Kirk Ferentz talks Iowa football signing day

It’s another signing day for Kirk Ferentz and he had quite a bit to say about the newly signed 18 recruits along with four walk-on prospects. Ferentz discusses his thoughts on the end of the 2025 regular season, the process for his coaches and players during the month of December, and his overall thoughts on the recruiting class.

KIRK FERENTZ: Good to see everybody.

It was a good weekend, obviously, and a good finish to the season on a Friday. One bonus there is that we get a little bit of time to get away. The players didn’t have anything until yesterday morning outside of their academic requirements. It was good that way.

We are pleased with Friday’s game – I mentioned that afterwards – and it was nice to be able to sit back and watch everybody else work on the weekend and we had a chance to relax a little bit.

A couple words about the season and Friday’s effort. Overall I am proud of our guys and pleased with their effort. It has been a good team to work with, certainly, and it has been week-in and week- out, and I’ve mentioned it several times, it has been that way since January. These guys have been an exceptional group to work with, the leadership has been strong and the way they work together has been really good.

The thing about this team, every week they’ve prepared well, handled camp, handled spring ball, summer, all that, but week-to-week, they prepared well and competed all 12 times about as hard as you can compete. We came up short a couple times, but it wasn’t for lack of effort or paying attention to detail, all those kinds of things.

It was rewarding in that regard, and in a lot of ways like 2008. I think the biggest difference there is the teams that we lost to were all ranked teams. I told the team a couple weeks ago, my guess is two of those teams will be Top 5, and that’s where they both sit right now.

The teams that we lost to were really good teams, and sometimes that’s the way that goes. It was a special group, and we’re all looking forward to finding out where we’re going sometime this month coming up and then getting ready. I’m sure it’ll be a good opponent, and I’m sure we’ll be underdogs again. That’s typically how bowls go.

This has been a good week for us. Now it’s getting a little bit different.

College football continues to change, and this is one positive change, actually, because we’re basically sequestered to the barracks here for the next month, and our players are here, we’re here, which is really an unusual combination in December, but it makes a lot of sense.

We’re taking this month to — especially this week — having a chance for the players to reset, recharge a little bit, get their house in order academically, all those kinds of things, and then having a chance to sit down with the position coaches. They’re all sitting down with their guys individually and talking about the season and looking forward, that type of thing, so setting the table a little bit there.

There is nothing to report right now. I imagine some things will happen over the course of the month. That wouldn’t be unusual. Hopefully, like last year, we don’t have a lot of transition, but we’ll wait and see how that all works out.

The only one to mention right now, I know Jackson Stratton went on social media and talked about it, but Jackson left the program. Unfortunately he’s had some interesting health challenges, internal digestive stuff, so he’s had a rough year physically, getting the nutrition right, and he’s lost a lot of weight, all that type of thing, so he’s had a really rough year.

He’s gone home. He’s going to graduate in December. He’s taking the rest of his classes online. I want to compliment him because he showed up here, I literally met his mom and dad here a year ago July or August, whenever it was our first-year guys reported, and little did I know at that point, nor did he. Now he’s probably more surprised he ended up starting for a couple games for us and got a couple wins for us.

I am appreciative of him as a person and the job he did coming out of the bullpen. I wish him the best. I think he’s contemplating playing another year, so we’ll see how that all goes.

Then recruiting-wise here, Tyler is going to come up and he’ll go into deep depth, but the biggest thing is recruiting has changed a lot, and you guys know that better than I do. The signing day used to be people would fax stuff in and we’d take phone calls starting at 6 a.m., all that stuff, and it’s a very, very different process than it used to be.

I think it’s a lot similar in a lot of ways, too, in that it’s still the crux of building a team. It really is important. It’s an important thing. Each and every guy that joins our team, we’re excited about it. We spent a lot of time trying to research players. We did it a little bit differently. We do our own evaluations, don’t go off magazines or this guy said or this guy offered a guy. We don’t do that. We try to be as thorough as we possibly can.

It has worked well for us. That’s kind of our formula. Hopefully we’re adding 18 players, actually 22, that we feel really good about.

We’re excited about that. We don’t mass recruit. We don’t send out 300 offers. I don’t know how you get to know a class by doing that. I think our coaches do a really good job of doing their homework, getting to know the guys and looking for the traits that we think are important.

There’s obviously requisite physical things that you have to have to play football at this level, but I think our standards are probably a little bit different than others and maybe we accentuate certain things that maybe other people don’t. So I am pleased with the way the coaches went about it.

Tyler is the guy that coordinates it all, and that’s a nightmarish job quite frankly, and then on top of it, the other component which has always been this way, at least in my 37 years here, it’s not the coaches recruiting but it’s a lot of people that help recruit, and one thing that hasn’t changed, if we can get a prospect on campus and if we can get him here on campus with their parents, I think we have a better chance of gaining traction, and that’s because so many people help sell it.

One kid comes on campus for an official visit, the exposure they get to all kinds of people on campus, whether it’s professors, academic counselors, and they give a lot of time, personal time up to help us recruit, so we’re very appreciative. It’s truly a team effort. We are happy about that.

We feel good about the group overall. I think we addressed the things we were trying to address and we feel good about that. Then we’ll continue to look around and see what we can do to keep supplementing the roster, but I feel good about that.

The other thing of note, and I don’t think it’s been shared with you, but we expect 14 of them to start out in January, so signing day changed and this will be the biggest number we’ve had of guys coming in in January. Some schools pretty much make it mandatory, at least that’s what I hear talking to our prospects. It’s a question that’s frequently asked of us, do you expect the players to come in in January, and our answer is no, we don’t. It’s not discouraged, but we don’t necessarily sell it and certainly don’t mandate it. I don’t believe in that.

It’s funny or interesting — maybe not funny but interesting with this roster reduction stuff, I remember talking to Ray during camp out there before we started practice one day back in August, and football is becoming a business, college football. The business of college football has truly become a business, and from a business standpoint, it is like, it would be smart for us to mandate it. But that flies really in the face of what we believe in in recruiting.

We like multi-sport athletes. We like guys that are parts of teams that are playing basketball or wrestling — competing on the wrestling mat, involved in track, involved in baseball.

I always tell prospects, Josey Jewell didn’t get here until August. He played baseball for Decorah. I believe they won the state championship. He showed up in August. He’s the only three-time captain in the history of this program, which again, it was 1889 when that started.

It’s more about the back end. It’s more about an entire career, not your first 10 months on campus. You build a foundation when you get here, but we’re not counting on any player to come in and save our team in year one. Big picture that way.

Anyway, all that being said, that’s just part of the new landscape. Tyler will fill in all the blanks, but I feel good about the class, I am enthused about them and eager to start work with them, but first things first, we have the month of December in front of us. I’ll throw it out for questions.

Q. Kirk, two-part question. When do you plan on doing your individual meetings with the players? Again, I know it’s early, it feels like, but with the portal and everything, when do you do those individual meetings?

KIRK FERENTZ: That’s actually what we’ve been doing or are doing right now. We’ll get together as a staff tomorrow afternoon and just pull in information, see what’s going on. Obviously if there’s something dramatic, I think I’d know that by now, or at least at this point.

It’s all preliminary. I just mentioned, college football has become a business, and one thing I encouraged our guys during the season is there’s a business time and there’s a football time, and hopefully everybody is here to play football and really be part of a team. So take care of business when it’s business time.

This is a business month for everybody. That began a long time ago, but hopefully our guys haven’t been too active. But there’s going to be poaching and all that stuff going on. That’s just part of what we do right now.

When I say we do, I’m not including us, but college football collectively. It’s all going on.

Q. You talk about how important it is to get players on campus, and I know the recruiting calendar has changed almost yearly at this point, but with it only being open two weeks and it goes to the middle of January, how do you plan on attacking the portal when you talk about getting the guys on campus and doing all that? Do you have a preliminary idea of how you’re going to go about that?

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah, you have to be active in the portal. It has been helpful to us. I think about a guy like Jacob Gill, I’ll mention him, who’s been with us for two years, and doesn’t have franchise numbers, if you will, putting it in those terms, but the value he’s added, I’m talking about the leadership on our football team, he’s a big part of that. He embodies everything you want in a football player. He has been such a great contributor.

We’re always looking to help our football team. We will be. It is interesting, whatever the window is, it’s pretty quick in January. We may be playing cards and watching soap operas here the next couple weeks, but I know what we’ll be doing early January. We’ll be very active in that.

So yeah, it’s a whole new world. This is another twist and turn of college football, and I don’t know if it’ll stay like this moving forward, but we’ll deal with it as it comes just like you do everything else.

Q. What is your message to recruits that ask about your future as head coach here, and are you definitively — sounds like you are, definitively going to coach the Hawkeyes in 2026?

KIRK FERENTZ: Well, yeah. I hope so. Unless you know something I don’t know.

I just tell them the truth. I feel really good. I had no idea what it feels like to be 70. Now I do, however many months it’s been. It doesn’t feel any different than when I was 60. I feel good physically. I’ve got permission from my wife to keep doing this, and it’s what I like doing. I really like it and enjoy doing it.

Unless we just screw this up beyond repair, which we’re trying to do right now in college football, I don’t envision stopping anytime in the near future. It’s what you do. I don’t golf, and when I did, I stunk, so I don’t see going back to that. That’s irreparable, too. My golf game is just awful.

Q. I was curious, with the evolving landscape of college football, the expanded playoff, how, if any, the way the program views its goals have changed because from when I have heard, when it was a 14 playoff, the goal was Big Ten Championship. Now you could argue that it’s easier to make the College Football Playoff than it is to win the Big Ten Championship. Has the way the program views its goals changed at all or your messaging? Is it the same, different? How have you approached that?

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah, our goal has always been to win every game. If we’ve got games scheduled, we’re going to try to win them. That’s kind of what I’m referring to.

I saw this coming years ago just when they went to the four, and I think I said on record, I preferred the two-game thing, only because as soon as we went to four, that’s where all the focus went, and a lot of bowl games were considered, quote-unquote, meaningless, insignificant, all that kind of stuff.

It flies in the face of the way I guess I was raised. The beauty of the game is competition. The beauty of the game is building a team and being part of something bigger than you. If that’s your end goal — the one thing it hasn’t changed, only one team is going to come out on top. No matter how we slice this thing and dice it, it’s going to be one team is going to win the championship.

It used to be two that got to compete for it, now it’s four, then it went to 12, and it’s going to keep expanding. I get that. But our program goal, we want to win anything — if we’re going to get beat, we’re going to try to win.

But the bigger picture, the three things that have been important from day one are graduation, first and foremost — I know everybody says that but it is true. The second thing is being a good citizen, a positive citizen hopefully, on campus, the team, anything you’re a member of. The third thing is maximizing your football experience. To me, it’s as simple as that. If we’re doing it right, some years we might have a realistic chance to get there, and then other years maybe not.

I think it’s a trap if you start chasing all of those exterior things, me personally. All you can do is do your best and try — we’re trying to do our best each and every week, and it breaks it down to the day, just maximizing days. But that’s all you can do.

If you’re good enough, you’re good enough, and if you’re not, you’re not. Other people, we’ve have plenty of people judging us. It’s never been an issue, fans and other people on top of that. And you can’t control how people view you, either.

But I can assure you we’re trying to win. That’s our goal is to win. But it’s a bigger picture than that, too. Because again, ultimately only one team is going to win. I do know that. In the NFL you have a one out of 32 shot. In our deal, I think there’s 68 teams in Power Four schools? What do they call the other ones? Group of Five, okay. So Group of Five sometimes whatever number that is, and their odds are probably a little less than ours.

Only one team is going to come out happy. It’s like pro football. Figured that out a long time ago.

Q. Kind of along those lines, almost existential with the sport itself, this year we saw more firings of quality coaches, experienced coaches at midyear. Basically when they lost their third game and they were not part of the playoff you saw people get fired, which really never happened before, and then you’re also seeing somebody leave a team that’s going to the playoff, as opposed to I don’t think we would see Mike Vrabel leave the Patriots for the Giants, for instance, on the eve of the Wild Card round this year.

Do you think that an expanded playoff – not even 16 but potentially 24 – would curb some of that, where you’re going immediately into a playoff round and then there’s also the chance of lasting longer through the season, that three losses wouldn’t preclude you from being part of it, or is that just going to change the dynamic in a different direction like this all has?

KIRK FERENTZ: Yeah, I really haven’t given that part thought, like the next expansion, how that’s going to impact things.

But the thing I can comment on is there’s no question things have changed, and it is the business of football now. The clear takeaway — I don’t know who the first guy fired was. Maybe it was James. But the clear message here is win. Like win and win now.

I’m smiling up here because I probably wouldn’t — if this was 27 years ago or 26 years ago, I’d probably be on that casualty list, too, and ironically, 27 years, good, bad or indifferent, I’m still here. People have varied opinions on that. But that’s one of the ironies I find.

The other irony – maybe I’m amused by it – but everybody talks about our staff from the ’80s. We were all assistants. We all got hired at decent places and we were all assistants, and I’m thinking about Barry, I’m thinking about Bill Snyder, I’m thinking about Bob Stoops. Seemed like we all did okay. And Dan McCartney probably did a better job than any of us at Iowa State because Iowa State was a really low place. K-State was way down there, too. None of us were head coaches.

How many assistants have been hired this hiring cycle? But that takes — you’ve got to do your homework, and you’ve got to have some guts to do that, too.

The world is different, that’s all. We didn’t have consulting firms back then, either, I don’t think, back in the ’80s. How we’ve improved. They’re making money, though. Those consultants are making money. Good for them. Everybody is finding a way.

I’m going to turn it over to Tyler. Tyler has done an unbelievable job as general manager, and I joked about it being a hard job, but it is a challenging job because he’s basically on the phone all the time, like all the time. But that allows me to go play, too, so that’s a good thing.

I’ll turn it over to him and he can give you a lot of details about the class. Thank you.