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Iowa Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz watches a replay during a game against the Michigan State Spartans Nov. 22, 2025 at Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City, Iowa. | Julia Hansen/Iowa City Press-Citizen / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across the NCAA brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook. Throughout the year we ask questions of the most plugged-in Iowa fans and fans across the country. Sign up here to participate in the weekly emailed surveys.
For a generation, Hawkeye fans have taken pride in doing things “The Iowa Way.” The athletic department operated under the mantra “win, graduate, do it right.” If nothing else, it served as a coping mechanism for teams in the major sports that competed at a high level, but never a championship level.
When the new NIL rules (and let’s be real, that terms is used more as a placeholder than anything – if we’ve learned nothing else of late, it’s that there really are no rules in this new world) were introduced, opinions on the potential impacts for Iowa spanned the spectrum. “Finally, the money will all be above board and even the playing field!” “Iowa will never have enough money to compete with the bluebloods!”
The truth, so far, has been somewhere in the middle. The reason lies in that old mantra and the types of leaders it has brought to the head of Iowa’s major sports programs. While we’ve seen a flurry of successful coaches in both football and men’s basketball hit the road after major success, Iowa has had just two football coaches in 50 years while they appear on track to have their next lifer in men’s hoops.
Most people blame the recent attrition, most notably the recent departure of national champion men’s basketball coach Dusty May, on the current state of college athletics. It’s a miserable landscape with a consolidation of talent at the wealthiest schools, an absurd number of transfers annually and players making more to move to the top programs than if they went on to the professional level in many cases. Oh, and if the NCAA wants to do anything to rein things in? Lawsuit after lawsuit that the governing body loses, stripping it of any glimmer of power it had.
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While all that is happening around Iowa, the Hawkeyes continue chugging along. If anything, we’ve seen an uptick in performance in the midst of all the nonsense.
The full process is still difficult to parse for Iowa basketball coach Ben McCollum given we’ve only seen him in Iowa City in one year, but all indications at this point are that he will be following a very similar blueprint to what we’ve seen out of the football program. That blueprint seems little changed from the pre-NIL days.
The Hawkeyes aren’t interested in athletes looking for the biggest payday. They can’t afford them anyway and spending valuable recruiting time and money chasing them is largely pointless. If anything, the way other programs are throwing money around (in case you hadn’t heard, Nebraska has taken to offering NIL money to high school players to transfer into the state for their senior season) has made it easier for the Iowa staff to identify the cultural fits earlier in the process. Kids asking about their payday in the first 20 minutes of a visit aren’t likely to stick it out when they’re actually forced to compete for a role – certainly not if they don’t win that battle initially.
Finding those cultural fits has always been critical to the process of Kirk Ferentz and company. With self-selection doing a lot of the work up front, Iowa is now able to build a roster in the image Ferentz wants. Returning players get the bulk of the money and investments are made in the trenches and on defense. With a strong foundation, the Hawkeyes can be opportunistic at other positions.
This cycle, that meant investing at WR given they didn’t need to add a QB for the first time in the Tim Lester era. How exactly that plays out this fall remains to be seen, but early indications the money spent on guys like Tony Diaz will have a solid ROI.
On the hardwood, McCollum seems to be taking a similar approach. His focus is on the high school front, though the ongoing transition from the Fran era to this new one necessitates spending in the portal. Cultural fit is critical given his demands for defense and the process.
In year one, we saw those elements meant more than raw talent as the Hawkeyes blew through the glass ceiling that had preceded McCollum and took what was essentially a Drake (and D2 Northwest Missouri State) roster to the Elite Eight.
It’s all in the DNA.
While McCollum is on the front end of his tenure and poised build on his momentum from the ground up, it’s hard not to wonder how much longer Kirk Ferentz has at the helm in Iowa City. He’s certainly adapted better than most expected to this new world and it doesn’t seem like the ongoing absurdity will be what sends him the route of a Nick Saban (and certainly not the route of Dusty May or Jim Harbaugh), but how much longer will he be content running things for the Hawkeyes?
That’s the topic of this week’s Reacts poll. Just how much longer will we have KF manning the ship and continuing to ?
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