Iowas Brian Ferentz on his job and critics: No ones crying for me, and no one needs to

May 23, 2024

IOWA CITY, Iowa — The same three words entered my mind both before I walked into an interview and before I started writing this story.

First, an exhale. Then, “Here we go.”

There isn’t a person who unites Iowa Hawkeyes fans with disdain more than offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz. The 2022 statistics bring that at times unhealthy indignation to the forefront. Let’s get those out of the way first. Iowa averaged 251.6 in total offense in 2022, the worst in Power 5 play, 130th nationally and the lowest among Big Ten teams since at least 1999.

The Hawkeyes scored 17.7 points per game to rank No. 123 nationally. They were 127th in yards per carry (2.9), 126th in passing touchdowns (seven) and 129th in third-down percentage (27.8). Most of the other numbers carry similar rankings, and from watching Iowa’s offense perform, the statistics equaled the eye test.

Brian Ferentz presided over that offense. He has served as the offensive coordinator for six seasons and is Kirk Ferentz’s oldest son. Iowa’s athletic director supervises Brian Ferentz because of university nepotism rules, and the word nepotism is used so often on social media that most fans no longer need a dictionary to define it. There are stadium chants and boos directed toward him from every direction, and a fan hired Fran McCaffery and Bob Stoops for cameo videos that indirectly taunted the offensive coordinator.

Brian Ferentz is not naive. He doesn’t search for his name on social media and only so often pays attention to what is written. The 40-year-old Iowa graduate has three daughters and a son with his wife, Nikki. They also lost a premature daughter, Savvy, at birth in August 2014. Yes, while Brian Ferentz was coaching in training camp. There’s more to his life than football, but the sport fills a giant part of it.

“My private life is my private life,” he said in a one-on-one interview. “I’ve never spoken on those topics. But there’s been plenty of things that have happened that are real. Make no mistake, winning and losing to me is very real. This is the second most important thing in my life, the University of Iowa football program. But at the end of the day, it’s just winning and losing, and no one’s dying. And that’s really it.”

Brian Ferentz is entering his seventh season as Iowa’s offensive coordinator. (Scott Dochterman / The Athletic)

This isn’t an attempt to humanize Ferentz or spin a message to make his career look more impressive as he enters Year 7 as Iowa’s offensive coordinator. There are numbers that should elevate his profile, just as last year’s performance drags it down. His salary reduction this offseason imposed by former athletic director Gary Barta serves as a humbling moment for him and will become a perpetual, perhaps weekly, mocking point for the football program this fall.

But there is nuance to this situation. For an offense that had significant issues in nearly every area, Ferentz became the scapegoat for a furious fan base. And that he wasn’t sacrificed or stepped aside in the offseason just furthered the vitriol this offseason. Apathy is nowhere in sight with every game virtually assured of sellout status.

A quality fall might allow the heat around Ferentz to simmer, but the praise will come more for improvements along the offensive line, the portal pickups at wide receiver or for new quarterback Cade McNamara. For Ferentz, the acclaim will be fleeting even if the offense rebounds.

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“No one’s crying for me,” he said, “and no one needs to. My job is to do my job. So as cliched as that sounds, my job is not to worry about what everybody thinks about how I do my job. I have to live with that.”

On a warm July afternoon one week before the start of preseason camp, Ferentz arrived in his office wearing a hat and bringing back the afterglow of sunshine after a week in the Dominican Republic. After pleasantries, the first questions of our discussion centered on Brian Ferentz’s relationship with his father.

Kirk Ferentz sits at 198 career wins at Iowa and ranks tied for third in Big Ten history with 115 wins against Big Ten teams. His 10 bowl victories are tied for first among Big Ten coaches, and he boasts five top-10 finishes. Whether he gets his due as a national figure, Kirk Ferentz has a resume any coach would love to have.

Brian Ferentz lives in that shadow. He was born in Iowa City after his father’s second season as an Iowa assistant. When his father took over in 1999, Ferentz returned to Iowa City and played football at famed City High before eventually starting and becoming a team captain at Iowa in 2005. After a short-lived NFL stint with the Atlanta Falcons, Ferentz worked in New England for five seasons. In 2012, he returned as Iowa’s offensive line coach and became offensive coordinator in 2017.

“You’ve been around me a long time,” Ferentz said. “This has never been a relationship that I’m totally comfortable with, the father-son aspect of what we do. It’s not something I’ve ever really celebrated. It’s not anything that I’ve tied my identity to.”

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Ferentz then brought up how a profile of him in the Des Moines Register made him self-conscious about his status as the coach’s son.

“You don’t get to pick who your father is, and nothing that he’s ever done makes me special,” Ferentz said. “It makes him special. It’s very difficult for me to talk about those things, though, because of the level of humility that he carries himself with. I’ve tried to emulate that from him.

“That’s when I had my first taste of like, I’m not comfortable with being his son. So imagine 25 years later how less comfortable I am with some of his achievements.”

To measure up to his father, Ferentz feels he falls short in every area: as a coach, as a man, everything. His father offers him daily lessons through his simplicity, not his lectures. If there’s one aspect that stands out to Ferentz from his youth, it’s his father’s vulnerability.

Kirk Ferentz arrived at the depleted end of the Hayden Fry era, and Kirk Ferentz’s first squad was 1-10 in 1999. The next season, the Hawkeyes faced Western Michigan in the home opener and second game overall. As a fan, Brian Ferentz expected victory. Instead, the Broncos beat Iowa 27-21 in Kinnick Stadium. It marked the 10th consecutive loss of 13 straight overall.

“I was old enough to understand the difference between winning and losing,” Ferentz said. “I was also old enough to understand the pressure that was on the outside. I remember asking him that night in our house, ‘Is this gonna work out? Is everything gonna be OK?’ Because I was scared.

“And I’ll never forget what he told me. He looked at me and he said, ‘I don’t know. But I do know that this is the only way I know how to do things. The way we’re doing them is the best way I know how, and we have a lot of people there who are working as hard as we can to get this right. So I don’t know if it’s going to work out, but I can live with the results.’

“That’s what makes him a hall of fame coach.”

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If that relationship has become a burden to Ferentz, to those outside their circle, it appears to be a crutch. Few, if any, assistants would have lasted beyond last year with those statistics. As the son of the head coach, it appears that’s the only reason Ferentz remains as the offensive coordinator. But here’s where the nuance comes in. During Ferentz’s first four years as offensive coordinator, the Hawkeyes averaged 29 points per game. Twice during that time, Iowa exceeded 31 points per game.

The past two years, the bottom has fallen out offensively. It’s convenient to blame the offensive coordinator, and perhaps that’s fair. But Ferentz’s first quarterback, Nate Stanley, threw 68 touchdowns from 2017 to 2019. That’s more than any Iowa quarterback during a three-year period in history, even more than Chuck Long, who threw 63 from 1983 to 1985. The past three seasons, Iowa quarterbacks combined for 28 touchdown passes, 40 fewer than Stanley.

Iowa’s offensive line has struggled the past two seasons. The 2018-19 recruiting classes totaled five starts up front last year for reasons ranging from ineffectiveness to injuries to attrition. For a developmental program, that stat is football failure. Injuries claimed five of Iowa’s six scholarship receivers coming out of training camp last year. Only one scholarship receiver was available in Iowa’s first two games.

Did Ferentz prepare his team to the best of its capabilities? The answer is probably no. But how much of the offensive woes, especially in 2022, were because of injuries, inexperience and inconsistency?

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“I got asked the question either in the spring or last year about thinking about resigning,” Ferentz said. “No. That’s crazy. Am I aware of the fact that I can be fired? Sure, we all can be fired. We all have contracts. Coaches get fired all the time. One just got fired three weeks ago. Did I think about resigning? No.

“I would resign if I did something wrong or embarrassed myself or the program or my family and I didn’t feel like I was fit to do my job. That’s a different thing. Resigning because we’re not getting the results that I want … we’ve got to try harder. We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to figure it out. That to me is how you overcome adversity. I’ll tell you one way to not overcome adversity, resign.”

Ferentz’s stubbornness hasn’t lightened the pressure around his position. In February, Barta forced Ferentz to accept a $50,000 pay cut and halted his two-year rollover contract. Barta also instituted a mandate to average at least 25 points per game with at least seven victories. The $50,000 drop, in reality, was a $122,000 cut because Ferentz didn’t receive his contract 8 percent raise, either.

Why 25 points per game? It’s a defining number for Iowa. In Brian’s six years running the offense, the Hawkeyes are 31-1 when scoring at least 25 points. But the change makes it an easy mocking point for fans, opponents and media.

“I’m sure that will be a story this year,” Ferentz said. “That all came about after the season. And, no, that’s not something that I anticipated was going to happen. That’s not something that I was happy about. I think you’d probably have to be pretty foolish to imagine that I thought all this was a great idea. But I’m not in charge. So that wasn’t my decision.”

In Brian Ferentz’s six years running the offense, Iowa is 31-1 when scoring at least 25 points. (Scott Dochterman / The Athletic)

Iowa football under Kirk Ferentz is the most self-aware program in the country. The combination of elite-level defense and special teams paired with an efficient offense is designed to win games physically. The offensive part has misfired in the past 21 games, but it still shows elements of complementary and successful football.

Last year, Iowa led Purdue 24-3 in the third quarter in a West Lafayette wind tunnel. The only way the Boilermakers would have mounted a comeback was through an Iowa offensive mistake. The Hawkeyes employed a risk-averse strategy in the final two quarters and won by three touchdowns. A week later, Iowa led Wisconsin 24-10 and took possession at the Badgers’ 22 after a fumble recovery with 2:18 remaining. The Hawkeyes ran out the clock.

With a 25-point mandate and a coordinator on edge, either of those situations could call for risky play calling such as a throw into 50 mph winds or kicking a last-second field goal.

“I don’t plan to worry about them this year,” Ferentz said of the mandates. “I know for a fact that the head coach isn’t going to worry about that. I will tell you this: I’ve been around the game a long time. I have too much respect for the game of football to do things that I think would embarrass the game, like kick a field goal when you should run the clock out or run the score up or whatever.

“Everybody can run their program the way they want to run it and run their offense the way they want to run it. We’re just trying to win games. That’s it.”

Our conversation continued on specific football topics, and those stories will run in the weeks ahead. There aren’t many people who understand schematic football like Ferentz, and at times, it feels like a calculus professor teaching a math lesson to an eighth-grader. For football nerds like me, it’s invigorating.

One last look at Ferentz’s office offers a glimpse into his football soul. There are ceremonial footballs and other markers, plus photos above his desk. The largest picture belongs to offensive line guru Joe Moore, who coached Kirk Ferentz in high school and became the head coach’s most influential football figure.

With his office connected to the right of his father’s and a pseudo-football grandfather watching over him, Brian Ferentz carries the weight of a legacy. It’s not what he wants, but it’s what he bears. That’s his paradox, the one people don’t understand.

“Adversity is inevitable,” he said. “If you expect it to be easy, you’re crazy. It’s not going to be easy. And it’s only going to get harder as the stakes increase. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, too. If you don’t want that, why do you do this?”

(Top photo: Scott Dochterman / The Athletic)

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