Mystery

O

oregonhawkeye

Well-Known Member
This is a genuine question-
What exactly happened that Ferentz was so successful at Iowa years ago and doing so poorly now? For that matter, it would be nice to know what makes one coach better than another at this level when presumably the best of the best have been selected. I think I can understand recruiting skills, application of novel X/Os, instilling discipline, decent game management, etc. But my guess is that most high school coaches can do a reasonable job in those areas. Why IS Bill Snyder Bill Snyder. Chris Petersen. Or the TCU guy whose name escapes me. What do they have that Ferentz lost? Can it be possible that he just quit trying? What else is there for an explanation?
 
Recruiting has not done well in the south since BB left for Wisconsin. Special Teams has cost Iowa a ton of games the last 7 years and I believe Norm used to run special teams before his health issues.

This staff has gotten way to comfortable (KF) which causes them to keep banging their head against the same walls every year.
 
OK, here's my take, which I don't expect many/any others to agree with.

I think most of the success Ferentz has had was a great deal from *after glow fallout* from the Hayden Fry era.

I think Ferentz was given a lot of credit for being responsible for good young men coming into the program who would have signed no matter who the coach was, based on the rabid fanaticism that built up during *The Hayden Fry Years*..

Fry did build up the program to strength and greatness, and he was absolutely brilliant in whipping up the very fanaticism that drove our appetites. So little tykes knew they were going to play for the Hawkeyes when they grew up, if they could. We had our pick of the best kids in the state... and beyond!

AND, we could offer for a whole lot of great kids from other states who were happy to come and play for Fry and be a Hawkeye. It was a great program. They could be showcased. They could be a part of all that winning!

And Fry got a snowball rolling.

So, for awhile, it kept rolling, if sporadically, for several more years after Hayden's departure. It slowed a bit at Hayden's end, but it wasn't stalled out, and it kept rolling for awhile. What Hayden Fry built benefited the coach that followed him! For awhile...

But, as the years passed, our *great years* were strung out a bit more, other teams climbed to their own greatness too, and I think it's harder and harder to get as many really, really good young men to play here. Always some really good one on board, don't get me wrong. But not enough who are that much better, and in dense enough numbers to keep the quality of the Hawkeye play what it used to be in those Fry years.

And so, the program loses a tiny bit of luster. We have a great season, and we get back a little more of the luster, but then we have a couple years of really mid-level results (yeah, yeah, bowl game, but still mid-level in the B1G) and after awhile, the best of the best start looking to sign with other teams.

The snowball just isn't rolling along very well much anymore. Other teams get more of the best players. We're trying to build with what we can get. Not lousy quality, but just not what we used to be able to attract. Recruiting always sounds exciting, but still.. most of the best don't come to us anymore. You gotta' be able to recruit, and then you gotta' be able to bring them along. It isn't working anymore.

It just feels like for the past quite a few years Ferentz has been getting by on the after glow from the Fry years that we've been able to take advantage of, but we aren't really making our own glow to keep it going anymore. It's like he fell into it and came up smelling like a rose because Hayden's snowball kept rolling for awhile, but then.. Ferentz wasn't able to keep the snowball rolling from his own ability. Hayden's after glow what the magic, and it ran out.

Don't know whether that made sense to anyone. Just a thought...
 
A lot of transfers for various reasons happened to the Jr and Sr classes. That has left a large gap between Sophmore's and the underclasses. There is actually a lot of talent in the pool just inexperianced. Next year Iowa may have 17 or 18 returning starters. But we also get OSU and Wisky back.
 
Cory said:
Recruiting has not done well in the south since BB left for Wisconsin. Special Teams has cost Iowa a ton of games the last 7 years and I believe Norm used to run special teams before his health issues.

This staff has gotten way to comfortable (KF) which causes them to keep banging their head against the same walls every year.
Click to expand...

A fact that has been lost on many Iowa fans because of their hatred for the guy.

Also completely agree with Cory about SP. Iowa used to dominate this phase of the game, even against superior athletic teams. For the last few years their KO & Punt return units have been awful and their KO coverage costs them at least once a game. FG kicking and punting have stayed solid.
 
i also think that there is very young talent in the wings. but the staff, for whatever reason, sucked at recruiting for a few years there, and combined with a huge amount of transfers we are pretty bare bones right now.

it needs to turn around fast though, cause will be hard to keep the recruiting up if we're going to suck this year and next.
 
Xerxes said:
A fact that has been lost on many Iowa fans because of their hatred for the guy.

Also completely agree with Cory about SP. Iowa used to dominate this phase of the game, even against superior athletic teams. For the last few years their KO & Punt return units have been awful and their KO coverage costs them at least once a game. FG kicking and punting have stayed solid.
Click to expand...

agree with this as well. losing Bielema, Philbin, and Ron Aiken really hurt. three excellent coaches gone.
 
A few thoughts on recruiting - Hayden had a nice pipeline into NY, NJ, Texas and Wisconsin. Barry Alvarez said in a documentary that the 1985 Iowa team had 16 players on its roster from Wisconsin. He vowed when he went to WI that he would build a wall around that state. He did.

Offense - Snyder / Fry was innovative and made it interesting and a challenge to prepare for Iowa.

Kirk's style is what you see is what you get - execute, execute, execute. No room for error. Little out smarting happening. I think it's gotten worse.

Depth - I don't like hearing it but Iowa has little room for error. In 2010 the outlook was great but injuries really hampered that team and after a couple closes losses (Wisky and OSU) they fell flat and lost at Minny and NW.

At the end of the day, its mostly recruiting that is to blame. IMO.

The "glow of Fry" as another posted pointed to, in my opinion, is about the State's love for the Hawkeyes. Prior to fry nobody followed Iowa football except a few men who graduated from there. Iowa football became the Saturday pastime from Clinton to Sioux City after 1979 and remains so today. People care a lot more now about Iowa football. Part of that hey day of Fry wasn't that they were always winning conference championships. They weren't but they were fun to watch and winning games - not always 10 but 5-6-8 games where before they lost nearly every game - that was exciting. That is no longer exciting to Iowa fans. The 80's were new and different from the 60's and 70's .
 
NCHawker said:
Prior to fry nobody followed Iowa football except a few men who graduated from there. Iowa football became the Saturday pastime from Clinton to Sioux City after 1979 and remains so today..
Click to expand...

^^This is so blatantly wrong. How old are you NCHawker. I am 60 and listened to the hawks all the time in the 60s as a kid and there were many, older men like my dad who was in high school during the iron men days who just loved the hawks though the 60s and 70s. My mom was a huge fan during the 50s to early 70s.

If you arent around 60 years old you have no idea what Iowa football was to people growing up in the 30's, 40's and 50's and how that has continued. My dad and many men never went to Iowa but graduated from high school and also watched the Iowa Pre-flight teams dominate other football teams during WW II. Do you know who Iowa Pre-Flight is?

I was 8 years old watching Evy's last rose bowl team with my mom and other family members. My Dad owned bars and restaurants and he would rget a couple of car loads of guys whenever he could to drive up to Kinnick for a game. And WHO and other radio stations kept Iowa football on a lot of radios.
 
Allot of factors have played in to the slide of Iowa under KF.

Kirk Ferentz is a fantastic evaluater and developer of talent but a terrible game time coach and motivator.

Those early 2000 teams were a combination of his and staffs ability find and develop talent and allot of luck. People also forget that allot of those guys were actually Fry recruits so they got even luckier.

You had Joe Philbin and a healthy Norm Parker back then too.

Another thing that has probably faded from memory a bit is the effect that Bob Sanders brought to the table. I dont think Iowa would have had near the level of success with out him. He made those teams the bullies of the big ten.

Feretnz is not a motivator, he needs a Sanders a Roth, a King, an Angerer to lead his teams. When Iowa doesn't have those types of leaders on the field the teams to often seem to take on KFs personality which is flat, risk averse and unfortunately when it comes to the QBs confused.

Combine that with his conservative schemes and the teams just don't seem to play with any fire unless its a "big game".
 
It's not a mystery. It is difficult to remain at the top of teh BoneG. This **** obviously goes in easily identifiable patterns, and very seldom does a non-OSU/UM team stick on the top very long, and rarely (the exception seems to be UW) do they avoid falling in the sewer for a few years.
 
This thread is so full of bu**shi* that I don't know where to begin. Go back and study Iowa Football a little bit and you will realize how rich it has been. If you are not TOO stupid, you'll realize that Kirk Ferentz has added to the richness of Iowa Football and we are lucky to have him. The Hawkeyes will be back and it may even still be this year. I know it doesn't feel like it today but if we beat Minnesota we are 1-0 in the B1G and will have 2 weeks to heal up and figure out a way to beat a beatable MSU squad.
 
Hawkzilla said:
OK, here's my take, which I don't expect many/any others to agree with.

I think most of the success Ferentz has had was a great deal from *after glow fallout* from the Hayden Fry era.

I think Ferentz was given a lot of credit for being responsible for good young men coming into the program who would have signed no matter who the coach was, based on the rabid fanaticism that built up during *The Hayden Fry Years*..

Fry did build up the program to strength and greatness, and he was absolutely brilliant in whipping up the very fanaticism that drove our appetites. So little tykes knew they were going to play for the Hawkeyes when they grew up, if they could. We had our pick of the best kids in the state... and beyond!

AND, we could offer for a whole lot of great kids from other states who were happy to come and play for Fry and be a Hawkeye. It was a great program. They could be showcased. They could be a part of all that winning!

And Fry got a snowball rolling.

So, for awhile, it kept rolling, if sporadically, for several more years after Hayden's departure. It slowed a bit at Hayden's end, but it wasn't stalled out, and it kept rolling for awhile. What Hayden Fry built benefited the coach that followed him! For awhile...

But, as the years passed, our *great years* were strung out a bit more, other teams climbed to their own greatness too, and I think it's harder and harder to get as many really, really good young men to play here. Always some really good one on board, don't get me wrong. But not enough who are that much better, and in dense enough numbers to keep the quality of the Hawkeye play what it used to be in those Fry years.

And so, the program loses a tiny bit of luster. We have a great season, and we get back a little more of the luster, but then we have a couple years of really mid-level results (yeah, yeah, bowl game, but still mid-level in the B1G) and after awhile, the best of the best start looking to sign with other teams.

The snowball just isn't rolling along very well much anymore. Other teams get more of the best players. We're trying to build with what we can get. Not lousy quality, but just not what we used to be able to attract. Recruiting always sounds exciting, but still.. most of the best don't come to us anymore. You gotta' be able to recruit, and then you gotta' be able to bring them along. It isn't working anymore.

It just feels like for the past quite a few years Ferentz has been getting by on the after glow from the Fry years that we've been able to take advantage of, but we aren't really making our own glow to keep it going anymore. It's like he fell into it and came up smelling like a rose because Hayden's snowball kept rolling for awhile, but then.. Ferentz wasn't able to keep the snowball rolling from his own ability. Hayden's after glow what the magic, and it ran out.

Don't know whether that made sense to anyone. Just a thought...
Click to expand...

Not really the case. Fry was on downslope and his recruiting was not good in his last couple years. Iowa was not all that even though they had brought the program up to a national level. The problem with KF is that he is stubborn and does not change with the times. He is still playing 80's football on a much different landscape. This is a guy that doesn't use the internet and just recently started tweeting some. I love KF but it may be time to get a more dynamic HC in place or we will wallow in this crap for another 8 years until KF gets his gold watch and a goodby banquet.
 
Hawkzilla said:
OK, here's my take, which I don't expect many/any others to agree with.

I think most of the success Ferentz has had was a great deal from *after glow fallout* from the Hayden Fry era.


Don't know whether that made sense to anyone. Just a thought...
Click to expand...

Afterglow? Really? Look at Hayden's last seven years (5-7, 6-6, 5-5-1, 8-4, 9-3, 7-5, 3-8). Two losing seasons, two .500 seasons, two mediocre seasons by the standards of some of today's fans (8-4 and 7-5) and one good season. You make it sound like he rode Hayden's coattails when he actually had to restart the program. Go back to 1988 and look at the records he had until the end. They aren't dissimilar to the records Kirk has posted since 2004, and Kirk gets MUCH more flak than Hayden did.
 
Hawkzilla -"It's like he fell into it and came up smelling like a rose because Hayden's snowball kept rolling for awhile, but then.. Ferentz wasn't able to keep the snowball rolling from his own ability. Hayden's after glow what the magic, and it ran out." That's stupid. We went 11-2 ten years after Fry was gone. We won three straight bowl games. We've beaten 3 straight SEC opponents in bowl games. That's not magic my friend. And Fry "didn't build that." He built the foundation but Kirk put it together.
 
IMO we play a style meant to keep games close. The years we've done exceptionally well, we've won the close games and caught the "breaks". The season's we've done poorly, we've lost those games and the "breaks" have gone the other way.
 
Smarthawk said:
This thread is so full of bu**shi* that I don't know where to begin. Go back and study Iowa Football a little bit and you will realize how rich it has been. If you are not TOO stupid, you'll realize that Kirk Ferentz has added to the richness of Iowa Football and we are lucky to have him. The Hawkeyes will be back and it may even still be this year. I know it doesn't feel like it today but if we beat Minnesota we are 1-0 in the B1G and will have 2 weeks to heal up and figure out a way to beat a beatable MSU squad.
Click to expand...
I like your passion, however, what is Kirk's record after a bye week?

Also, the "after glow" theory, I had been debating about that recently.

Also, I do wonder what happened to Kirk because I swear he used to show some emotion in the 1st 6 years.
 
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