If I’m being honest, the best weekend I’ve had in awhile was during Iowa’s bye week. It was a Saturday spent at a pumpkin patch with family, free from the obligation to watch Iowa’s profoundly inept offense flounder for three hours while Iowa’s defense desperately tried to prop them up like that corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s. And when I got home, it was lovely to look at some college football box scores and not see the word “Iowa” with the number ten, or some even smaller number next to it, glaring at me like some sadistic taunt. All in all, it was just plain nice to not spend any time thinking about Kirk Ferentz’s Hawkeyes.
I say Kirk Ferentz’s Iowa Hawkeyes, because he has spent the last couple of decades creating a seemingly irrevocable link between the Hawkeye Black and Gold with his brand of Bland and Old. He has been so successful with this that you can’t watch a crummy Thursday night NFL game without coming across some variation of a “Did these guys swap jerseys with Iowa?” joke. The Hawkeyes have transcended the Chicago Bears as the de facto “This shit is unwatchable” team in all of football. And Kirk hiring his unqualified son to run the offense has only deepened the Ferentz connection while taking Iowa’s brand of ugly to even greater levels of hideousness.
As this football season has cratered further into the Earth’s crust, it is important that to the extent that “Ferentz=Iowa” is real, it is only temporary. Because it isn’t Iowa football that makes me miserable. It is the hubris of an old fogey that refuses, however chagrined, to concede that college football has changed, that time has rendered part of his tried and true method for winning football tired and poo, and that he needs meaningful help with the one aspect of football he genuinely doesn’t seem to understand anymore. (And the nauseating nepotism which keeps a wholly unqualified son in a job that pays him $900,000 a year which is just hateable in and of itself but is all the more hateable when he is this clearly inept at the job.) So with every Kirk Ferentz press conference in which every absurd utterance about “Practice” or “Execution” is really just some version of “We are staying the course because I know best,” deflecting from the need for Kirk to start with the man in the mirror and asking him to change his ways, the temptation to cut off our entire face out of spite for the Ferentzes grows. And when Iowa's mug is this mangled, it sure feels like a facelift is in order.
I’m not quite in the “let’s blow it up!” camp, but I can’t blame anybody that is, given the pervasive stench of hopelessness and despair wafting around Kinnick Stadium these day. Certainly it is tempting to light a stick of dynamite on the Ferentz era and see who can pick up the pieces. I’ve just heard enough from those of you that remember Hawkeye football in the 70s* and I've seen enough teams fire coaches for middling results and then spend decades trying to find a coach capable of replicating those results to be skittish about such a transition.
* I looked up Frank Lauterbur’s record. 4-28-1 across 3 seasons. As Samuel L. Jackson says in Jackie Brown, “That is some repugnant shit!”
But here is the rub. If I’m forced to accept some position for the Hawkeye football team a few rungs below the top of the college football hierarchy, I at least need to be convinced that we are trying to aspire to climb higher. With the coach’s son leading one of the absolute worst offenses in college football, it is impossible to believe Kirk is trying to put Iowa in a position to be as successful a football team as he can. Even the Hawkeye faithful that freebase Black-and-Gold kool-aid know it is time for Brian to hit the old dusty trail. And that’s what is so infuriating. The fix, and what is really the best thing for Iowa football, is relatively simple. Let someone, any actual football person, install their own offense. In the age of the transfer portal, it probably doesn’t take more than a season or two for Iowa to look like a 21st century football team. And if Kirk replaces Brian with some 90-year-old that looks like Teddy Roosevelt and ran the wishbone in the 1960s or something, I would rather watch Iowa football slowly sink into the ocean with someone other than the coach’s son helming the offense.
I haven’t mentioned anything about the actual game on Saturday, because, well, that shit was gross. You don’t need some yokel on the internet to tell you that Ohio State is an elite team and that Iowa is not. The game played out as such. There were two cool plays for Iowa, the strip sack and fumble recovery by Joe Evans and Jack Campbell’s one-handed interception to start the second half. Everything else was just pain. The game played out even worse than my ground level expectations going into the game.
There is one thing to talk about from this game though. At long last, Alex Padilla got a shot at quarterback. All it took was three absolutely ghastly turnovers by Petras in the first half, including a stupefyingly stupid pick-six that so befuddled Joel Klatt he couldn’t even conjure up speculation as to what hopes Petras had when he threw the ball, to make it happen. In one brilliant stroke of cosmic hilarity, Alex Padilla fumbled the very first snap he took in live action in 2022, before promptly being every bit as terrible as Spencer Petras. (Though certainly not worse.)
I very much think getting your first game action down 16 on the road at Ohio State is a lousy way to show what you can do, but let’s concede that Padilla is no better than Petras. If Padilla being as bad as Petras gives you a smug sense of satisfaction, I want you to take five minutes to think more deeply on this “See, the coaches talent assessment is totally correct. Told you so. There are no better quarterbacks than Spencer Petras on the roster” take. Whatever confidence you have in Kirk’s ability to evaluate quarterbacks is surely offset by his inability to develop or find one in the transfer portal that can perform better than the worst quarterback in college football in the last three years. (And even further back, really.)
Obviously the problem is a lot deeper than a quarterback. I have run out of ways to say this offense (especially the offensive line) is awful, that Brian shouldn’t be the offensive coordinator, and that Kirk is the cause of all of this. I’m boring myself with these words. We’ve got five games left. While none of them will be watchable, they are all winnable. We’ll talk about them and I’ll hope to find something interesting to write about. However it shakes out the rest of the way, can we please have a 2023 season sans Brian Ferentz? If keeping Kirk means keeping Brian, then fuck it. Let’s start sifting through some Frank Lauterburs until we find our next Hayden Fry or Kirk Ferentz. As Sam Weir says in Freaks and Geeks when he breaks up with who he thought was his dream girl, "I'm just not having any fun. Are you?"
Hawkeye Droppings
* This playcalling is just so fucked. There is plenty to gripe about, but the throws to Sam LaPorta behind the line of scrimmage are the most maddening to me. Sam LaPorta is fast… for a tight end. Plus, there is the whole “nobody is playing off coverage because Iowa simply does not throw it deep” phenomenon which makes these playcalls utterly worthless.
* I feel for Tory Taylor. He so desperately wanted to make a play for this team. He had a shot if he committed earlier and sprinted towards the sideline. Dude, Iowa’s suckitude is not your fault.
* It is astounding that we have almost nothing to say negatively in regards to the defense despite Ohio State’s 54 points. But they held the best offense in college football to 360 yards and the vast majority of points came on short fields after turnovers and failed first down conversions. Ohio State did make a few ludicrous plays on offense, but that's going to happen with the talent they have.
* We can add the “Iowa is the only team that hasn’t converted a fourth down attempt” to the ever-growing list of nasty stats from this season. Equal parts weird and awful.
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