young, the players who strap up the pads and perform this bone-crunching allegory for land war, this battle of the bulging biceps. Fans' faith in this fight will always waver — that's not an Iowa thing, that's literally every fanbase.
The players' faith never seems to waver back. Again: who wouldn't stick around for that?
Through it all, Kirk Ferentz is Kirk Ferentz. Sometimes ebullient, sometimes coy, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes sincere. Sometimes he's happy to talk to the press, and sometimes it's obvious there's nobody he'd rather see less.
He keeps showing up, though: day in, day out, week in, week out, year in, year out. Twenty-six years of running the show. He sets an example that anyone can follow, and the fruits of that example include retaining several coaches — most notably (but not only) DC Phil Parker, ST coordinator LeVar Woods and assistant head coach Seth Wallace — despite untold lucrative opportunities awaiting each of them.
It's a risk-averse way to navigate modern college football, to say the least. In this day and age of eroded guardrails in the sport, contentment with where he is makes Ferentz more of a dinosaur among his peers than any number of gray hairs could evince — and Ferentz hardly tries to hide his age.
So maybe the question of when Ferentz finally hangs up his headset is the wrong one (it's been asked and answered anyway). Maybe the question isn't even how long the 69-year-old can keep up with the grueling schedule of a head coach.
Maybe the question is what'll make this whole operation too unfamiliar to Ferentz, too far removed from winning games and guiding young men through those first few chaotic years of adulthood. Because what hasn't changed is 11 guys on each side, 10 yards to a first down, two goal lines 100 yards apart bracketed by two sidelines 160 feet away from each other.
What hasn't changed is the brick cathedral at the corner of Melrose and Evashevski Drive, where the black and gold swarm seven Saturdays a year, in front of sold-out crowds that can rise to any moment and make life hell for opponents.
What hasn't changed is 60 minutes of tough, clean, cohesive play, turning effort into execution.
What hasn't changed is the Tigerhawk that these 131 young men, like the decades upon decades of young men before them, wear every Saturday and fight for with every rep in the weight room and on the practice field.
These constants are the foundation that even a 26-year career can stand on.
Kirk Ferentz will tell us when it's time for him to hang it up. He'll know when that ship is sailing to Byzantium. Until then, college football is still his country, and come December, he just might have the one thing that has always eluded him — a College Football Playoff berth — to prove it.
