Iowa vs. Wisconsin Takes: The Root of the Offensive Problem Begins With A Ferentz

One of the neat things about college football is the fact that there's total roster turnover every five years (at least in most cases). When a coach is present for at least five years and a trend is persistent across virtually every season, that suggests that the trend originates with the coaching staff and not the players within said coaching staff's system.

Iowa hasn't been an offensive juggernaut in, well, forever. In fact, they haven't even been average on that side of the ball for a vast majority of the past 2 decades. The singular constant that entire time has been the head coach, Kirk Ferentz. Iowa is known as a "dominant running team", and that has been the case in the past. In the past five years (since a 2016 offensive line that won the Joe Moore Award as the best offensive line in the country), however, Iowa's running game has been fairly average. In fact, since 2017 Iowa has averaged about 3.88 yards per carry. That average would generally rank in about the 80-90s range nationally. There are just over 120 FBS teams. Statistically, the "strength" of Iowa's offense is in the bottom-third of the country in terms of efficiency.

Couple that with a passing game that is somehow extremely intricate (according to the coaching staff) and incredibly ineffective, and the Iowa offense consistently has the makings of one of the worst offenses in the Power 5 conferences. The argument we hear from the head coach is that they play a certain way on offense to set up their defense to succeed. I think it's fair to question how much a defense is helped by an offense that struggles to put up 20 points against any defense with a pulse.

Since 2018, Kirk's son Brian has been the offensive coordinator. To put it bluntly, Iowa has had about 3 good offensive games in big moments in the four seasons that Brian has been the OC. 2017 Ohio State, the 2019 Holiday Bowl, and maybe the 2017 Iowa State game. Much more numerous are the absolute clunkers (today's game certainly included). One could point to a few select plays over the years where the Iowa players didn't execute well enough on a good call that led to Iowa dropping a game they needed to win. One could point to individual calls in a defensive battle that swung the game completely to a win (see: the Nico Ragaini touchdown vs. Penn State earlier this year). I would contend that if you play in a way that puts infinite pressure on a microscopic portion of plays each year to win games, you should be able to coach your players to perform at their absolute peak in those moments.

Brian's best excuse (and it may be legitimate) is that his offense doesn't look much different than most previous iterations of Iowa offenses. His play-calling is abysmal at times (today's consecutive fullback dives into an 11-man front were abominable), but one has to wonder how much he really has to work with. Kirk is notoriously rigid in his approach to the game (for better and for worse), so it's not outlandish to consider that Brian is simply placed in a tough spot.

I think the buck ultimately stops with Kirk. He's the head coach, and this is a two-decade body of work. If he doesn't have the fortitude to carry out major changes (whether through firing his son or allowing major changes in offensive scheme), he deserves the brunt of the blame.

If I were trying to solve everything with the assumption that Kirk still plans to be at Iowa for the next few years, I would "encourage" Brian to take a job at another school at a lower level than the Big Ten for the time being. Let him show his expertise with less pressure focused on him to rehabilitate his own image, and Iowa can try to revamp their offense with some new blood (though I question whether much would actually change). I don't think this will happen, but I think it should.

On one final note, I just don't buy the argument that Iowa can't recruit the talent to run an offense that resembles the rest of football in the 21st century. The profile of the Iowa program is not what it was when Kirk took over. Purdue routinely gets better offensive recruits despite being an inferior program in almost every respect except for when they actually play Iowa (ugh). The difference between the schools is scheme, not ability to recruit.

There aren't any excuses after the colossal failure of these past two games. Sure, Iowa probably isn't a national championship-caliber team, but this team had all the momentum to at least make a run to Indianapolis and the Big Ten Championship. That's the stated goal of the program, and the staff's stubbornness is putting obstacles in the program's path to accomplishing that right now.