Catch 25

Oh, Iowa

Dating was much easier a hundred years ago.

There were no apps or airplanes to complicate the mating process; people just snagged someone generally compatible from their neighborhood or their homeroom, got married early and moved on with life.

Today we have tools and time at our disposal to expand our dating horizons, to help us shop around a little, just in case, out of the eight billion people walking this planet, our soul mate doesn’t happen to be sitting behind us in ninth grade algebra class.

Even though dating can be stressful, the modern way is better. It may be tempting to commit to the first familiar, comfortable option, but when making an important life decision, we owe it to ourselves to explore our options.

And if we do choose to be with someone from our neighborhood, it had better work out, or things will become very awkward at the bus stop.

Which brings us to Iowa football.

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You may be aware that Kirk Ferentz, Iowa’s head football coach, is in a jam.

Ferentz has been in charge of Iowa football, the biggest sport at the state’s biggest university, for a quarter century. His $7 million salary makes him Iowa’s highest paid state employee, and his $42 million buyout means he’s not going anywhere.

It’s as close to tenure as you can get in sports. Things should be going great.

But in 2017, when Ferentz needed a new offensive coordinator, he set a ticking time bomb. He chose to hire the familiar, comfortable option: his son, Brian.

To be fair, Brian was already on the staff and possessed some solid coaching experience. But of the hundreds of viable candidates across the nation, what are the odds that the best choice happened to live in Kirk’s own neighborhood?

Ferentz is an institution in Iowa City, so nothing was going to stand in his way. Not even Iowa’s pesky anti-nepotism policy, which the school administration circumvented by having Brian report to the Athletic Director instead of his dad. Problem solved!

Brian is bad

There is a new problem, though: Brian Ferentz has been really bad at his job.

How bad? Since Brian was promoted to offensive coordinator in 2017, Iowa’s offense has been 105th in touchdowns scored and 128th in yards per game (out of 133 Division I football teams).

And last year, things fell off a cliff.

Pick a statistic and Iowa’s 2022 offense was awful at it. Yards per game? Second worst in the nation. Points per game? Ninth worst. Third down conversions? Third worst. You get the idea.

So going into last off season, the Iowa fan base rightly expected that Brian would be relieved of his duties. But on February 1, Kirk Ferentz announced that there would be no changes to the coaching staff.

Hawkeye Nation was outraged.

The contract

Less than a week later, the school announced a weird amendment to Brian’s employment contract: in order for Brian to keep his job, Iowa must win at least seven games and average at least 25 points per game in 2023.

It was publicly positioned as tough love, but the details were surprisingly Ferentz-friendly: If Iowa’s offense meets the 25 point threshold (as 85 teams did last year) and wins seven games (as Iowa has done every year but one since 2007), Brian will not only keep his job, he’ll get a $112,000 bonus, a two-year extension and a raise.

(For comparison, Clemson’s offensive coordinator Garrett Riley will receive a $100,000 bonus if Clemson wins the National Championship.)

Brian’s goofy contract has become the distracting backdrop to Iowa’s 2023 season. The media is of course tracking Brian’s progress against the metrics (Iowa is averaging 21.25 points through four games). There is even a brianferentzpointstracker.com website for handy reference. It’s all just so awkward.

Kirk has never fired a coordinator in his 25 years at Iowa, and he clearly wasn’t going to start with his own flesh and blood. Perhaps these thresholds were put in place so that if Brian underperforms, his dad won’t have to fire him, the contract will?

In happier, more winning times.

Disclaimer: I have sons, and I totally get this. I don’t blame Kirk for not wanting to fire his kid, or for wanting to hire him in the first place. I’m sure he envisioned years of working down the hall from his boy, spending late nights and weekends building something together, maybe even passing the reins to Brian when he decided to step aside one day.

His judgment was clouded, because it’s supposed to be. He’s Brian’s dad.

And that’s how the University of Iowa let Kirk Ferentz down.

University of Iowa, asleep at the wheel

In big business — and college football has become very big business — anti-nepotism policies exist to protect people in hiring positions from themselves. The purpose of those policies isn’t to force adjustments to reporting lines, it’s to prevent people from hiring their kids in the first place.

In 2017, when Kirk proposed to install Brian as his offensive coordinator, he needed someone to tell him that this wasn’t a good idea. He needed to hear that Iowa football isn’t the Ferentz family business, that Iowa has an anti-nepotism policy that it takes seriously.

Instead, the university did Kirk Ferentz’s bidding, and now things are very awkward at the bus stop.

College football has been too busy laughing at Brian to feel sorry for him, but he’s a victim here too. In a more normal environment Brian would have been able to fail quietly, learn some lessons and resurface at a new job somewhere down the road. It happens in coaching all the time.

But because of his special treatment, Brian’s flameout will spectacularly public, tracked and mocked and documented in every corner of college football. It will be tough sledding to get his career back on track.

It’s every parent’s nightmare, seeing your child struggle and knowing you could have prevented his pain. Kirk Ferentz created this mess, but his university failed him.