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The second game I ever attended at Kinnick Stadium was against Northern Illinois.

At the time, Iowa was really quite terrible at football. It was Kirk Ferentz’s first season in charge, Hayden had gone 3-8 in his last season, and the cupboard was empty. The Hawkeyes had already lost to one top-five opponent, and would face five more ranked teams over the course of the season. Throw in that NIU had gone 2-9 the previous year and opened with losses to Western Illinois and Vanderbilt, and this looked like Iowa’s best chance of a win.

It turned out that was correct, though it wasn’t easy.

It was only 3-0 at the half, and Kirk Ferentz told the TV interviewer “we don’t look like a well-coached team right now.” The game wasn’t really decided until LeVar Woods returned a blocked kick 87 yards for a touchdown while wearing the largest set of shoulder pads ever created.

This will be the seventh time that a Kirk Ferentz team has faced the mighty Huskies. Just twice has the game been decided by more than two scores. In 2012, Iowa opened the season with a one-point victory over NIU in Soldier Field; the Huskies would end that season in the Orange Bowl. The following year, Northern recorded its only win over the Hawkeyes, the first win in an undefeated regular season for the Huskies. NIU was perennially among the best teams in the MAC, and while Iowa was always expected to win, it was a contested matchup throughout. This wasn’t exclusive to Iowa, either: Just two years ago, Notre Dame suffered their only loss of the season in a Week 2 upset against Northern Illinois.

But NIU has fallen victim to the same issues that have struck down mid-majors as a whole over the last few years. The program moved to the Mountain West Conference this offseason, despite having few mountains and not being very far west, severing their longstanding ties with the MAC in the chase for more revenue. They then had 21 players enter the transfer portal after last season, with seven of them transferring into Power 4 programs1. They brought in a dozen transfers of their own, but just one of those was playing FBS football last year. In February, head coach Thomas Hammock — who was on the NIU sideline for that 1999 game — abruptly left his alma mater to become the running backs coach for the Seattle Seahawks, the sort of position that a sitting head coach wouldn’t even consider a decade ago. The interim coach, defensive coordinator Rob Harley, will be coaching his first game as a head coach on Saturday, and the trip to Iowa City is the shortest road trip on NIU’s schedule.

Total it all up, and the once-mighty Northern Illinois Huskies will step onto the turf of Kinnick Stadium on Saturday as 31-point underdogs, in a game that hasn’t been decided by more than 31 points since the heyday of Hayden Fry. If Iowa needs an 87-yard blocked kick return from a future assistant in giant shoulder pads to ice this, it’s either coming in the second quarter or things have gone horribly wrong.

It’s likely a sign of my age, and my need to tilt at the windmills of college football as it careens into something I don’t fully comprehend, but I will miss Northern Illinois as a barometer. I have watched some of the worst teams of the Ferentz Era — 1999, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2013 — play against this program and had my expectations throttled down by the experience. If you had somehow generated a bit of hope in those years, a close game against Northern was where it went to die. That no longer seems possible, in a world where Northern Illinois has been transformed from feisty mid-major to a Power 4 farm team.

We likely won’t learn much about Iowa on Saturday. Maybe we’ll get an idea of who will play quarterback, or whether the youngsters on the defense are as talented as we had hoped, or what to make of Iowa’s revamped offensive line. But I suspect we’ll learn a lot about NIU on Saturday, and how the current college football landscape has made a once-proud foe as outdated as LeVar Woods’ shoulder pads.

Elmhurst defeated Coe College in the first round of the playoffs, setting up a matchup with perennial powerhouse St. Thomas. As Lester tells it, his team was outgunned and outmanned, but they were scrappy and well-rehearsed. Lester and his staff had picked up that a frequently-used St. Thomas defensive alignment would open up a tight end seam route. Elmhurst hit it three times in the game for big gains, but this wasn’t a story of a scouting triumph. In the defensive alignment in question, St. Thomas played man coverage on the outside. Lester had instructed his receivers to run go routes against that coverage. As a result, every time his tight end caught the seam over the middle, there were two deep cornerbacks there to run him down and make the tackle. If he had simply told his receivers to run short hitches and occupy the corners, Lester explains, those three long gains would have been three touchdowns. Instead, Elmhurst lost by seven.

Lester didn’t show up on that podcast with the Elmhurst playoff story ready to go; it was prompted because one of the hosts was a third-string tight end on the St. Thomas sideline. And as Lester told that tale — and later described how he had to build an interior quarterback run playbook mid-season last year to help Mark Gronowski, and how he recruited Tradon Bessinger with the help of a Matt LaFleur Facetime call — I couldn’t help but think of Iowa’s previous offensive coordinator, and his preseason podcast appearances. You would never hear Brian Ferentz recount how he’d missed a receiver adjustment in a game fourteen years ago, largely because Brian Ferentz didn’t have fourteen years of experience and probably wouldn’t know he’d missed the adjustment.

Between the transfer portal and player payments, we’ve never had more turnover in college football rosters. Every player on the roster is a free agent at the end of every season, and the market is finding a very expensive equilibrium. Penn State brought in 23 transfers from Iowa State alone last season, basically portaling in the entire two-deep. Iowa State, in turn, brought in 16 players from their new coach’s prior program. It’s telling that there are just two quarterback position battles at the Power 4 level between quarterbacks who were both on the previous year’s roster; most guys simply leave if they’re not getting the playing time they want. Some leave even when they do.

At the same time, coaches are being hired and fired at an alarming rate. The 2025 coaching carousel was manic. Four major-college coaches were fired before October 1 last season, and fifteen coaches were fired in total, and 32 spots eventually were filled when the music stopped. That is nearly one in four FBS-level programs replacing a head coach last year alone.

There’s a sense that the wheels are flying off the wagon at the moment, and that nothing is stable in this sport. But then there’s Iowa, a place where the coach is never fired, and the players largely stay, and the assistants carry over from year to year. Iowa has one of those two QB battles playing out at the moment, which has become the story of a very quiet, almost sleepy, offseason.

Nobody doubts that Phil Parker knows ball. There are fourteen previous seasons as defensive coordinator, and the fourteen seasons before that as defensive backs coach, as proof. When Phil talks to us laypeople, it’s always in the tone used by a nuclear physicist trying to describe fission to a golden retriever, the jargon of a man who doesn’t know how to distill the sophistication of his knowledge base into something a normal person can comprehend.

But what we’ve learned in the last two years is that, finally, after more than two decades of abject futility on the offensive side of the ball, Iowa now has a certified ball-knower there, too. Tim Lester was given the keys late in 2024.

While he’s coaching in Ferentz’s program, Lester has adopted the motto of the coach who preceded his current boss: Scratch where it itches. When his transfer quarterback turned out to love inside zone more than consistent pocket footwork, Lester modified the offense on the fly to fit Gronowski’s skill set. When his most lethal weapons haven’t been effective pass-catchers, whether Kaleb Johnson in 2024 or Kaden Wetjen in 2025, Lester has found creative ways to get them the ball in space. It has been as obvious as the modified Wing T he was running at times last year, and as subtle as the adoption of the “mid-zone” for Johnson in 2024. Lester seems to know what needs to be adjusted to make the offense work, and how to implement it.

The results have been obvious. Iowa finished Brian Ferentz’s last season in charge, 2024, ranked 129th in SP+ for offense, ahead of only Kent State, Akron, Ball State and Eastern Michigan. The following year, Lester improved the Hawkeyes to 69th, hardly world-beating but more than enough for success with Iowa’s usual defense and special teams advantage. By the end of 2026, the Hawkeyes were 37th overall and eighth in the Big Ten. He’s done all of this without an elite wide receiver or a starting quarterback with any experience in his system.

The telling story from Lester’s podcast appearance came in last year’s Outback Bowl. Vanderbilt had just gone 70 yards in 8 plays, cutting Iowa’s fourteen-point lead in half, and there were still 16 minutes left to play. In past years, this would be a prime scenario for Ferentzball: Run into the line a few times, burn some clock, punt it deep, and let the defense try to hold up. But the defense had just given up touchdowns on two consecutive Vanderbilt drives and looked spent from the effort.

As Lester tells it: Ferentz doesn’t get on the headset much these days, but he felt it was time to weigh in with his offensive coordinator. “Tim, we’re up seven,” he said. “But I feel like we’re down 13. We need points.” And then Lester went and got them. Iowa went on a 6-play, 70-yard drive of its own to restore the two-score lead, then killed 7 minutes of clock on a 13-play field goal drive to ice the victory. While the keys had been turned over in 2024, Iowa’s offense was truly Lester’s on that day. And Iowa is better for it.

Last year, we discussed Kirk Ferentz as a figurehead coach, and how the desire to set one’s progeny up for success in coaching frequently derails otherwise-great careers. Few can recover from the effects of a poorly-performing son in a coordinator spot, and it takes a special level of humility and flexibility to do so. But Kirk Ferentz was smart enough to surround himself with ball-knowers for this third (or fourth, or fifth) act, and to let them do what they do best. Consequently, you get this: Iowa football, an island of consistency and tranquility in a tumultuous sea, run with the efficiency that the head coach always wanted but could rarely deliver. In an era judged by playoff appearances rather than bowl trips, where Indiana can rise to the top of the sport in just two seasons with the right coaching hire and a bag of money, we’re about to see if that knowledge, and that steadiness, is enough.

I needed a team. I wanted it to be English, and I wanted to be able to watch them on television. There were three English teams in the Champions League that year: Manchester United, Arsenal and Leeds United. I dove into it headfirst, researching them and any other team that looked poised to potentially get into the Champions League in later years. ManU and Arsenal were easy choices: They were the most successful teams in England, they already had legions of fans in America, and they were most likely to be on television. I’ve never been one for the easy choice,1 and everything I read said that Leeds (1) was full of scrappy young English guys rather than international superstars, and (2) had zero chance of getting through the Champions League group stage, in a group that included AC Milan and Barcelona. Both AC Milan and Barcelona had multiple players I’d heard of. Leeds didn’t have anything of the sort. It didn’t matter. Leeds immediately became my club.

They lost the first game I watched, at Barcelona, by four goals. I was already regretting my decision. But a week later, back at the madhouse that is Elland Road, Leeds somehow held Milan scoreless and got a last-minute goal to win. When they scored early in the second game against Barcelona a month later, then backup keeper Paul Robinson stood on his head for 90 minutes before an extra-time equalizer, I was hooked. A draw at Milan a couple of weeks later sent them through to the second round. I was going to the business school computer lab early every Monday morning to open up Netscape and see how they did in the Premier League.

There was a second group stage back then, and this would surely be the end of Leeds’ miracle run: They were grouped with the defending Italian league champion Lazio and mighty Real Madrid. But Leeds beat Lazio in a half-full Stadio Olympico, and hammered Anderlecht a couple of times, and even with a pair of losses to Real Madrid, they went through to the knockout round with a game to spare.

They hammered Deportivo la Coruna — itself a Leeds-like out-of-nowhere participant — in the quarterfinals, and drew with Valencia in the first leg of the semifinals. But a 3-0 loss in the second leg meant the end of the journey. It didn’t matter. I was absolutely locked in, and couldn’t wait to watch again the next year.

There was no watching the next year: Leeds finished fourth in the Premier League, meaning no Champions League for the following season. The next year, they were fifth. And then they fired the coach. And then they started selling the starting lineup to the highest bidder. Pretty soon, all of the magazines and websites I was reading to keep up with the season turned dire, with stories of financial mismanagement. They were 15th in 2003, and relegated in 2004 after going bankrupt. Leeds spent the next fifteen years in the wilderness, outside the Premier League entirely. At one point, they got relegated again to the third-tier, the club that had gone toe-to-toe with Europe’s best now playing at half-full backwaters.

It had been so easy to become a fan when things were great. It was very difficult to remain a fan when things were terrible. I persevered, in that I’d check the standings once or twice a month, see that there was no chance of a promotion back to the Premier League, and go back to whatever it was I had been doing.

As I’ve written many times, I became an Iowa basketball fan long before I was an Iowa football fan. Unlike the football team, Iowa hoops was on television where I lived, and were on in the winter, when I was inside and would sit long enough to watch sports. I was six years old when Dr. Tom Davis took the Hawkeyes to the top of the AP poll in January 1987 by beating three top-10 opponents — No. 8 Illinois, No. 6 Purdue and No. 3 Indiana2 — in succession.

That team went to the Regional Final in the NCAA Tournament, blowing a 16-point halftime lead to UNLV and losing by three. This was my first experience as a fan of any team, and the concept of the season ending was confusing enough to squelch the heartache of that loss. The following year, Iowa returned to the Sweet Sixteen, only to lose to Lute Olson, my dad cursing that traitor every time he appeared on screen.

Again: This is how I started as a fan of anything. My team made the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament in the first two seasons I paid any attention to them at all. In my juvenile brain, this was simply what was supposed to happen every year. Iowa was to be in the Sweet Sixteen as my personal birthright. And then came 1989, and Rodney Monroe made two buzzer-beater shots over B.J. Armstrong to take Iowa to two overtimes, an outcome that felt like someone had made a jumper over God himself, then somehow did it again to prove it had happened. NC State knocked Iowa out of the Big Dance in double overtime that afternoon. Iowa didn’t see the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament for another decade. And yes, that decade felt like an eternity to a middle- and high-schooler.

Davis was no longer embattled — he was, simply, already fired — when Iowa returned to the Sweet Sixteen in 1999. I was a senior in high school. I hadn’t yet officially said where I was going to college, but I was pretty sure it would be Iowa City; I’d like to say basketball still factored into that decision, but it had been a hard decade in the wilderness. By the time you hit the last couple of years of high school, college basketball players stop looking like titans and start looking like guys you saw at summer camp. That 1999 team, made up mostly of Iowa guys who didn’t have many opportunities elsewhere, playing for a lame duck head coach, beating Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas to get to the second weekend, made for a great story. But when they lost to UConn in the Sweet Sixteen, I remember what felt like an audible exhale. This was a proper send-off for Dr. Tom, to be sure, but it was also the proper end of that era. Steve Alford was coming, everyone knew, and the days of a bunch of Iowa guys with few other options playing at Iowa were supposed to be gone with him. We were headed back to the promised land of Davis’ first couple of years.

It turned out we were bankrupt. Iowa didn’t return to the Sweet Sixteen under Alford, made the Big Dance at all just three times in eight seasons3. The 2006 team won the Big Ten tournament and got a 3 seed, but were bounced in the first round. I watched it at The Airliner, by then a third-year law student on my way out the door just a year before Alford, with one fewer Tournament win on my resume.

Alford begat Todd Lickliter, who didn’t even win a Big Ten Tournament game in three years. Lickliter begat Fran McCaffery, who nobly returned Iowa to Davis’ standard, then carried on the Tom Davis tradition of losing every second-round game by a dozen. Before you knew it, Iowa had gone twenty-seven years without a trip to the Sweet Sixteen. Twenty-seven years of abject futility and near-misses and heartbreaking losses. Twenty-seven years of Northwestern State and Bob Huggins and Richmond, of Dean Oliver and J.R. Angle and Jordan Bohannon. Twenty-seven years, long enough for Roy Devyn Marble to fall short of the Sweet Sixteen his father had made in that first Davis season, long enough for two Murray brothers to fall short of the Sweet Sixteen their father had missed during that first drought.

Twenty-seven years is a long time to be a fan of something that never gets to that most basic standard of excellence, even if it’s tied up in nostalgia and alumni loyalty. I did what I had to do to stay engaged. We used to reserve March for pure silliness at BHGP, so certain we were that there would be no NCAA Tournament to cover. I drove from Des Moines to Iowa City on a whim for their first NIT game under McCaffery. On the night my kids were born in 2016, Iowa was ranked second in the nation; I would sneak to the NICU at night to get them out of their plastic boxes and teach them about the shooting motion of Peter Jok. Iowa responded by losing six of eight, stumbling into the Tournament as a seven seed, losing to Villanova in the second round, and teaching my kids the true essence of being an Iowa fan before they’d mouthed a word.

At the end of the 2017 season, Leeds was sold to a new owner. A year later, the new owner did something nobody else had tried in the previous 13 years: He hired Marcelo Bielsa. Bielsa was your favorite soccer manager’s favorite soccer manager (famously idolized by Pep Guardiola), an absolute obsessive and borderline recluse who was famous for training his players like a drill sergeant and deploying them with jaw-dropping speed and tactics. His well-earned nickname is “El Loco Bielsa,” and he’s known to bark mid-game instructions from the sideline while sitting on an Igloo cooler. He had never been successful at the top end of club soccer, in large part because he always chose oddball projects at second-tier clubs; he was never in play for top clubs because everything about his style was so weird. He got the Lazio job in 2016, the closest he’d ever been to the top tier of soccer, and quit after three days.

Bielsa hit Leeds like a Category 5 hurricane. His teams attacked relentlessly, and would carve you apart with two well-timed passes when you least expected it. The fans, used to drab second-tier football from middling local managers, could not truly process what they were seeing. YouTube videos of his first game, a 3-1 victory over Stoke City that had Leeds United looking like vintage Barcelona, are titled things like “The Day Leeds Changed Forever.” Fans painted murals of Bielsa all over town. This is one I found on an electrical box near the stadium last year:

The greatest of them all is titled “Bielsa the Redeemer,” in which he’d depicted like the famous statute in Rio, with “2020” written in Spanish below:

Bielsa’s Leeds, with most of the same players that had finished a toothless 13th in the league the year before, would rise to third in 2019. They won the league the following season, going back to the top flight for the first time in sixteen years. Leeds fans held an impromptu socially-distanced victory parade. Even Covid could not stop them from celebrating this long-overdue — and potentially temporary — return to the top of the sport.

I have been struck this week, as I prepare for Iowa’s first Sweet Sixteen game since I was a high school senior, that this team looks a lot like Dr. Tom’s last trip to the second weekend, a ragtag mob of mid-major refugees and Midwestern kids who didn’t have many offers elsewhere, most of them coming from Drake. I have been struck that a member of that 1999 team, senior J.R. Koch, is the father of the Iowa forward who triggered the fast break that beat Florida, and that it’s been, quite literally, a generation since Iowa basketball did this. I have been struck that my kids are first paying close attention to Iowa basketball just as they go to the Sweet Sixteen, just as I had forty years ago.

And as I read Will Warren explain how Ben McCollum is playing Pep Guardiola possession soccer on hardwood Wednesday morning, I was struck yet again: I am watching Bielsa’s Leeds a second time. McCollum has the reputation he earned at Northwest Missouri State that made him an urban legend among college basketball junkies. He was utterly dominant at that level, to the point where those same sickos wondered out loud how he would do if he ever got a shot at Division I. He took a bunch of players from Division II and made them capable contributors at Division I, then took a bunch of other guys from that year at Drake and pulled off a miracle at Iowa. And as much as his style is discussed, nobody seems to really understand how it works so well. It cannot be duplicated, because no other coach is so singularly focused as to pull it off.

When the immediate euphoria of Alvaro Folgueiras’ three-point shot wore off Sunday night, the remainder for me was relief. It was relief that this drought that had lasted for my entire adult life had ended, that nearly three decades of crushed hopes and crippling frustration had a purpose. It bordered on catharsis. I haven’t felt that way about a sporting event since Leeds’ promotion six years ago, that tinge of pride from having seen out a long, difficult time and finding the light at the end of that decades-long tunnel. There were plenty of times where it would have made sense to abandon Iowa basketball, as their head coach defended an accused criminal4, or lost to a Northwestern that isn’t even the Big Ten Northwestern5, or drove away so many players that he had to play his son as a point guard, or turned three of the best players in program history into two Tournament wins over three years. But there’s pride to be had in loyalty through thick and thin, in fidelity to the arbitrary promises you made to yourself at age nine and age nineteen. It’s that pride that will make watching them take the court and beat Nebraska Thursday night — in the first night of the second week of the NCAA Tournament, the first night of the Sweet Sixteen — feel all the better.

It is no longer The Tavian Banks Game, or at least not if you’re saying the name out loud.

Facing the defending national champion with a massive and experienced front line, Iowa power forward Tavion Banks put on a show Sunday night. He scored 20 for the first time since January, making 7/10 field goal attempts. He pulled down six rebounds. In a first half where Bennett Stirtz struggled and the referees handed out indiscriminate whistles seemingly at random, Iowa played Florida’s front line to a stalemate in the paint and on the glass, in large part because of Banks’ sheer force of will.

The rest of Iowa’s front line — exposed as undersized by far inferior opposition this year — did their part to contain the mighty Gators. Cooper Koch knocked down four three-pointers, pulled down four rebounds and threw himself at Florida forwards all night. Cam Manyawu scored only six and rebounded four, but his chaotic style of play disrupted Florida’s offense. And Alvaro Folgueiras, the stretch four who occasionally disappeared from physical Big Ten games, set the tone by picking up a technical for refusing to back down on a tie-up, then jarred the game-winning shot with four seconds to go.

And Iowa — this ragtag bunch of Division II call-ups and spring transfers, here because nearly the entire roster left Iowa City following the firing of Fran McCaffery — will make its first appearance in the Sweet Sixteen in 27 years, because Ben McCollum’s Hawkeyes defeated mighty Florida.

I went to church on Sunday. We’re two weeks from Easter, so it was time for Jesus to raise Lazarus from the dead.

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

“Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.”

Twice in John’s telling of the Lazarus resurrection story, he mentions that Jesus was “deeply moved” by the death of his friend. Death has a way of doing that, particularly in sports. In 1993, we watched Iowa basketball rally to defeat Michigan State, then outplay the Fab Five, all within twelve days Chris Street’s death. A few days before he ran for 314 yards against Tulsa, Tavian Banks attended the funeral of his uncle, who died of AIDS the previous week.

Anyone who has watched Folgueiras this season has seen him point to the sky after a made jumper. The gesture is in honor of his father, who died when Alvaro was nine years old. Folgueiras’ mom was at the game Sunday, carrying a custom flag with her son’s image on it. The television commenters noted that it was the first time Alvaro had seen his mom since August. And so, when Folgueiras made that shot from the corner, he first turned to point to his mom, before turning skyward in honor of his dad. And then Folgueiras — who had just fired Iowa into the Tournament’s second weekend and guaranteed he will never pay for a drink in Iowa City ever again — closed his eyes and brought his hand to his face, taking a moment to contemplate what had just happened before returning to defense. For a guy from Spain who played last year in Pittsburgh, living away from his family but always carrying that family with him, it had to be surreal to make That Shot with his parents so clearly in attendance.

McCollum came to Iowa as a lifelong fan of the program — his wife assured Beth Goetz he was not getting cold feet over taking the job last spring because Iowa was his dream job — and most Hawkeye fans bought in relatively early. He’s had a successful first season on the job. McCollum went 10-10 in the Big Ten, becoming the first head coach since Tom Davis to post a non-losing conference record in his first season. He rejuvenated the fans and sold out Carver Hawkeye Arena. He turned Bennett Stirtz from a guy with no major recruiting offers to a first-team All-Big Ten point guard.

Still, it would be a stretch to call those things ‘miracles.’ Iowa was predicted eighth in the conference and finished ninth. Stirtz was a preseason All-American, and played up to his billing. Iowa’s fans needed a fresh start, and McCollum’s defense-heavy style of play presented something those fans could grab onto, in the aftermath of Fran McCaffery’s fifteen-year run. It is a credit to McCollum that he pulled it off, but those items could be expected.

The sermon today focused on the fact that Jesus did not heal Lazarus or save him from death, but instead waited until he had been dead four days before resurrecting him. Lazarus’ sisters both lamented that Jesus hadn’t arrived earlier, so that he could have saved their brother, both assuming that nothing could now be done. But if Jesus had merely cured Lazarus of his disease, a skeptic could believe that the recovery was coincidental, or that Lazarus had recovered due to his own strength. By waiting and resurrecting Lazarus, Jesus demonstrated that the miracle was solely due to him, so that there could be no doubt of his powers. The Bible is replete with Jesus’ other minor miracles, but the resurrection of Lazarus is the one that makes him famous.

We had witnessed McCollum’s minor miracles all year, but we hadn’t seen the full resurrection. Many of us were reviewing Iowa’s February swoon, lamenting that a few more wins would have improved their Big Ten standing and earned this team an easier path to the Sweet Sixteen, that coveted second-weekend matchup that had evaded Alford, Lickliter and McCaffery for more than a quarter-century. But to do it this way — to fight through the notorious 8/9 game, then take out a one-seed and defending national champion, in a game that nobody in their right mind believed Iowa could win — is the miracle that takes McCollum from a promising young head coach to the program’s one true savior. We lamented that McCollum hadn’t done more to avoid having to face Florida. McCollum showed us that he was coming to wake Iowa up, and our skepticism was born of a lack of imagination. Iowa basketball, the program of Ralph and Lute and Dr. Tom, is resurrected tonight. All we needed to do is believe.

When the Brits invaded North Carolina, Major Patrick Ferguson sent message to the settlers in the Blue Ridge Mountains that he would “"march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay waste the country with fire and sword” unless they surrendered. The settlers — who became known as the “Overmountain Men” — responded by crossing the mountains en masse, with ammo made from lead they had mined themselves, and attacked the British. They killed Ferguson, captured his army, and forced Cornwallis to retreat back to South Carolina.

If Washington is the star of the series, his co-star for the first eight hours is Benedict Arnold, the Patriot general who was deployed to some of the most difficult tasks of the war. Arnold laid siege to the British in Boston, invaded Quebec, retook Fort Ticonderoga at the Battle of Saratoga, and governed Philadelphia following the Patriot recapture from the British. In a war with remarkably few battles, Arnold seemed to show up in almost all of them. While acting as governor of Philadelphia, Arnold married the daughter of a Loyalist who assisted him in switching sides. By 1779, Arnold was sharing troop locations, and in 1780, he had made a deal with the British to hand over West Point — and, effectively, the entire Patriot position on the Hudson River — in exchange for a commission and a bag of money. Washington spent most of the rest of the war trying to hunt down Arnold, and told subordinates to hang the traitor if he were to be caught.

Arnold’s timing could not have been worse. Two weeks after he switched sides, the Overmountain Men defeated Ferguson and stopped the British invasion of North Carolina. The Brits spent the rest of the fall losing most of South Carolina. Not only was the Southern Strategy on the verge of failure, but Arnold’s reversal angered Washington enough to bring the Americans out of their long-held positions around New York in pursuit of the traitor. It galvanized an American side that had stalled. One year later, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and he joined Arnold on a boat back to England.

Iowa defeated ninth-ranked Nebraska 57-52 Tuesday night, in a slog more reminiscent of trench warfare than the Revolution. Bennett Stirtz scored 25 of Iowa’s 57 points; only Cooper Koch managed double figures beyond him, and Iowa shot just 33 percent from the field. But Iowa outrebounded Nebraska by 13, and managed 12 offensive rebounds, extending possession after possession until the Cornhuskers had been ground into a fine paste.

But neither Stirtz nor Koch was the focal point last night, because Pryce Sandfort was making his return to Iowa City. Sandfort, of course, was a Hawkeye for the two previous seasons, playing alongside his brother Payton. Last spring, Payton got drafted and Pryce left for Lincoln. He has since become the offensive focal point of a Nebraska team that opened the season with 20 consecutive wins, and leads the Huskers in minutes played. He’s made more three-point shots than any other two Cornhuskers combined, and has been the Kenpom MVP in six of Nebraska’s eleven Big Ten wins to date.

In the transfer portal/NIL era of college basketball, players arrive and leave all the time. This is especially true when a program makes a coaching change: Iowa’s entire roster, except for Koch, left when Fran McCaffery was replaced last spring. That included Iowa natives like Josh Dix, who were actively courted by Ben McCollum but opted to move to Creighton. Most of those departures were met with a shrug at worst.

But something didn’t sit right with Sandfort’s transfer. It may be that his brother had been such a warrior for the program, or that he had so clearly turned the corner under McCaffery last year, or the simple fact that he’s an Iowa kid who opted to cross the Missouri River and take sides with the Cornhuskers. The rivalry between the schools isn’t as pronounced in basketball, but it still exists.

Regardless of the reason, Pryce Sandfort walked out onto the Carver Hawkeye parquet on Tuesday night as a modern Benedict Arnold. The erstwhile mild-mannered Carver Hawkeye crowd came out of hiding like they were the Overmountain Men. The students jeered and chanted. The fans stood and roared. It looked and felt like a true home court, with much of it focused on Sandfort.

And it clearly had an effect: Despite playing 37 minutes, Sandfort made just three shots all night, tying his Big Ten season-low, and did not record a single rebound or assist. And when Sandfort — and Mast, and Hoiberg, and Lawrence, and the rest of the Cornhuskers — could not muster more than 52 points, those Overmountain Men swarmed the court like they had breached the defenses at King’s Mountain.

It felt like a game of immense consequence on television, as well, as BTN repeatedly cut to Sandfort’s parents, clad in red and white, behind the Nebraska bench. BTN color commentator Shon Morris was frequently shouting over the shouts and boos of Iowa fans, incensed by every minor grievance. Sandfort’s presence turned an otherwise-innocuous mid-week Big Ten game into something like a morality play, with that “9” next to Nebraska on the scorebug adding further to the stakes. For the first time in years, Iowa came through, and put their own Benedict Arnold on a boat back to England with Fred Hoiberg.

In the light of day, it feels a bit unseemly. Iowa’s best player, and most of the Hawkeye roster, was taken from another in-state program. I can’t imagine an Iowa crowd becoming incensed over Brock Harding or Carter Kingsbury returning. But if the long war of this basketball season needed a precipitating event to end the stalemate and kickstart Iowa’s run into March, Pryce Sandfort’s return and defeat will have to do.

The Hawkeyes’ overall status remains solid. Iowa is 21st in Kenpom as of Tuesday morning, and has been in the top 25 since the win over Maryland more than a month ago. McCollum — whose hallmark has been defense, going back to his days at Northwest Missouri State — has Iowa in the national top 20 in defensive efficiency, sixth overall in defensive turnover rate and third in non-steal turnovers. Iowa has a similar statistical profile as last season’s Drake team, only turned up even higher; Drake was not nearly as effective at contesting opponent shots, even if the Bulldogs’ block rate was effectively even with Iowa’s right now.

It’s at the offensive end where Iowa has struggled in Big Ten play. Iowa is currently 12th nationally in effective field goal percentage (58.4%) and 10th nationally in two-point shooting percentage (60.9%). If those were to hold through the rest of the year, they would both be program highs for the past thirty seasons. The Hawkeyes’ current overall offensive efficiency is nearly identical to that posted by Fran McCaffery’s last five teams. While the turnover rate is considerably higher than McCaffery’s teams — that was kind of McCaffery’s thing post-Garza — it is still respectable, and significantly outweighed by Iowa’s penchant for forcing turnovers on defense. On its face, Iowa has the profile of a mid-seeded NCAA Tournament team.

But the chances of those holding through the rest of a Big Ten season don’t look great. Brian Rauf at Basket Under Review summed it up, prior to the Illinois loss:

Iowa's offensive rating, effective field goal percentage, and turnover rate all drop drastically against [opponents in the] the top two quadrants. The Hawkeyes also get to the line considerably less against that level of competition.

Some of this goes back to preseason concerns with Iowa and McCollum’s jump from Drake. This is a roster short on athleticism and individual creation. As good as Stirtz is, it’s much more difficult to rely on one player to carry everything at this level than it is at the mid-major ranks.

The margin for error is already small for Iowa because of the pace it wants to play at, and the lack of other creators makes it even smaller.

Things didn’t get better against Illinois, either. Here are Iowa’s offensive rating, effective field goal percentage, and turnover rate against the best five opponents on its schedule (Iowa State, Michigan State, Illinois, Minnesota and UCLA) versus its overall ratings:

Of course, those are good opponents! Three of them are among the 15 best teams in the country! It’s understandable that Iowa would not perform as well against the best teams on their schedule. However, it’s also become clear that the other games in the Hawkeyes’ early slate meant to bolster its position haven’t panned out. Of Iowa’s twelve wins, just one — UCLA — is against a team with even a modest chance of an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. Ole Miss, which was Kenpom #34 when they lost to Iowa in November, has gone 4-6 since then and dropped 36 spots in the standings. The only other Iowa opponent in the Kenpom Top 100 at the moment is Grand Canyon, currently 88th.

It’s a bit simplistic to state that Stirtz is Iowa’s only offensive weapon. Tavion Banks has been an effective scorer in the frontcourt, Cam Manyawu’s Reggie Evans game is strong — he’s 67th nationally in offensive efficiency at the moment — and Alvaro Folgueiras has been awarded additional playing time as his scoring has improved. However, with the possible exception of Banks, those players’ shots are dependent on Stritz’s ability to create. The same holds true for Cooper Koch, Tate Sage, Isaia Howard, etc. It’s an offense built around Stirtz’s unique abilities as a creator.

Coaches are starting to figure it out. Iowa State tried to combat Stirtz with the length and athleticism of Killyan Toure, and Iowa almost ball-screened their way to an upset as a result. Subsequent opponents are playing Iowa with more targeted defenses. In the second half, UCLA moved to a full-court press and switched all of the Stirtz ball screens, daring Iowa to find another ball handler to get into the frontcourt and another consistent scorer once they were there. Illinois went to what was, effectively, a Box-and-1, in order to put a defender on Stirtz at the top of the key with support against any drive though the lane. Even if opponents merely slow down Stirtz, it has a direct effect on Iowa’s success. Here’s Stirtz’s Kenpom profile this year, with his per-game offensive efficiency rating on the right. See if you can find a pattern.

We’re seeing another anti-Stirtz tactic at the other end of the court, as well. Stirtz famously plays virtually every available minute. In 2025 for Drake, he sat for a total of 16 minutes in 33 games against Division I opponents. Stirtz picked up four fouls once, in a ten-point win at Southern Illinois, and he didn’t pick up that fourth foul until there were three minutes remaining. Watching Iowa this year, it becomes clear how McCollum shielded Stirtz from foul trouble. McCollum does not typically have his point guard defending the other team’s point, opting instead for Isaia Howard. Stirtz is generally assigned to a lower threat, frequently a corner three specialist. Not only does that tactic limit his activity at the defensive end, preserve his stamina for operating the offense, and put him in perfect position to receive an outlet pass when Iowa forces a turnover, but it also keeps him out of the line of the referee’s fire.

Opponents have clearly taken notice. Even the most modest of opposition offensive threats are now the recipients of back screens and double screens, and are finding the courage to drive to the basket on Stirtz. The result: Eleven Stirtz fouls in the last three games, and more time for Stirtz on the bench in those three games (23 minutes) than he recorded all of last season. The strategy almost backfired for Illinois, as Iowa’s offense came alive with Stirtz on the bench, but there’s no question that he’s Iowa’s most important offensive player, and that he’s being schemed out of the game since Big Ten play formally started.

I don’t think there’s any real question that McCollum is a great coach, or that Iowa is in a far better place than it was at this time last season; last year’s Hawkeyes were in the midst of their catastrophic West Coast trip at this point in 2025, and would win just five more games all season. I trust that a coach with McCollum’s track record will make the adjustments necessary to prevent this losing skid from turning into a season-ending disaster. But if anyone truly believed that McCollum could roll into the Big Ten with his Drake team, run the same system he had at Drake, and contend for a conference title has received a hard dose of reality this week. There are a new set of questions being posed by the Big Ten’s best coaches. We’ll soon see if McCollum can find the answers.

The Buccaneers have played in the NFC South division since 2002, with New Orleans, Atlanta and Carolina. The NFL schedule includes an in-division home-and-home for each team, meaning all other members of the NFC South come to Tampa once a year. As a result, former Saints coach Sean Payton coached 15 games in Raymond James. John Fox and Ron Rivera each served nine-year terms with Carolina. Crossover games between the Bucs and non-division opponents are so scattered that no other coach is in Tampa with any frequency; the two longest-running modern head coaches, Bill Belichick and Andy Reid, have coached in Raymond James three times and five times, respectively.

USF started a football program in 1997, and moved into Raymond James when it opened in 1998. Jim Leavitt1 was head coach of USF through 2009. Since Leavitt’s firing, USF has followed the Buccaneers’ lead, with five coaches serving short terms: Skip Holtz, Willie Taggart, Charlie Strong, Jeff Scott and Alex Golesh.

That’s a total list of sixteen coaches who have coached eight or more games in Raymond James Stadium in the last 28 years, across all divisions of college and pro football. Mike Smith, the coach of the Atlanta Falcons between 2008-2014, is currently seventeenth on that list, with seven visits to Tampa. And at 11:00 this morning, he’s joined on that line by Kirk Ferentz, a coach who has racked up all of his visits to Raymond James Stadium just to play in the Outback Bowl.

Since the Outback Bowl — a Big Ten/SEC matchup for more than a quarter-century now — moved to Raymond James in 1999, Iowa is its most frequent participant. No other Big Ten team has played in Tampa more than four times, and only Florida and South Carolina have played in five Outback Bowls. Iowa is making its seventh New Years’ trip to the gulf coast, heading down to Ybor City, up to their necks in the sweat and wet confetti.

The Outback Bowl has essentially acted as the Mendoza line for a successful Iowa season during Ferentz’s entire tenure; anything greater is a success, anything less is a modest failure. Win all the games you should, but fail to do anything extraordinary, and the white sand beaches of St. Petersburg beckon. In the shorthand of Iowa season summaries, where bowl placement acts as a simple barometer for overall success, the Outback Bowl always stands as dead center.

When combined with the gradual deterioration of relevance in bowl games, it all feels a bit routine. There’s no doubt this game has less gravity than it used to. Even the traditional hangover-fuel early-morning New Years’ Day kickoff has been moved to the middle of a work day in order to accommodate the Playoff. And when your program, and your coach, have played in it so many times that he registers on the list of coaches who have appeared most often in that stadium, it’s easy to dismiss this as exhibition.

There was plenty of ‘routine’ in the 2025 campaign. The Hawkeyes took three out of four trophy games, but the one loss — to Iowa State, two weeks into the season — lowered expectations. When those expectations came back following the blowout win over Minnesota, Iowa once again dropped two games to ranked opponents to send them back to Outback Bowl levels. But that lack of success against the top of the Big Ten presents Iowa with one more opportunity to break a four-year drought against ranked opponents before it extends into a fifth.

It apparently matters to this team. Iowa has had essentially no opt-outs from this game, and will field a complete starting roster. That includes all of the nation’s best offensive line and the NCAA’s winningest quarterback, all for one last time. It also includes Diego Pavia, for (possibly) his last game, against a Phil Parker defense that found its stride in the second half of the season. There’s plenty to watch here, if it’s not going to be a simple exhibition, and it certainly looks like both sides are treating the Outback with old-school reverence.

Iowa could put definitive punctuation on a near-great season Wednesday afternoon with an upset win. And if not? If Iowa can’t get past Vanderbilt, and takes that drought against ranked opponents to 14 losses in a row? It’s 41 degrees in Iowa City today, 23 tomorrow, and those St. Pete beaches are nice regardless. A bowl trip will always be a bowl trip, even if the bowl doesn’t carry the same weight it used to.

We’ll get to what we’ve learned so far about McCollum’s coaching and playing style tomorrow, but I figured it would be best if we first asked and answered an initial question: With a roster that has almost completely turned over from the final Fran McCaffery season, who exactly is playing basketball for Iowa this year?

The Drake Guys

Bennett Stirtz (#14, Senior, PG, 6’4”, Liberty, Mo.)
Tavion Banks (#6, Senior, SF, 6’7”, Kansas City, Mo.)
Cam Manyawu (#3, Junior, PF/C, 6’9”, Kansas City, Mo.)
Isaia Howard (#23, Sophomore, SG/SF, 6’5”, Plattsburg, Mo.)
Kael Combs (#11, Junior, SG, 6’4”, Nixa, Mo.)
Joey Matteoni (#44, Freshman (RS), SF/PF, 6’9”, Overland Park, Kan.)

The story has now been told a million times: McCollum made his name at Northwest Missouri State, winning four Division II national titles and going 253-21 over his last eight seasons. He got the Drake job last year when Darian DeVries left for West Virginia, and brought substantially all of his NMSU roster with him to Des Moines. That team went 30-4 and made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament, with hardly more than a bunch of Division II guys and a couple of Wyoming transfers. There’s a reason why nearly all of these guys grew up near Kansas City: That’s where McCollum has built his empire.

The star of the show: Point guard Bennett Stirtz, who quickly became your favorite college basketball guy’s favorite player. Stirtz led the country in available minutes played; if you take out the two games that Drake played against non-Division I opponents, he sat out a grand total of sixteen minutes all season. He was also one of the nation’s most efficient players, and shot 40 percent from three. Iowa hired McCollum for the long term, but it’s largely Stirtz that made a short-term bump possible.

Stirtz is hardly the only player to come along with McCollum from Drake, however. Due to the near-complete exodus of Iowa’s 2024-25 roster, McCollum brought along nearly all of last season’s Bulldog core. Three regular starters from that team graduated, but there remains a number of guys who joined Drake from Wyoming, rather than NMSU, a group that includes junior post Cam Manyawu. At 6’9”, Manyawu doesn’t have the typical size of a Big Ten center, but he played that role for Drake and will likely get pushed into it frequently for this Iowa team. His athleticism allowed Manyawu to rebound at a far higher rate than his height would suggest (he was first in the MVC last year in offensive rebound rate and second in defensive rebounding), and he’s shown a real knack for forcing turnovers in the paint; he finished first in the Missouri Valley Conference last year in steal rate, despite playing center almost exclusively.

The Wyoming-Drake-Iowa eastbound train also brings junior guard Kael Combs, who played somewhat sparingly last season but has become a starter in recent weeks. Combs is only averaging 5 ppg in his five starts in black and gold and has shot just 2/11 from three, not exactly the kind of output one expects from their shooting guard. McCollum has paired Combs with his other transfer guard, sophomore Isaia Howard; they are the only two players on the roster to have split a starting position so far this season. Howard got zero starts for Drake last year as a freshman, but grew into a bench role as the season progressed. Returns so far this season have been mixed: He was Iowa’s best player in a 13-point win over Grand Canyon, but has scored just seven points in the two Big Ten games played since then. In the Hawkeyes’ rout of Maryland last week, Howard only took two shots in 21 minutes of action.

If Stirtz was a known quantity, the biggest surprise so far is arguably Tavion Banks1. The senior wing had been forced into duty as an undersized power forward/center for Drake last season, and played all but one game from the bench. Despite that fact, he was second on Drake’s team in percentage of shots taken (behind only Stirtz) and near the top in rebounding rate, block rate and fouls drawn; the 6.3 fouls he drew per 40 minutes of play was 49th nationally. In essence, he was a matchup problem in the Valley that likely wouldn’t be such an issue in the Big Ten. Instead, moving to a more natural position — and into the starting lineup — has only created more issues for defenses. He’s still drawing a ton of fouls and rebounding at a high rate, but is now coupled with Manyawu instead of backing him up in order to improve Iowa’s athleticism. His scoring needs to improve — especially with the lack of production from the shooting guard position — but everything else seems to have translated marvelously.

The final Drake transfer, redshirt freshman Joey Matteoni, has played minimal minutes in low-leverage situations so far. McCollum said, “Joey can do a variety things – he can trigger your offense, finish and shoot,” in the press release announcing his addition. He’s a depth addition at best, at the moment.

The Non-Drake Guys

Alvaro Folgueiras (#7, PF/C, 6’10”, Junior, Malaga, Esp./Robert Morris)
Brendan Hausen (#15, SG, 6’4”, Senior, Amarillo, Tex./Kansas State)

With the exception of Stirtz, the Drake transfer contingent is light on scoring. That’s where the two non-Drake transfers come into play. Let’s start with Alvaro Folgueiras, the reigning Horizon League Player of the Year, who averaged 14 points and 9 rebounds for a Colonials squad that made the NCAA Tournament last season. At 6’10”, Folgueiras provides some much-needed size and rebounding, and shoots north of 40 percent from three. His efficiency rating is in the national top 100 so far this season, despite him playing less than 20 minutes per game. He’s been an effective pick-and-roll partner for Stirtz so far; given his shooting range, opponents never know where he’s going to end up after the ball screen, and Stirtz has done a nice job of finding him in those scenarios. Those perimeter tendencies have limited his offensive rebounding, but Folgueiras has posted Iowa’s highest defensive rebound rate through nine games, as well.

More of an enigma is Brendan Hausen, a perimeter sharpshooter brought in with much fanfare from Kansas State (and Villanova before that). On paper, Hausen looks like exactly the shooting guard that Iowa needs: He has sufficient size, he shot 39 percent from three last season on seven attempts per game, and he doesn’t turn the ball over. So it’s a bit odd that he’s not playing: Hausen has averaged just nine minutes a game so far, and has played just fifteen combined minutes in Iowa’s last four games (he didn’t see the court at all against Maryland). McCollum has praised Hausen’s demeanor and work ethic, and chalked up the lack of playing time to lingering injuries and issues on the defensive end that should resolve with time and experience, but Iowa needs Hausen’s scoring when Big Ten play ramps up in a few weeks. The clock is ticking.

The Holdover

Cooper Koch (#8, SF, 6’8”, Freshman (RS), Peoria, Ill.)

What we thought we’d get from Hausen might actually come from the one guy on last year’s roster who stayed: Cooper Koch, the former four-star recruit who missed most of last year due to injury. Koch has been ostensibly playing power forward so far this season, but his stat line looks like that of a shooting guard: He’s taking more than three three-point attempts per game (trailing only Stirtz) and jarring half of them, but the other typical post stats — rebounding, fouls drawn, free throw attempts — don’t really register. Through eight games, Koch is in the national top 10 in effective field goal rate and 27th nationally in offensive efficiency. Those are the kinds of stats we haven’t seen since Keegan Murray. Like Folgueiras, Koch is a potential mismatch issue for most teams. On a team that looks somewhat desperate for scoring, he’ll have to continue as a starter and first option for Stirtz.

The Freshmen

Trey Thompson (#20, PF, 6’8”, Greeneville, Tenn.)
Tate Sage (#24, SF, 6’7”, Weatherford, Okla.)
Trevin Jirak (#27, C, 6’11”, West Des Moines, Ia.)

Finally, Iowa has added three freshmen to the squad. Much like the Hausen situation, their usage has been somewhat confusing. Let’s start with Trey Thompson, the national top 100 power forward out of Tennessee who was McCollum’s first big recruiting win of his tenure (he held offers from Purdue, Tennessee, Kansas, Indiana and Alabama, among others). Thompson cited McCollum’s willingness to take him a year early — Thompson had initially planned to graduate high school in 2026, but moved it up to come to Iowa immediately — as one of the biggest reasons why he chose the Hawkeyes. McCollum has responded by not playing Thompson at all, and is now talking about potentially redshirting him. One of the knocks on Thompson coming of high school was lateral mobility, which would potentially cause problems on defense, but it nevertheless seems odd to push for a recruit to come to campus early and then redshirt him.

In the meantime, McCollum has put his other two freshmen to work. Tate Sage, a 6’7” wing from Oklahoma, has registered significant minutes as a backup wing and scored in double digits in wins over Chicago State and Maryland. He’s been limited from the perimeter, but effective inside the three-point arc and adept at drawing fouls to get to the free throw line. Trevin Jirak, the reigning Iowa Mr. Basketball out of West Des Moines Valley, was a late addition who had previously committed to Northern Iowa. Jirak got minutes early, and impressed as a high-screen weapon. However, he has seen only limited action against Iowa’s Power 4 opponents, and looks like a project who could give some low-leverage minutes and a handful of post fouls for the Hawkeyes in the conference campaign.

We hate our rivals because they are the most like us, and therefore how we gauge our own self-worth. Who cares if our team is better than some team halfway across the country? We want to be better than those jerks from down the road that we see all the time. We hate most those who most remind us of ourselves.

— Will Leitch, this week in The Athletic

Iowa is the only program in the Big Ten with three protected rivalries on its conference schedule, and that list doesn’t even include its standing date with Iowa State every September. That’s a whole lot of hate to spread around.

Each rivalry has its own pressure points, its own narrative of disrespect. Minnesota is built on their unjustified claims of superiority; Iowa State is fought on our completely legitimate claims of the same nature. Both of those are culture wars, with football as a stand-in for decades of politics and money, like the urban/rural divide or the theory of higher education being decided by feats of strength. Those battles are visceral, as each side fights for that thing that is so hard to find in modern America: Respect from the opposition.

The Nebraska rivalry started in the same way. After all, it was a fluke 10-7 Iowa victory over Nebraska in the 1981 season opener that jump-started Hayden Fry’s rebuild project and sent the Hawkeyes to the Rose Bowl for the first time in two decades. It was Nebraska that blew the doors off Kirk Ferentz’s first squad in his opening game as head coach, the same Nebraska that took the first two games from Iowa after joining the Big Ten and started a dialogue of whether it made more sense for them to play Wisconsin on Black Friday, whether Iowa could possibly hang with the Huskers in the long term. In 2014, Nebraska beat Iowa, then fired their head coach anyway.

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Dantonio, of course, was the head coach at Michigan State for thirteen seasons, from 2007 through 2019. Obviously, Michigan State has its own set of built-in rivals — Michigan, Notre Dame, the Department of Justice — but Sparty’s relations with Iowa got particularly frosty during the Dantonio years. In 2009, Michigan State almost killed Iowa’s undefeated start, until Marvin McNutt called game.

The following year, Iowa’s dreams of a Big Ten title had gone up in flames weeks prior, but Michigan State was undefeated and ranked fifth, right up until they walked into Kinnick Stadium. Sparty was quite literally breaking starters out of jail for the game, and Kirk Ferentz took umbrage with extreme prejudice.

There were talking points from the next few years of games: The Fainting Spartans in 2011, Iowa’s East Lansing Dance Party in 2012, Connor Cook’s coming out party in 2013. Both teams played the same brand of football, and it was clear to all involved that Mark Dantonio and Ferentz didn’t much care for each other.

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He gets caught by the real Don Draper’s wife, Anna, who knows he’s not actually Don Draper. In exchange for her keeping quiet about the lie, he essentially bankrolls her life in California. This provides Don with an excuse (to the viewers, at least; none of the characters know about any of this for at least three seasons1) to go to California from time to time. The show creates a vivid change in dynamic whenever Don went west. Much of the show is set in Manhattan, as Don and company inhabit dark restaurants and darker bars, the blue sky rarely visible amongst the gray skyscrapers framing every shot. Even at the Drapers’ colonial house in the suburbs, it often feels dark, gray and formal, as if everyone has their guard up. Don, holding a secret that he believes can bring his life crashing down, is actually guarded at all times.

And then he gets to California, where nobody knows about him or cares about whether he’s Don Draper or Dick Whitman, and the one person who knows his actual identity is there, and the clouds part, and the sun beams down, and the gray walls are painted seafoam green.

The last few episodes of the series are primarily Don, unencumbered by everything, once again traveling west to California. He leaves work in Manhattan without warning, drives across the country, and breaks down in every way imaginable; his car stops running in Oklahoma, he’s beaten up by some locals, and eventually he just gives the car away along with most of everything else he owns. He has a mental break on a call to his coworkers. Things are pretty dire.

By the final scene of the series, he’s in a spiritual retreat on the Monterrey coast, doing some light meditation, and writing the iconic “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad, a smile creeping across his face.

This has been a season of near-misses for Iowa football. Three losses on last-minute scores, by a total of ten points, are the difference between a Playoff contender and another New Year’s Day trip to Tampa. Last weekend’s loss to Oregon was bleak, and not only as the last nail in Iowa’s Playoff hopes. It was cold, rainy, and miserable. Everything was dark. Everything was gray.

What better time is there, then, for a quick trip to California? The big goals for this season may lie in ruins, but that’s back in Iowa City. There’s no freezing rain in California, no bone-chilling winds, no gray. For a campaign that teetered on the edge for two months before finally falling by the wayside, it’s an opportunity for new life. There are four games left to play, and that old Ferentz guidepost for success — the ten-win season — remains well within reach. Mark Gronowski’s NFL aspirations may still be as remote as they were when he left Brookings, South Dakota, but his place in Hawkeye lore is fully up for grabs. Nobody has told Kirk Ferentz’s offensive line or Phil Parker’s defense that the season is over, and nobody will until January comes. Ferentz has his record, but if you expected that would finally move him to stop pushing for those internal guideposts on which he measures success and failure, you’d be mistaken.

There is no doubt that last weekend’s loss was a disappointment, the kind which would make any team consider abandoning all worldly possessions and giving up. But it’s probably time that Iowa got out of Iowa City, felt the sun on its face, and found a reason to finish with a flourish. The Iowa Hawkeyes will not be national champions this year, will not even be in the contest that would give them a chance at such a feat. But there are still four games in a season that is nowhere near a total loss. There are still reasons for hope, reasons to smile. There is still time to buy the world a Coke.

Norm Parker was the gold standard for this. Norm was always good for a quote — especially if the topic was a linebacker — and could spin a good yarn, but rarely would he delve into something newsworthy. It was PR for the program, basically, in the same way Norm and Tom Brands would hit the rubber chicken circuit together every spring to glad-hand donors.

So when you saw Norm get technical, it was usually when he had something. In the leadup to the 2010 Orange Bowl, Norm sat down with reporters and gave a graduate-level lecture on defending the triple option, using a styrofoam cup and the reporters’ tape recorders to diagram strategies. And then he gave the quote:

“In all of the time we’ve been here, there’s never been a team that’ll make the players study film and concentrate every play as much as this team will,” Parker said. “This team will take more on-the-field preparation, but the guys will have to watch film on their own more than any team we’ve played.

“If you don’t do that, you won’t win. You can’t think about football an hour and a half a day and play these guys or they will go up and down the field on you.”

And then Norm’s squad went out and defended the Georgia Tech triple option more effectively than any team had in years. It was clear that Norm had done the homework, and was making sure his guys did the same. That quote wasn’t meant for them, because they already knew Norm wasn’t afraid of that offense. It was meant for Georgia Tech.

Phil Parker has been on the staff at Iowa for 27 years, first as a position assistant to Norm and then as defensive coordinator. He was a player and assistant for Nick Saban before that. While he clearly sees the public-facing portion of his job as the most annoying aspect, he also has seen how to use the media to your advantage. Most of the time, Phil speaks in technicalities, always downplaying performance, always resetting his personal expectations for his players higher. In his decade-plus as defensive coordinator, Phil has made news from the lectern maybe twice.

So it was jarring when he slipped an aside into his answer about Oregon this week:

Parker said, “They [Oregon] have the whole package. It’s well funded, if I put it that way.” And it was said with the closest thing to a derisive smirk that Phil Parker can muster.

Dan Lanning doesn’t need much to use for motivating his team, as we’ve learned in the past. As Chris Hassell points out in the video above, Mike Gundy tried to say something similar and ended up out of work soon after. So why on earth would Phil Parker say something like that and draw the wrath of the Ducks?

Could it be that Phil Parker wants that wrath?

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Back in the late aughts, I was in a brief relationship where we both were quick on the heels of a bad breakup. We listened to a lot of music, and spent a considerable amount of our weeks together discussing the album put out by Little Joy. The first track on that album, “Brand New Start,” became our de facto song.

“Brand New Start” is a song about thinking you’ve found The One in a new relationship. “She and I have a brand new start,” they sing in the chorus. “Gotta give all my love.” The singer describes how others may try to pry his girl away, but he’s laughing from the sideline because he’s sure they’re solid. Everything is great. They’re starting over, and it’s going to last forever.

Except the last chorus gets a coda that portends doom: “Love won’t bring me down, oh no.” Because the honeymoon doesn’t last forever, and the eye may eventually wander, and she might not be The One after all. People are who they are, and that doesn’t change by simply declaring it’s a brand new day. Things will never be better than that first few weeks, and the best we can do is not think about what happened with the last one, and trust that love won’t bring us down again.

Obviously, it was not meant to last, and we broke up after a month or two. She quickly went back to the guy she’d previously broken up with, because people never really change. I hadn’t really thought about Little Joy again since then, until Tuesday night.

There was a lot to like about the Ben McCollum debut Tuesday night. Iowa looked visibly more engaged on defense, switching and rotating with a level of urgency not seen since the early days of Fran McCaffery. Obviously, Bennett Stirtz is the real deal, matching Aaron White’s record for most points in an Iowa debut. The offense wasn’t as fast-paced as we’re used to, but it had more tempo than we expected; the 69 regulation possessions in Tuesday night’s game were more than all but one game Drake played last year. Iowa played ten guys for more than 12 minutes each, in a far cry from the short bench McCollum was using last season.

The reviews were generally positive, in large part due to that defense, a whole aspect of the game that had been missing from Iowa basketball for years. Holding the reigning Horizon League champions to 1.00 points per possession is no small feat, even if we had to take their best player out of the portal and use him against them. You do that, and break the century mark on your own, and Iowa fans will bask in the afterglow.

Except there is this, which remains a fundamental issue with the program that has not yet been resolved: Nobody is showing up, and those that do sit on their hands.

It was Iowa’s defense that helped spark the 17-2 run that opened the game. Every stop, every turnover, brought a roar from the crowd, and McCollum was waving his arms to try to turn up the volume.

“We’re still trying to get them to stand,” McCollum said. “I’m trying. ‘Man, let’s go. Let’s get lit.’ What else are we here for? We’re not here to just spectate and watch. We’ve got to be a part of it, right? So, yeah, I mean, we need them on defense. Need them on offense. You just need noise. That’s kind of my theory.”

“We’re still trying to get them to stand” is not exactly what you want to hear from the home crowd for your new coach’s first game, especially when the official attendance — 9,232 — is only a few hundred more than attended Iowa’s last two openers, and leaves more than 5,000 empty seats in the already-cavernous Carver Hawkeye Arena, making ostensibly less noise than those in attendance. More people attended McCaffery’s final home game.

When Iowa fired Todd Lickliter and hired Fran McCaffery, it came with a whole marketing campaign addressing fan apathy. While “Let’s Be Mad Again” went away fairly quickly, the concept was essentially the same as what Iowa is facing now. People had checked out during Lickliter, and the athletic department was desperate to get them back. Attendance for McCaffery’s first game was 11,700, though the game was on a Sunday. Lickliter drew 10,200 for his first game against Idaho State on a Friday night in 2007. And I was in attendance for the near-sellout for Steve Alford’s first home game in 1999, though that came on the heels of a season-opening win over the top-ranked team in the nation. Throw it all together, and this was the lowest attendance for a coach’s home opener at least since Carver Hawkeye Arena opened in 1983.

That “new student section”? The Hawks Nest has been relegated to the area behind the basket at CHA since 1999, a particularly bad place to watch basketball in an arena built around a giant multipurpose oval floor. Instead of moving the students from the end zone and closer to the floor along the sideline, Iowa created a “student platform” that holds 200 students, ostensibly closer to the court.

This was done, obviously, for the same reasons that the previous athletic director refused to take action on student ticket placement: Because there’s more money in selling those sideline seats to the people who are barely engaged with the product on the floor.

The worst part is this is the honeymoon period. We’re supposed to be seeing this program through rose-colored glasses. None of the bad stuff has happened yet. McCollum said it himself postgame:

“It’s not going to be like this every single night. I hope it is. It’d be really nice, but it’s not always going to be. And so that’s when you really, really need those fans.”

After the runaway win, McCollum and his squad spent the first few minutes of postgame thanking the fans.

McCollum and the Hawkeyes waded into the new student section at the south end of the arena, then went along the east end to shake hands with the fans seated there. And while McCollum and guard Bennett Stirtz waited to talk to the BTN announcers broadcasting the game, the rest of the players went through the north end with more handshakes before heading up the tunnel.

The message was simple after Tuesday’s 101-69 win over Robert Morris — thanks for coming.

If there’s a night where the fans should not need your thanks, it’s the first night, and perhaps there’s hope in the fact that fans were still there after a 32-point blowout victory over a non-conference tomato can on a Tuesday, but it’s still striking that an in-person thank you was deemed necessary at all.

Beth Goetz got the perfect coach, a born-and-bred Hawkeye who attended basketball camp with Tom Davis and pined for the Iowa job for years, who won on a massive level at Division II and became the darling of the college basketball coaching world last year. Excitement around the program is as high as it’s been since Luka Garza and the Murray Brothers had fans dreaming of deep NCAA Tournament runs. That it would begin with such an inauspicious showing — not from the team, but from its fans — does not bode particularly well, and points to the fundamental problems presented by Carver Hawkeye Arena and those who inhabit the seats within it.

It’s a brand new start for Iowa hoops, a program that just got out of a long-term thing and needed a new start more than anything. And hopefully, as the conference season approaches and the level of opponent improves, the fans come back, both in numbers and decibel levels. But watching Tuesday’s game had me wondering if we had already moved past the honeymoon before it ever really started, and if love was truly not going to let us down again.

But there’s a part of me that misses the days where every season would end against Minnesota. Back in the BHGP days, we used to run a series during Minnesota Week called something like “Great Moments in Gopher Football,” with some of the best content the world wide web had to offer. It was stuff like this botched long snap that cost Minnesota a win over Wisconsin in 2005:

Hayden Fry famously told a story about beating Minnesota on a game-winning field goal made possible because the Gophers had 12 men on the field for the first, missed, attempt, a story that included snippets from about a half-dozen games Fry coached against Minnesota in the 1980s. Back in 1982, Star Tribune columnist Sid Hartman called Iowa a bunch of farmers, and Gopher coach Joe Salem wore overalls to practice that week. So when Iowa won 21-16, Fry got out his ‘clod clothes’ to wear to the postgame press conference.

“Hey, all you great Minnesota writers and radio people and TV,” Fry told a group of reporters. “I didn’t want to make you look like liars. … We’re taking Floyd home where he belongs. Sooo-ey, sooooo-ey!”

“Does he always do stuff like this?” a Twin Cities reporter asked then-Daily Iowan sports reporter Melissa Isaacson.

Fry responded.

“I’ve never done this before,” he said that day. “But I figured if we’re going to take Floyd home, I may as well dress for the occasion. I didn’t want to scare him and dress like a city slicker.

We could do a multi-part series on Minnesota football disasters, and Fry could weave a story about Minnesota from all those games, because Minnesota was so generally incompetent that stuff like this just seemed to keep happening. From Murray Warmath’s retirement in 1971 and continuing through the Tim Brewster regime in 2010 — a period of forty years — Minnesota had one coach with a winning record, and that guy ended up 64-57. They were our black sheep cousin, the neighbor who couldn’t grill a steak without setting the house on fire. It was a delight. When Tim Brewster left, we openly wept.

Last week, I listened to Danny McBride on Conan O’Brien’s podcast. McBride talked about how the trait that is consistent across all of his characters is a complete, all-encompassing self-confidence paired with abject incompetence. That was Minnesota in the aughts, an intoxicating mixture of braggadocio coupled with trip-over-your-shoelace buffoonery.

Jerry Kill got hired after Brewster, and brought a basic, boring competence to Minnesota that had been missing for decades. P.J. Fleck has continued that, expanded on it, made them into something vaguely Illinois-like.

It hasn’t changed much about the on-field results against Iowa. Like the Nebraska series, Iowa has won nine of the last ten against the Gophers, and Kirk Ferentz holds a 19-7 record against them. But those recent wins haven’t been nearly as fun as the old days, where Shonn Greene took more hits from his own receivers than the Gopher defense as Iowa hung 55 on them1, or Iowa fans tore down the goalposts in the Metrodome after completing a perfect Big Ten season2. These days, Iowa beats Minnesota in the same way it beats Nebraska: By dragging them into the deep water and waiting for their arms to get tired.

The great irony in all of this, of course, is that this would be an excellent end-of-year series now. Not only does Fleck provide the Gophers with a basic capacity for playing football that was missing for most of my life, but he’s a twitchy, bald-headed villain, a mini-boss on your way to the more difficult things in the postseason. He complains to officials. He wears all those damn quarter-zips. He’s the perfect avatar for the Minnesota fan that Fry mocked so mercilessly in the 80s, pompous and faux-sophisticated and superior. And he wants to beat Iowa, in the way that all Minnesota fans want to beat Iowa: Badly, and with great aplomb.

This game will be a struggle. It will be a fight. It will be that because Minnesota is no longer likely to shoot its foot off at some point in the third quarter, or show up wholly unprepared for what Iowa will throw at them. It will likely be a good football game between two well-drilled opponents, a battle at the line of scrimmage in the way God intended.

But it won’t be as fun as it used to be, because it’s October, and not Thanksgiving. Because it’s Fleck, and not Glen Mason. Because it’s Ferentz, and not Hayden Fry. There won’t be clod clothes. There won’t be coach tweets. The goalposts come down on their own.

It wasn’t a fair catch.

Defend Floyd.

I generally put a deep discount on the sort of dime-store team psychology seen on the pregame shows. Motivation has a part in any athletic endeavor, to be sure, but the guys who play at the upper echelon of college football have their own motivations. Last week, I heard from a half-dozen Iowa fans concerned that Wisconsin’s offseason push-up regimen was a bad omen for Iowa on par with a sailor seeing a red sky in the morning. Obviously, the push-ups didn’t work, probably because Wisconsin is lacking in talent and this isn’t middle school football.

But there are time where you can pinpoint the second where a team’s heart is ripped in half. It often happens on senior-laden teams where everyone came back for one more shot at a big goal, and the goal can no longer be met. In 2010, Iowa returned the complete core of a team that had just won 11 games and an Orange Bowl. That defense, in particular, was stocked with future NFL players who could have taken the millions of dollars available to them; they chose instead to come back for a shot at a Big Ten title and potential BCS playoff berth. That team slept through the first half of a game at Arizona and eventually lost, but the heartbreak truly came on Bret Bielema’s fake punt five weeks later. The second loss — by one point, at home, to a rival — took Iowa out of contention for the playoffs, the Big Ten title, and anything more than a respectable conference finish and another trip to Tampa or a Tampa-like substance. Wisconsin had already beaten Ohio State, Michigan State was undefeated (at least for one more week1), and Iowa was fourth at best in the event of a tiebreaker.

We spent the rest of the season watching Iowa work through the stages of grief. There was anger against Michigan State, bargaining against Indiana, and depression by the second week of November as Iowa lost its final three regular season games. Acceptance arrived just in time for the bowl trip to Phoenix.

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Every program makes mistakes, Wisconsin included. The Badgers finished second in the nation in 1962 under Coach Milt Bruhn, an assistant who was elevated to the top job in 1956. Bruhn didn’t do much after that season, and resigned four years later. But Wisconsin just really liked hiring former assistants, so they opted for another former coach, John Coatta, over then-Miami head coach Bo Schembechler for the head coaching spot.

Coatta lost 23 straight games at one point. Those who followed him — John Jardine, Dave McClain and Don Morton — failed to resurrect the program; Morton went 6-27 over three seasons, finishing 1-7 in the Big Ten each year. By the end of the 1980s, Wisconsin was generally considered one of the worst jobs in the country for potential coaches.

And that’s when they turned to a former Mason City High head coach currently working for Hayden Fry.

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When Iowa hired Ferentz as its football coach in 1999, he was replacing the legendary Hayden Fry. When Fry had taken over the program in 1978, he was paid $45,000 to coach football. He was making $86,000 in 1985, when he guided the Hawkeyes to a No. 1 poll ranking and his second Rose Bowl appearance, and $133,000 per year on his last contract with the university. When Kirk Ferentz arrived to a starting salary of $1 million, nearly eight times when Fry was earning, eyebrows were raised. After all, if Hayden was drawing his $133,000 per year with annual adjustments for inflation, he’d only be making $263,000 in 2025.

Kirk Ferentz makes more than $9 million per season now, his salary escalating at roughly five times the rate of inflation over the course of his career at Iowa. His top assistants earn well more than the $1 million he started with in 1999. The kicker: After nearly two decades of drawing one of the largest salaries in the game, Ferentz is now making roughly market rate for a coach with his accolades, and his assistant pool is healthy but hardly excessive. This is simply the cost of doing business now in big-time college football.

The Big Ten is reportedly considering a $2 billion investment from private equity firms with an extension of the conference grant of rights deal through 2046. Michigan and Ohio State1 are reportedly against the deal, with everyone else — including Iowa — in favor of taking the money. If distributed evenly, the private equity investment would be roughly $111 million per school, or about five years of projected House settlement payments.

Iowa’s athletic department budget has held steady at approximately $152 million over the last seven years, with Covid as an obvious exception. The $111 million cut of this private equity investment would not even cover a year of revenue. So why would Iowa — and the vast majority of the rest of the conference — so willingly let the fox into the hen house?

For a self-sustaining entity that is operated like a large business, a university athletic department faces an unusual problem. Where any other business tries to turn the largest profit imaginable for its owners, the finances of an athletic department demand it show almost no profit at all. Not only is athletics supposed to be a non-profit entity, but a significant chunk of its revenue comes from donations. Donors are less inclined to give their money to a cause that already has enough, or to direct their donations elsewhere, and so it becomes critical that an athletic department be able to plead poverty.

That became more difficult after the establishment of the Big Ten Network in 2006, and increasingly more difficult as television revenues — both from the NCAA and the Big Ten — exploded. In 2004, Iowa’s athletic department budget was $61 million, including $19 million of ticket sales, $10 million of contributions, and $23 million of television and licensing revenue. By 2022, the budget had grown to $151 million, with television and licensing revenue more than tripling to $77 million.

And yet, Iowa pleaded poverty. It was a standing feature of the summer doldrums for Gary Barta to announce a projected decrease in revenues and corresponding budget cuts. Back in 2017, Iowa was hauling in $137 million in revenue while telling the Des Moines Register and the Board of Regents that it was running at a deficit. Yet even as revenues skyrocketed, donations also more than tripled, to more than $32 million. In the fiscal year before Covid, Iowa collected nearly $40 million in athletics donations, a new high.

Before NIL, Iowa (and every other department) was awash with cash and needed to put it somewhere. While scholarship costs have increased with tuition hikes, they still make up a small percentage of overall expenses. Coaching salaries across the department ballooned, tripling from 2004 to 2022 and topping out at more than $53 million.

But in a world where players could not be directly paid and the NCAA limited permissible benefits, Iowa and others turned to the most stable, lucrative investment available: real estate. Facilities costs went from $7 million a year in 2004 to nearly $34 million in 2022. Athletics issued a string of bonds to fund facilities construction and upgrades. As of the beginning of this year, Iowa owed $235 million in debt, including $155.6 million in bond issues related to improvements to Kinnick Stadium and Carver Hawkeye, $21.3 million on other real estate improvement loans, and $10.3 million in on facility leases, according to a report in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Those bonds generate stable, consistent cash flows out, which can be easily budgeted and offset against revenues. With revenues — and some expenses — steadily rising, the facility upgrades permitted Iowa to “surround” its student-athletes with the money they weren’t allowed to pay them, all while improving the value of the department’s assets and allowing the department to plead poverty.

The pandemic was the first red flag. Revenues dropped by $71 million overnight. Ticket sales went from $25.7 million in 2019 to less than $200,000 in 2020. Contributions were down $25 million, as well, and the lack of an NCAA Tournament and televised football through September caused a $13.6 decrease in rights and licensing fees. But there’s a funny thing about debt: The payment requirements don’t stop just because you can’t sell tickets2. In response, Iowa took out a $50 million loan from the University and cut four sports. And then, because it was Gary Barta at the wheel, they got sued and had to reinstate one of the sports that had been eliminated, and add another sport — women’s wrestling — as part of the settlement. Four years later, Iowa Athletics still owed $47.6 million on that $50 million loan, and is incurring nearly $1 million per year in interest.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, the NCAA — mostly by order of the federal court system, but occasionally in a bow to public sentiment — let go of the reins on player payments. First came NIL, which didn’t come directly from the budget but had something close to a zero-sum effect on department donations. As NIL needs have increased, particularly in football and men’s basketball, but for Iowa also wrestling and women’s hoops, those outside donations have naturally depressed department revenue.

But if NIL was a dent in the budget, the House settlement represents a gaping hole. The settlement requires 22 percent of all department revenues to be contributed to revenue sharing with athletes, with a cap at $20.5 million. And so an athletics budget where fixed expenses, in the form of contracted salaries and debt service payments, had already consumed all revenue by design, now has to find an additional $20.5 million every year, just to stay competitive. In a world where the Big Ten has only recently renegotiated its television rights, the donor class has been stretched to its limits by NIL, and the number of seats are fixed, there isn’t an easy mechanism to find that revenue.

And so Beth Goetz — and nearly all other Big Ten athletic directors, if the reporting is correct — looks at this economic minefield and sees five years worth of House payments, a five-year reprieve while they get the debt service in order, pay the university back on a politically-touchy loan, adjust coach and assistant pay, and find themselves the $20+ million per year of budget space that currently doesn’t exist to continue making those player payments in 2030 and beyond. You would forgive her for seeing it as an easy solution to a complex problem.

The public response to the Big Ten proposal has been almost universally negative. Obviously, private equity investment comes with negative connotations, much of it well deserved. But if this goes forward, it’s largely the comeuppance for intentional spendthriftiness in the twenty years before she took the job on things like $45 million practice facilities and $9 million coaches. Remember that when the ANF sticker is replaced with an ad.

Kirk Ferentz’s first college coaching job was as a graduate assistant at Pitt, working for offensive line coach Joe Moore in 1980. Ferentz often credits Moore1 for his theory of offensive line play, and there’s a reason why the award given out to the nation’s best offensive line is named after him. Cignetti, having finished his playing career at West Virginia, took the same job as a grad assistant at Pitt in 1983. He spent his first two years in coaching with now-Pitt offensive coordinator Joe Moore.

Where Ferentz became an offensive line guy, Cignetti moved into quarterback coaching. He bounced around the lower end of college football through the 1980s, then spent most of the 1990s back at Pitt. Where Ferentz got his doctorate in football in a three-year stint with Bill Belichick, Cignetti cut his teeth with Belichick’s most famous disciple, coaching quarterbacks for Nick Saban at Alabama.

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Two losses in the season’s first full month was a far more frequent occurrence. Iowa dropped at least two September games in six of Ferentz’s first ten seasons at the helm. It wasn’t always a harbinger of doom, either: Ferentz’s last title season, 2004, started with September losses to Arizona State and Michigan.

It is worth pointing out, however, that (1) no Iowa team has won ten games with two losses before October 1 since that 2004 team, and (2) All of Ferentz’s bowl-less seasons at Iowa — 1999, 2000, 2007, 2012 — have come in two-loss September scenarios. Since that 2012 season, Iowa has suffered two losses in September just once, in 2017, a season which started with losses to Penn State and Michigan State and resulted in a perfectly forgettable2 8-5 record.

At this point, a perfectly forgettable 8-5 might be welcomed. As has been repeatedly cited, Iowa hasn’t won a game against a ranked opponent in almost four years, and September is not over after Friday night’s game at Rutgers. Next week brings No. 19 Indiana, fresh off a playoff appearance and one home win over Illinois away from contention for another. If the track record of Ferentz seasons with two September losses isn’t great, you don’t want to see the record in seasons with three (combined record: 9-15, zero winning records, zero bowl trips). If history is any guide, Friday night’s game at Rutgers could well be a must-win if Iowa intends to get anything meaningful out of the 2025 campaign.

And so the Hawkeyes have gone to the Garden State to face the infinite abyss.

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Frankly, it’s the best song ever made about a member of the Mid-American Conference. It’s the best song ever made about an associate member of the Atlantic 10. It’s high in the running for best song about a place that John Calipari coached at, only because Calipari later coached at Memphis, and there’s a lot of really good songs about Memphis.

U-Mass is off of the Pixies’ fourth and final record1, Trompe le Monde. The early records — Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, in particular — were highly influential on everything that came after it. If you were a teenager in the early 1990s, The Pixies were your favorite band’s favorite band. They were the first ones to do the “quiet lyrics, loud chorus, quiet lyrics” thing consistently, a formula borrowed by Kurt Cobain for “Smells Like Teen Spirit". Cobain admitted it in a January 1994 interview, famously saying he “should have been in a Pixies cover band.”2 Their use of surf rock channeled through punk distortion led directly to Weezer, back when Weezer was making interesting records. Bono once said they were making the most compelling music of the entire 1980s, and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said they changed his life.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing who The Pixies are, or not having a copy of Doolittle sitting high in your Spotify list. The Pixies were five years ahead of their time; their first record was released in 1986, and Trompe le Monde came out in September 1991, one day before Nevermind. None of their records rose any higher than 70th in the U.S. charts. Surfer Rosa finally went gold in 2005, seventeen years after its release. Doolittle didn’t go platinum until 2018. Probably the most recognizable song to come out of the group wasn’t even theirs: Bass player and infrequent lead singer Kim Deal started The Breeders in 1992 and released their first record in 1993. You know “Cannonball.”

Deal’s ability to write a song like “Cannonball” was part of the issue. Most of The Pixies’ songs were written by the lead singer, Black Francis, a/k/a Frank Black. Honestly, most of his lyrics were absolutely deranged by the standards of 1988. Francis didn’t write love songs, or typical punk politics. Instead, his music largely focused on religion, horror movie tropes, and space. These were not the things that would make you a pop star in 1988, but had a place in popular music a decade later. By then, Francis had informed the other members of the band that they had broken up via fax.

What is left is that back catalog, now appreciated in ways it was not when it was first released, and the adoration of punk rockers and music dorks across the world. Someone once said that The Velvet Underground and Nico only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it started a band. The Pixies were that for the following generation. I don’t know anyone who says they were the best at what they did, but they were the first to do something that everyone else was forced to follow. They created the thing that became everyone else’s template.

Nobody is ever going to confuse Kirk Ferentz for Black Francis. It would not be surprising if Ferentz has never seen a horror movie in his life, and his contemplations of space are generally limited to how a right tackle needs to move in order to set the edge on a stretch play to the boundary.

Nobody is going to say that Kirk Ferentz is the greatest coach in the history of the Big Ten, either, even when he breaks Woody Hayes’ record for most wins as a Big Ten coach on Saturday. Hayes got to his 205 wins in 28 years, one more than Ferentz has taken, but in a time where nine-game seasons were the norm. Iowa would have to win its next 193 games for Ferentz to reach Hayes’ 76.1% winning percentage, and an even more absurd 209 straight Big Ten wins to match Hayes’ in-conference win rate. Hayes won thirteen Big Ten titles, the last one just one year prior to his firing; Ferentz has won two, and none in the last 21 seasons.

It makes the talk of this Big Ten wins record seem sort of silly, when you look at it in that context. Ferentz’s success has been in duplicating modest success enough times in a row to stay on with the same program for 27 years, in a profession where the average life span is slightly longer than three seasons. That is its own kind of achievement, in a way, but not in the way that we usually consider and rank coaches. This is why most lists of the best coaches in college football have him ranked somewhere between 15th and Also Receiving Votes.

But Ferentz was also ahead of his time. Nobody was running the Alex Gibbs/Mike Shanahan outside zone at the college level when he arrived in 1999. Bill Walsh had attempted to implement the West Coast Offense at Stanford in 1992 and was drummed out after three seasons. Walsh had developed that system with the help of two of the most capable quarterbacks of all time, and Shanahan had perfected it with perhaps the most talented signalcaller ever. Ferentz used it to turn Kyle McCann into a gunslinger and Brad Banks into a Heisman finalist. It was revolutionary stuff.

And then it was co-opted, and improved, and incorporated into other systems. Zone blocking was cross-bred with the Northwestern spread to get to Chip Kelly Oregon, with the Run and Shoot to get to Rich Rodriguez West Virginia. The game evolved, as it always does, and Kirk Ferentz has responded to progress at every turn with a breakup memo via fax. He’s been around so long, running the same system, doing the same things, that it became new again. Only this time, he’s not a 43 year old just out of the incubator of the NFL, but a septuagenarian who has been shielded from innovation for almost three decades. He doesn’t have the experience to teach the new version of the Shanahan offense at an NFL level, or anything beyond the rudimentary original concepts from thirty years prior. But still he teaches nonetheless. We’re watching him make the nostalgia records for the die-hards, but those first records were revolutionary.

When Kirk Ferentz finally stops coaching, the Big Ten wins record may well make its way into the first line of his career obituary. It’s a big, flashy achievement, regardless of how he got there. But this record isn’t the reason that Kirk Ferentz will be remembered in football circles. Kirk Ferentz will be remembered as your favorite offensive line guy’s favorite offensive line guy, the man whose system launched two decades of progress in college football. Forget the plaudits. Let’s talk about Doolittle.