In any other P5 program…

BigD said:
Sorry if I have been testy to you and any other posters. In fact some are probably wondering what’s gotten into me. Frustrating that it seems like there is always a short coming in some aspect of our game that just keeps us short of winning the division.

It’s true that our division doesn’t have an Ohio State in it. Considering that it is only fair that we do better than what we have been doing. If we were in the East with Ohio State, Michigan, MSU, and Penn State then that would be a little bit more understandable.

Wisconsin, Northwestern, Purdue, has been Nebraska.

Come on now? We should be able to win the division more than what we have been doing. That’s what gets me so upset.

I know we are not Ohio State but neither is Wisconsin.
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Ha, you're fine - it's the internet, you haven't even begun moving the needle!

As far as Wisconsin goes, I have more excuses for you there... ;)

From a program history standpoint, we are actually quite comparable with them.

But...

They've got roughly double the population of Iowa and, furthermore, they are essentially the OSU of their state. For top in state talent, it's UW or nothing. There aren't even any FCS programs in the state.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, we're splitting half Wisconsin's the population with another P5 program (and one of the most consistently successful FCS scholarship programs in the country). Both Iowa and Wisconsin have to rely on out of state talent to build a program, but Wisconsin has a massive leg up on us as far as what kind of foundation they can lay with in state kids.

Also, the elephant in the room...Iowa City is a great little college town and kids should be so lucky to get to spend 4-5 years of their life there...but Madison puts it to shame. It's everything Iowa City is but taken to the next level. I'm sorry, but it's true. Personally, I take Iowa City 10 times out of 10, but that is pure, unadulterated sentimentality. If I'm an out of state kid with no particular attachment, chances are Madison wins out over Iowa City more times than not.

Wisconsin is a great aspirational stretch goal, but they've got some factors that make things easier for them. They've also, unfortunately, had a really great stretch of coaches just about as long as Iowa's Fry/Ferentz run. You can say much the same things about Minnesota as you say about Wisconsin, but Minnesota has had - mostly - lousy coaching.
 
Luftgekuehlt67 said:
I don't mean to pick on you personally but, again, the gap between reality and the Iowa football program living in some of your heads might as well be the Grand Canyon.

Iowa has a proud history, but it's a story of a plucky program that occasionally punches above its weight. Save for a brief 3-4 season span under Evy in the late 50s, early 60s, this program has never been "elite".

There's nothing wrong with being proud of your team, but some of you inflate this program's stature to the point of delusion.

Some data to consider:

www.winsipedia.com

Winsipedia - Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Georgia Bulldogs football series history

Winsipedia - Database and infographics of Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Georgia Bulldogs football series history and all-time records, national championships, conference championships, bowl games, wins, bowl record, All-Americans, Heisman winners, and NFL Draft picks
www.winsipedia.com www.winsipedia.com

www.winsipedia.com

Winsipedia - Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Oklahoma Sooners football series history

Winsipedia - Database and infographics of Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Oklahoma Sooners football series history and all-time records, national championships, conference championships, bowl games, wins, bowl record, All-Americans, Heisman winners, and NFL Draft picks
www.winsipedia.com www.winsipedia.com

www.winsipedia.com

Winsipedia - Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Clemson Tigers football series history

Winsipedia - Database and infographics of Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Clemson Tigers football series history and all-time records, national championships, conference championships, bowl games, wins, bowl record, All-Americans, Heisman winners, and NFL Draft picks
www.winsipedia.com www.winsipedia.com

And, by the way, speaking of delusion, Iowa claiming FIVE national championships is an absolute joke.

Don't think for a second Iowa is the type of program that can just start flinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. We have a 120+ season history of needing to do things the hard way. If you tuned into 2021 expecting different, I'm sorry but that's on you.

The last 2 games have been bitter pills to swallow, but if you think, in the big picture, dropping those two games was somehow beneath us as a program, you're nuts.
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I have never heard or read of Iowa claiming 5 natty titles, where did you get that info?
 
Fryowa said:
It’s pretty damn poor. But people who think firing a staff mid season (or at all) is productive have no sports knowledge whatsoever.
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Nobody should be fired, but responsibilities could be shifted. Under the guise of "needing to get the offensive line fixed" you could put Brian as the line coach as a temp. fix and have O'Keefe take over as OC for the rest of the season. It would save face and Brian would have the pressure taken off him. This will never happen. What's the old saying? People rise to the level of their incompetence.
 
uihawk82 said:
I have never heard or read of Iowa claiming 5 natty titles, where did you get that info?
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From the Wiki page. Apparently they list all 5 in the media guide:

"Iowa has been selected national champion by NCAA-designated major selectors in 1921, 1922, 1956, 1958, and 1960.  Iowa claims all five championships. However, the NCAA only recognizes the 1958 co-championship season shared with LSU."
 
Ben Rumson said:
I'm not for firing anyone. This is expected for most of seasoned fans. The system is basic x and O's KF has always been a we're going to do what we do and it's up to the other team to beat us and it happens 4-5 times a year to mediocre teams. Iowa football is the Christmas carol. Ghost of future, present and past. It is what it is. Anybody wanting shit loads of changes better pick a new team. When we are winning Kirk is great. When we're losing Kirk sucks.Got news for you fellas one team wins and one will lose. Don't believe look at the scores of the other games today!
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Most of us are looking at more than one or two scores or losses each year. It’s a pattern of poor offensive performance that keeps Iowa near the bottom of national offensive stats year after year and that with a couple exceptions keeps Iowa from competing for a conference title, much less a division championship.

Hayden Fry always said defense wins championships. But defense can’t do it alone. You need the players and schemes to score more points than the other guy. Iowa, unfortunately, doesn’t have that right now, and hasn’t for a while.
 
This is stark coaching negligence by KF. We’ve known for years he can’t manage beyond slightly-better-than-average. Iowa will never be elite under him. And when the pollsters elevate us, KF will embarrass the state. He hasn’t the football intellect to be elite – nor his genetically predisposed offspring. Negligence in not having his team ready mentally or physically for Purdue and Wisconsin, to have been dominated, and absolutely out-coached on basic strategy, not just the X’s and O’s.

“Hey, guys, just go out this by-week and don’t think about football … force yourself to think about anything but football. … don’t stay honed as if defending a top 10 national ranking. … actually, my football acumen has peaked and I can’t deal with you; Brian feels inconvenienced as well … yes, we’ve had clever plays earlier this season, but we’re not inherently a risky people, Bri and I. And, me loves me some of that good ol’ Kelly-Martin magic – he fumbles, but he means well.”

Goodson’s potential has peaked; he drank the Kool-Aid and became fogged by his sense of greatness – no more sense of adventure. Time to tap one of the newbies with more upside potential for next year. Petras – the latest version of the ‘anointed one’ – stopped developing a year ago. His bi-polar mind is too manic to temper a rifled pass or decipher a pass route. Iowa nation was afraid of the Wisky hype, and KF allowed it to infect the team – he didn’t know how to manage it. Take the gum away, and the pad and pencil, and the emotion and just recruit a QB – from the transfer portal, a junior college, Australia, or our 3rd stringer. KF was 1.5 games too late deciding on Padilla. That’s unacceptable negligence given his salary.
 
uihawk82 said:
Kirk and his wife have enough money so that 3 generations of his family never have to work so let's not worry if Brian loses his job.
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You know how many times I have thought about that coming from a humble working class family.

My wife is a registered nurse and puts her self and our family at risk every time she goes to work at a large hospital. Not just Covid but other conditions that can be transferred to her and then the rest of our family. For example TB is spreading and is very contagious and dangerous if not immediately treated.

Now the $70K a year is a respectable income. How many nurses salaries does it take to match KF’s salary? 71. 71 nurses putting there lives on the line in hospitals al around the United States just to make one years salary of Kirk or seven nurses a year to match Brian’s salary. My wife caught Covid, then brought it home and passed it on to my special needs son ( I am personally touch by what happens at the end of the first quarter at home games) then from my son I got it. Damn near but it. Lost 30 pounds from not eating. Couldn’t taste, couldn’t smell, had no desire to eat at all. Would have had an easy ride to the sky to see Hayden, but wife kept waking me up and forced me to eat when I had no desire. Got to the point with a lapsing lung that we finally drove over to the ER. Stopped in front of the ER doors and looked at them. Nope! If I am going out of this world I am going out on my terms. Home with my family. Got a ton of anti biotics and suffered through it.

Had to tell my story to illustrate what the working class goes through and especially those in our society who literally put their life’s on the line, fireman, paramedics, law enforcement, school teachers, etc.

So it I get my feathers a little ruffled at someone who makes millions of dollars a year and expect a little more out of them…….so be it!

KF? What are we looking at here? A minimum of 80 to 120 million dollars that the University of Iowa. Not only will his children be millionaires all of his grandchildren will be too.

Then I read comments about how he has earned the right to stay as long as he wants. My wife and I both work in professions where we protect and save lives and what do we have to show for it? No one is guaranteeing us anything. Yet if we screw up everything we have worked for during our thirty years of marriage could be taken from us.

I think I’ve earned the right to be a little critical of some millionaire who appears to gotten comfortable and lax at their profession.
 
KF has to do nothing, he has the most important people on his side. Those big time donors love them some KF. Us rif raf arguing on message boards is their entertainment.

We have no say. We will see no changes. We will continue to argue about if 8-5 every year is consistency or apathy.
 
dahlhawk said:
Nobody should be fired, but responsibilities could be shifted. Under the guise of "needing to get the offensive line fixed" you could put Brian as the line coach as a temp. fix and have O'Keefe take over as OC for the rest of the season. It would save face and Brian would have the pressure taken off him. This will never happen. What's the old saying? People rise to the level of their incompetence.
Click to expand...
This is the most reasonable short term path to potential improvement I have seen lately. Would love to see how it would work.
 
IowaPhan said:
This is stark coaching negligence by KF. We’ve known for years he can’t manage beyond slightly-better-than-average. Iowa will never be elite under him. And when the pollsters elevate us, KF will embarrass the state. He hasn’t the football intellect to be elite – nor his genetically predisposed offspring. Negligence in not having his team ready mentally or physically for Purdue and Wisconsin, to have been dominated, and absolutely out-coached on basic strategy, not just the X’s and O’s.

“Hey, guys, just go out this by-week and don’t think about football … force yourself to think about anything but football. … don’t stay honed as if defending a top 10 national ranking. … actually, my football acumen has peaked and I can’t deal with you; Brian feels inconvenienced as well … yes, we’ve had clever plays earlier this season, but we’re not inherently a risky people, Bri and I. And, me loves me some of that good ol’ Kelly-Martin magic – he fumbles, but he means well.”

Goodson’s potential has peaked; he drank the Kool-Aid and became fogged by his sense of greatness – no more sense of adventure. Time to tap one of the newbies with more upside potential for next year. Petras – the latest version of the ‘anointed one’ – stopped developing a year ago. His bi-polar mind is too manic to temper a rifled pass or decipher a pass route. Iowa nation was afraid of the Wisky hype, and KF allowed it to infect the team – he didn’t know how to manage it. Take the gum away, and the pad and pencil, and the emotion and just recruit a QB – from the transfer portal, a junior college, Australia, or our 3rd stringer. KF was 1.5 games too late deciding on Padilla. That’s unacceptable negligence given his salary.
Click to expand...
Trolls hide under bridges and grab and eat little children. I worry about them about as much as I worry about your attempts to be controversial. Go hide under a bridge. Thanks.
 
BigD said:
You know how many times I have thought about that coming from a humble working class family.

My wife is a registered nurse and puts her self and our family at risk every time she goes to work at a large hospital. Not just Covid but other conditions that can be transferred to her and then the rest of our family. For example TB is spreading and is very contagious and dangerous if not immediately treated.

Now the $70K a year is a respectable income. How many nurses salaries does it take to match KF’s salary? 71. 71 nurses putting there lives on the line in hospitals al around the United States just to make one years salary of Kirk or seven nurses a year to match Brian’s salary. My wife caught Covid, then brought it home and passed it on to my special needs son ( I am personally touch by what happens at the end of the first quarter at home games) then from my son I got it. Damn near but it. Lost 30 pounds from not eating. Couldn’t taste, couldn’t smell, had no desire to eat at all. Would have had an easy ride to the sky to see Hayden, but wife kept waking me up and forced me to eat when I had no desire. Got to the point with a lapsing lung that we finally drove over to the ER. Stopped in front of the ER doors and looked at them. Nope! If I am going out of this world I am going out on my terms. Home with my family. Got a ton of anti biotics and suffered through it.

Had to tell my story to illustrate what the working class goes through and especially those in our society who literally put their life’s on the line, fireman, paramedics, law enforcement, school teachers, etc.

So it I get my feathers a little ruffled at someone who makes millions of dollars a year and expect a little more out of them…….so be it!

KF? What are we looking at here? A minimum of 80 to 120 million dollars that the University of Iowa. Not only will his children be millionaires all of his grandchildren will be too.

Then I read comments about how he has earned the right to stay as long as he wants. My wife and I both work in professions where we protect and save lives and what do we have to show for it? No one is guaranteeing us anything. Yet if we screw up everything we have worked for during our thirty years of marriage could be taken from us.

I think I’ve earned the right to be a little critical of some millionaire who appears to gotten comfortable and lax at their profession.
Click to expand...
Your wife is the definition of “hero” and your family is heroic.
 
$5M per is chump change against a Big Ten athletic dept budget. A athletic dept that the head football coach is THE central cog in. Whether it's "fair" or "reasonable" or "ethical" or anything like that, in a free market economy, is moot. Economics say that a P5 college football coach is worth $3-10M/yr. It is what it is.

In practical terms, if you want rid of Kirk, the absolute minimum you'd get away with would be $3M. You'd probably want to go a bit above that to get a promising hire. To us average people, we can't even conceptualize the difference between making $3M and $5M per year. You need to see those numbers within the ranking of the wacky world college football coach salaries to have them even begin making some sense.

So now we've gone out and nabbed our up and coming MAC coach or hot P5 coordinator commodity and got our salary expenditure down by a million or two. Hopefully New Guy makes the appropriate noises to indicate he's not "complacent", but the really hard part is actually winning games. At $3.5M or $4M per, how many wins would be acceptable?

I gotta warn you, there might not be a lot of wins. Look at Nebraska. They have the same population struggles as we do but also have a program history that makes ours look like reheated dog poop. And don't tell me, "yeah, like, 20 years ago!" The only time our program was even near the level of success Nebraska enjoyed was SIXTY years ago and it lasted a tiny fraction of the time Nebraska's run did.

Nebraska has gone through one coach after another - each paid handsomely - chasing elite. It's never good enough for them. We laugh at them, but then a bunch of you want to throw our program into the same condition (and we don't even have the tradition to fuel the expectations the way Nebraska does). I'm sorry, but it's stupid. I'm very thankful our athletic dept is not run by a panel of HN posters.

It's this simple: accept that college football is a highly tradition-bound affair. Making an elite program out of thin air takes some serious deus ex machina kind of shit (like one of your alumni going on to found the most profitable shoe companies in the world, that sort of thing). So, accept Hayden/Kirk style 4 decades worth of "hey, not too shabby" or, like literally every other program in America, spin the "maybe this guy will be better" roulette wheel every 3 to 5 years.

Given that we have neither (a) a population base or (b) a strong tradition, failing a Phil Knight or T Boone Pickens type scenario falling into our lap, Iowa's worst case scenario is significantly worse than the "bad" Hayden/Kirk seasons.
 
BigD said:
You know how many times I have thought about that coming from a humble working class family.

My wife is a registered nurse and puts her self and our family at risk every time she goes to work at a large hospital. Not just Covid but other conditions that can be transferred to her and then the rest of our family. For example TB is spreading and is very contagious and dangerous if not immediately treated.

Now the $70K a year is a respectable income. How many nurses salaries does it take to match KF’s salary? 71. 71 nurses putting there lives on the line in hospitals al around the United States just to make one years salary of Kirk or seven nurses a year to match Brian’s salary. My wife caught Covid, then brought it home and passed it on to my special needs son ( I am personally touch by what happens at the end of the first quarter at home games) then from my son I got it. Damn near but it. Lost 30 pounds from not eating. Couldn’t taste, couldn’t smell, had no desire to eat at all. Would have had an easy ride to the sky to see Hayden, but wife kept waking me up and forced me to eat when I had no desire. Got to the point with a lapsing lung that we finally drove over to the ER. Stopped in front of the ER doors and looked at them. Nope! If I am going out of this world I am going out on my terms. Home with my family. Got a ton of anti biotics and suffered through it.

Had to tell my story to illustrate what the working class goes through and especially those in our society who literally put their life’s on the line, fireman, paramedics, law enforcement, school teachers, etc.

So it I get my feathers a little ruffled at someone who makes millions of dollars a year and expect a little more out of them…….so be it!

KF? What are we looking at here? A minimum of 80 to 120 million dollars that the University of Iowa. Not only will his children be millionaires all of his grandchildren will be too.

Then I read comments about how he has earned the right to stay as long as he wants. My wife and I both work in professions where we protect and save lives and what do we have to show for it? No one is guaranteeing us anything. Yet if we screw up everything we have worked for during our thirty years of marriage could be taken from us.

I think I’ve earned the right to be a little critical of some millionaire who appears to gotten comfortable and lax at their profession.
Click to expand...
That is really well said and touching at the same time. I do believe coaches do get to much credit and to much blame for the successes and failures of their teams all across the sporting world. I do believe that the Jimmys and Joes on average trump the xs and os.....but both are needed to win championships.

But if the Jimmys and Joes are 60 to 65% of Iowa's formula (and we clearly see the problems in that make-up) Iowa's coaching strategy is making up the other 30-35% of the formula. Outside of the defense and special teams (which is showing some holes to) we are getting little to nothing out of the offense. We are probably getting a solid 10 to 15% out of that 30-35%. That is why we don't win championships at a bigger clip at Iowa.

The Ferentzs stink at offensive philosophy and they recruit subpar skill position players on offense to lead our team that seem to regress the longer they still in the program....especially QB position.
 
I think it is also time to revisit the statement "Defense wins Championships" or Offense wins championships. You need both to win championships at a consistent clip. For every 2002 Ohio St football situation, you have 100s of others that fail when they don't have both going for them.

And Iowa has this problem big time in both of their major sports programs. It has no offense in its football program and no defense in its basketball program. The leaders of the team, the quarterbacks in the football program suck on average and the leaders of the team, the point guards in the basketball program also suck on average.

Until these things get fixed, Iowa will be a good team sometimes, but always on the outside looking in at greatness.
 
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