Iowa is proof of the power of coaching continuity
Hayden Fry still has a West Texas twang thicker than the crude oil they pump out of the Permian Basin, where he grew up. But for 20 years, Iowa was his preferred place to coach football.
Kirk Ferentz spent most of his formative years in western Pennsylvania and the Northeast. But he’s lived and worked in Iowa for 24 of the past 34 years, including the past 16 as head coach of the Hawkeyes.
The two men who came from outside the state have combined to give Iowa incredible continuity for more than 35 years. Since 1979, Iowa football has had two head coaches. The only other FBS school that has had that few in that time period is Florida State, which had Bobby Bowden and now Jimbo Fisher. (Virginia Tech had two, Bill Dooley and Frank Beamer, but Beamer has retired and was replaced this week by Justin Fuente.)
Fry was the coach of the Hawkeyes from 1979-98. Three times, he turned down NFL offers to stay there. He is the winningest coach in school history with 143 victories.
Ferentz, a former Fry assistant, has been the coach since 1999. He, too, has turned down multiple overtures to leave. Saturday, he will lead Iowa’s first 12-0 team into the Big Ten Conference championship game against Michigan State, with a College Football Playoff bid at stake.
Between the two coaches, Iowa has become the least likely Destination Job in the sport.
If you polled 100 football coaches and asked them to list their dream jobs, Iowa likely wouldn’t be in the top 25. Might not be in the top 40.
It does not sit on fertile recruiting soil – Rivals.com lists no one from the state in its Class of 2016 top 200, and no one in its Class of 2017 top 190. It does not have the tradition of Big Ten rivals Michigan and Ohio State – Iowa lays dubious claim to one national title, in 1958, bestowed by the Football Writers Association of America, not the wire services. It does not offer great weather – the 86-year-old Fry, who now resides in southern Nevada, said, “My rump hasn’t thawed out yet” from the Iowa City winters.
Despite all that, Iowa became a destination job for two of the better coaches of the past 35 years – neither of whom had any natural ties to the state before working there.
The question is, how?
Start with a fan mindset that is coach-friendly. Iowa fans want to be good, but by and large they’re reasonable. They’re not demanding national championships. This is not Alabama. They’re not of a mind to run off a coach after a lean year or two.
Fry arrived in 1979. Iowa’s last winning season had been 1960. That set the expectation bar fairly low.
“I loved the people there,” he said. “The environment, everything was just super. The people were so appreciative.
“The first game we came out with nobody in the backfield but the quarterback, and they gave us a standing ovation. Every first down, they gave us a standing ovation. I started to wonder what they’d do if we scored a touchdown.”
That might be a recycled banquet-circuit joke, but there is some truth to it. Iowa sat still while the school’s 18-year streak of losing seasons extended to 20 before Fry broke through. He paid back the school’s patience with three Rose Bowl bids between 1981-90.
Fry coached his last year at the school in 1998 while secretly undergoing chemotherapy for prostate cancer. He said he would slip into a back elevator before dawn at the hospital for treatment to avoid the word getting out. Those who worked at the hospital kept his secret.
Iowa went 3-8 in his final year. Ferentz followed with seasons of 1-10 and 3-9, marking the longest succession of losing seasons since the dark days of the 1970s. But yet again, the school stood behind him and has been rewarded.
Both Fry and Ferentz worked for supportive administrators, who themselves put down roots in Iowa City. The athletic director who hired Fry, Bump Elliott, was a former coach at Michigan who understood the business, the Big Ten and Iowa’s historic place in it.
“I could trust him,” Fry said.
Elliott was the AD at Iowa for 21 years. He was succeeded by Bob Bowlsby, who hired Ferentz and stayed for 16 years. Since then the AD has been Gary Barta, now nearing 10 years on the job.
Fry was a cheap hire – his starting salary in his first head-coaching job, at SMU, was $13,000. After winning the Southwest Conference and being given the AD job as well, he got a raise to $15,000. So, after a stint at North Texas followed SMU, a starting salary of $40,000 seemed pretty lavish to Fry.
“For an old farm boy, it was enough,” he said.
Fry did politic for an indoor facility to be built in the 1980s. The argument was compelling: If we’re finally going to Rose Bowls, can we at least avoid practicing in snow and ice to get ready?
“I threatened to leave if they didn’t build an indoor,” Fry said. “They finally did.”
Ferentz has been compensated to a degree Fry couldn’t imagine during his coaching days. In 2006, at what might have been the height of his NFL marketability, he received a new contract making him the highest-paid coach in the Big Ten at $2.7 million a year. Three years later, Barta gave him a deal for even more money (north of $3.5 million a year) that runs until 2020.
Well paid and very popular with the fans, Ferentz had the added bonus of coaching his three sons at Iowa. The oldest, Brian, is now on the coaching staff. The youngest, Steven, is now on the playing roster.
“Kirk sees himself as a perfect fit for Iowa,” Big Ten Network analyst and former Indiana coach Gerry DiNardo said. “All his children growing up in Iowa City, all his boys playing for him – how many people get to do that?
“Ninety-nine percent of coaches are built to be upwardly mobile. Kirk Ferentz wants to be the head coach at Iowa, and I don’t think anything else interests him. And that’s unusual.”
Now 60 years old and doing arguably his best work, Kirk Ferentz almost certainly is Coach for Life at Iowa. He might coach as long as Fry, who went until he was 69 in Iowa City.
Both men had the good sense to stay in a comfortable place, and the school had the good sense to make them comfortable. That’s how Iowa became America’s least-likely Destination Job.
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