Fake Field Goals, Real Progress: The Evolution of Iowa's Kirk Ferentz

With his team down by a touchdown heading into halftime and sitting pretty on the Iowa State 22-yard line, Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz let the clock wind down to one second, called a timeout, and sent out his field goal unit, hoping to close the gap before halftime.

Instead of calling for a field goal, however, Ferentz called for a fake. Kicker Marshall Koehn took the ball and ran it all the way to the Iowa State two-yard line before being tackled. The clock hit zero and that was the end of the half. Iowa came up empty.

To be clear, the fake was a terrible idea. Since Iowa needed more than just a first down, and only had one try to do it, there's no way the play should have been called. The odds of Koehn outrunning Iowa State's entire defense over 20-something yards were very, very low. The correct calls would have been either to go for it with time left on the clock or just to kick the field goal.

Forgive Ferentz—he's still working on this aggressiveness thing. To his credit, he is actually trying to change.

To diehard college football fans, Ferentz is best known for his contract and his preferred boring of play. After leading Iowa to a Orange Bowl victory and No. 7-ranked finish in 2009, Ferentz got a ten-year contract with a buyout that pretty much locked him in as the Hawkeyes' coach for as long as he wants. Halfway through the deal, however, Iowa hasn't sniffed a top bowl game or conference title, and 7-5 records have become the norm.

Ferentz is old school. He bans his players from Twitter, he doesn't let freshmen talk to the media, and he has no problem punting the ball inside the opponent's 40-yard line. This conservatism seemingly has caused him to fall behind the rest of the college football world, as Iowa has struggled to stop spread offenses and flailed on the recruiting trail.

Fan criticism boiled over at the end of last season. Playing against Nebraska for nothing but rivalry pride, Ferentz went ultra-conservative with his team up 24-7. The Hawkeyes ended up losing in overtime. Ferentz's response to the collapse? "That's football." I was at that game and wrote this at the time:

"Please, let's just try to win this game."

That was the guy in the row in front of me at Kinnick Stadium on Friday, half joking and half hoping that for once in his time, Iowa would act like it cared as much as he did.

It's not that Iowa's coaches didn't want to win the game—of course they did—it's that they seemed to absolutely refuse to do what was necessary to win it. They were going to do things their way, results be damned.

That game was particularly disheartening for fans because it was supposed to be the capstone of "Ferentz 3.0." Even though he is much maligned now, Ferentz had a stellar run of success in the previous decade. He took over a bare Iowa program in 1998 and led the Hawkeyes to an unprecedented four top-eight finishes between 2002 and 2009.

Ferentz 1.0 began in 2002, when Iowa made the Orange Bowl and finished in the top eight of the polls in three consecutive years. Ferentz 2.0 began in 2008, when Iowa rebounded from two mediocre seasons to set the stage for a return to the Orange Bowl in 2009.

Ferentz 3.0 was supposed to come in 2014, with the coach promising a new, exciting offense, and with the return of multiple starters from a team that got better throughout the 2013 season. The Hawkeyes sputtered to a 7-5 record and a fourth-place finish in the Big Ten West.

Perhaps in response, Ferentz made a series of un-Ferentz-like moves. He named a new starting quarterback immediately after a bowl game loss to Tennessee, opting for the high-ceiling C.J. Beathard over steady, but not overly impressive, Jake Rudock. Then he called a press conference, which is unheard from other coaches to start the offseason, let alone from Ferentz. Why did he do it?

"My sense is we needed to talk," he said. "It's as simple as that."

What followed was a retrospective on the past five years—the "big contract" years—and what needed to change.

"I think we've got great people in this program. I feel really good about that," he said. "Our job moving forward is to utilize those people the best possible way we can, and beyond that we've got to look at everything we're doing systematically. A through Z, we've got to look at everything we're doing with a fresh eye."

Football coaches have a tendency to say what people want to hear, but Ferentz has so far kept his word. Consider the Hawkeyes' opening game. Iowa played last year's Football Championship Subdivision runner-up, Illinois State—a game Ferentz's team should win, but not easily.

In the past, letting inferior opponents stick around and pull upsets had become a Ferentz calling card, frustrating fans and gamblers alike: since 2006, Iowa has a stunning 11 losses as double-digit favorites.

This season, however, the Hawkeyes pounded the Redbirds, going up 31-0 before calling off the dogs in the fourth quarter. Iowa even tried (another unsuccessful) fake field goal! In the first quarter! Just for the hell of it!

Wrote fan blog Black Heart Gold Pants, "Suffice it to say the level of worry that pervaded the outlook for the 2015 season has, if only for one week, abated."

Fast forward to the Iowa State game. Despite generally having the better program, Ferentz has struggled against Iowa State, and in the first half it looked like more of the same. Then came the changes. There was the fake field goal. There was the choice to go with Beathard, a mobile quarterback, who helped the Hawkeyes avoid a safety and get a 57-yard run when backed up on their own one-yard line. There was Ferentz letting Beathard air it out on for a 48-yard completion on 3rd and 21 from Iowa's six-yard line, a situation that in past seasons almost certainly would have meant a cautious play call designed to produce better punting position.

The Hawkeyes won, 31-17, and head into a matchup with Pitt as the favorite, with a 4-0 non-conference record in sight.

Iowa is still not a great team. The Hawkeyes aren't what they were in 2002 or 2009, and they're not going to be mistaken for College Football Playoff contenders any time soon. But in one offseason, old-school Ferentz seems to have undergone the transformation that he has been promising for the past few years, one that starts with ill-advised fake field goals and possibly ends with a Big Ten West title. It's Ferentz 3.0, a year late.