Sports’ Most Absurd Nepotism Charade Has Ended

The most farcical story in college sports has, for a few years now, been unfolding on the football coaching staff at the University of Iowa. The head coach, one of the best in the country, is Kirk Ferentz. Under Ferentz, Iowa has the best defense in college football, led by stalwart coordinator Phil Parker. And it has the most consistently great special teams in the sport, too, under the leadership of another dependable coordinator, LeVar Woods. And yet Iowa has been just OK (though sometimes better than that) because it has the most painfully bad offense in the sport to pair with its two elite units. The offense has been bad for a lot of reasons, including that Kirk Ferentz has less than zero interest in modernizing it to look like what other teams now field. But the lowest-hanging fruit has been a staffing issue: The guy running the offense, to disastrous results for half a decade, has been Ferentz’s own offspring, Brian.

By results, Brian Ferentz has been the worst offensive coordinator in college football, but he’s retained a job making nearly $1 million a year to lead an offense at a Big Ten program for his dad. Exasperated Iowa fans have called for, even chanted for, his firing for years. Media members have made the whole story into a joke, treating Iowa—which is elite in two of the game’s three phases—as a circus, because the team’s nepo-baby offensive coordinator has floundered for so long.

Iowa announced on Monday that it will pull the plug on this charade at season’s end. Brian Ferentz will cease to be Iowa’s offensive coordinator after the team’s bowl game, and the program can at least gesture in the direction of putting a competent offense on the field to supplement its world-beaters on the other sides of the ball. Fans will have something new to chant about, reporters will have something new to write stories about, and Iowa will at least have a puncher’s chance to produce a better offense. But the Ferentzes should stand up forever as an example of how powerful coaches can often do whatever they want if administrators enable them, and how athletic programs can become self-dealing platforms, and how one program can create such gore and beauty at the same time.

The saga of Brian Ferentz, Iowa offensive coordinator, has been a little silly from the start. When he joined up in 2012, Brian told reporters that Kirk Ferentz had recruited him to Iowa’s staff, first as offensive line coach. “You can’t say no to your father,” Brian told reporters. But a father hiring and managing a son would violate school nepotism rules, and Iowa’s former athletic director, Gary Barta, said that it was he who had hired Brian. The athletic director remained Brian’s nominal supervisor, creating a dynamic in which—if Iowa wasn’t just playing a sick joke on its fans—the head coach would not have oversight of the person responsible for his team’s offense. This structure has remained in place, at least on paper, and nobody with power at the University of Iowa has chosen to reckon with its ridiculousness until now. It turns out Iowa’s athletic director can remove a direct report from the football staff. Barta never did, and he retired over the summer. But his successor, Beth Goetz, made the announcement that Brian won’t return.

It is unclear how cool Kirk Ferentz is with this outcome, though it’s not supposed to be up to him. Ferentz has not tried to hide his contempt in the past when reporters have challenged him about why his child has been allowed to remain in the job while being so ineffective. He referred to one line of questioning about it last year as an “interrogation” and later apologized. He likely got help in managing that apology from his own retained public relations firm, which he reportedly maintains outside of Iowa’s sports information office. The needs of Kirk Ferentz and the needs of Iowa football do not always align, apparently.

To be fair, the head man has some reason to think he knows best. He’s an excellent football coach. Two of the three coordinators who work for him are arguably the literal best in the world at what they do. When he elevated Brian to offensive coordinator in 2017, his son had been a successful offensive line coach who had helped develop multiple NFL players. And Ferentz does not fire coordinators as a matter of practice. In a certain light, letting his son continue to languish was just the head coach doing what he does. This season’s dreadful results—132 out of 133 teams in yards per play, 120^th in scoring—aren’t even all Brian’s fault. Iowa has a laundry list of injuries, including to two star tight ends and the transfer quarterback they’d hoped would elevate them after a few lean years at the position.

Which is why it was so critical that Iowa have a professional administrator, one who behaves seriously in her job, who could make this decision. Barta was an exceptionally messy athletic director who, in addition to providing cover for Brian Ferentz’s cushy job, had a penchant for facing athletic department lawsuits. (One of the last big controversies of Barta’s tenure, before he retired over the summer, came when the state auditor called for his resignation after the university and state settled a racial discrimination suit around the football program. Kirk Ferentz vehemently objected to that settlement.) Barta retired without first mandating that the football team find a new offensive coordinator.

But he left an even smellier turd on the doorstep for his successor, Goetz. Not only did Barta not fire Brian Ferentz, who was nominally his direct report. He imposed a comical contract structure, which quickly became national news, in which Brian’s contract would lapse after the 2023 season unless the Hawkeyes score 25 points per game. (He also cut the coordinator’s pay to a mere $850,000, down from $900,000.) Media and fans have taken to calling it the “Drive for 325,” for 25 points multiplied by 13 games. The team will not even come close to reaching that threshold. The 25-point marker has become a veritable sideshow to Iowa’s season, again inviting the world to treat the offense like a joke while the defense and special teams ball out and keep Iowa in the New Year’s bowl race with a 6–2 record. And so, it was left to Goetz, who is still technically an interim athletic director, to set the fanbase at ease in her first months on the job by firing the son of a powerful head coach who’s been on the job for 25 years. It was a ridiculous task for an AD who just started, but Goetz did what had to be done.

The weird undergirding of all of this is that, for as much of a mess as Iowa’s handling of Brian Ferentz has been, the football program itself is doing fine. They still pack Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City. They will win lots of games because of their All-American–laden defense and special teams. (This year’s best player is both a cornerback and a punt returner, Cooper DeJean, who could be All-American at either position.) A brutal, replay review–aided loss to Minnesota two weeks ago dashed a very slim and somewhat comical hope at playing in the College Football Playoff, but Iowa could still win 10 games and participate in the Big Ten Championship. They’ll get eaten in that game by Ohio State or Michigan, but making it still matters. That’s what has made the crisis around the offense so acute; Iowa’s failure to move the ball has not been the difference between a six-win team and a seven-win team, but between a nine-win team and an actual national contender. In 2024, the Hawkeyes can shore up their weakness a little bit.

Goetz may have felt she didn’t have a choice but to act now. The fervor around the offense was so pitched that, if it hadn’t already, it could’ve become a fundraising impediment. Next year, the Big Ten will add four good programs from the West Coast, and its current divisional structure will cease to exist. That will deny Iowa the chance to feast on an easy schedule every year while avoiding most of the league’s real heavyweights, all of whom now play in the conference’s other division. Building the best program in the Big Ten West was only a bit of a feat, but it was a feat nonetheless, and Iowa could accomplish it while running out an offense that served mainly as a job program for the head coach’s son. That option will be off the menu next year. Either Kirk Ferentz will start taking offense as seriously as he takes defense, or Iowa will start losing.