No Upside
On Ferentzes, failure, and approaching the horizon of meaning on the biggest Saturday of the season
Two weekends ago, your author was in Iowa City to take in his alma mater’s football contest against The University of Iowa, expecting the worst. In his twenty-three-year tenure as head coach, Kirk Ferentz has made his hay punishing opponents for the slightest mistakes. Iowa’s defense is among the best in all of college football, their special teams are consistently elite, and their philosophy for winning flows from this—pull your opponent into a torturous rock fight on a short field and then cave their head in with one or a few well-timed blows. They deliver these blows with a Protestant Ethic offense touting NFL-bound developmental marvels at tight end, or center, or fullback, meaty hands that can palm death-bringing bricks with ease. The Ferentz ideology is a point of near-pride, judging by the sheer number of “punting is winning” shirts you can see in Kinnick Stadium any given Saturday, a relatively new mantra that nonetheless feels like it has defined Iowa’s style of play forever.
Michigan possessed the ball for nearly 23 minutes in the first half, eking out a 13-0 halftime lead that my Iowa friends assured me was insurmountable. And while Iowa took substantial advantage of Michigan’s costliest mistakes in the second half—a drive stalling out when Michigan quarterback JJ McCarthy tripped on his center’s feet, a shanked punt, a backward pass barely recovered at Michigan’s goal line—the blindside brick blows never landed, and my childhood heroes trotted off the field with a 27-14 victory.
As I walked with my hosts down Melrose Ave away from the stadium and back to our ride, we passed a lawn of tightly parked cars and their seeming attendant, a man fully relaxed in a folding lawn chair, cooler beside. He probably never went to the game, just listened on the portable radio at his feet. He wore sunglasses. “Brian Ferentz, offensive genius,” he would say with a smile so ironic it seemed to eclipse irony, to all who passed, “best offensive mind in the game!” “That’s right,” each passer-by would respond, dutifully sublimating their dripping hatred into Iowa Nice.
Iowa fields what may be the worst offense in major College Football. It may be among the worst offenses the Big Ten conference has ever seen, a conference historically known via the epithet “three yards and a cloud of dust.” It is a unit helmed by the head coach’s son, an act of clear nepotism that—in spirit, if not quite by the letter—violates the very policies of the university itself. And it is now brickless.
The Hawkeyes followed up their spiritually immiserating but nonetheless boring loss to Michigan with a loss to Illinois the next weekend so breathtakingly unentertaining and horrific it seemed to bend the logic of the game. The program had an opportunity to hide from public view during what promised to be an historic weekend for the sport. But Iowa traditionally, and mysteriously, only makes its assistant coaches available to the press on their off week. So, on the morning of October 12th, Brian Ferentz, already the recipient of withering coverage in the national press, took to the lectern for the first time this season and proceeded to nearly melt down.
Kinnick Stadium is an unmissable experience if you have the means to be a college football tourist. The fans outside (for an 11am local time kickoff, at least) are stereotypically kind and welcoming. The tailgating fare is glorious. Once you’re inside, an unassuming teenage girl in the row in front of you will scream “Kinnick is where top five teams go to die, baby,” warping Jim Harbaugh’s pre-game comments into a downright intimidating Viking war cry, as AC/DC’s “Back in Black” suddenly blasts out over the stadium PA. I have never heard a home crowd at its loudest for their team only when they are mired in a game state in which defeat is statistically assured. You begin to doubt statistics. They have a live hawk that flies right out of the press box. Their recent communitarian tradition of waving across the street to the gathered families inside the children’s hospital is already so well-established in college football culture that it constantly oscillates back and forth between over-commercialized and genuinely moving.
At the level of uncritical spectacle, this is about as appealing a “product” as latter-day college football can get. And yet the core service, the football team, is nothing but end-of-empire palace intrigue on the field and realpolitik decrepitude off of it. The games resemble Shakespeare’s lesser-performed histories. They wear 1970s-style NFL uniforms and play an outmoded and complicated 1970s-style NFL offense unrecognizable to any future recruit with a Patrick Mahomes fathead decal in their bedroom. Meanwhile, their coaches allegedly engage in depressingly timeless racism, among other petty tyrannies.
Though you can pick any among these reasons why your average Iowa football fan is not very happy right now, I still wasn’t prepared for the stoicism and noble suffering I encountered in Iowa City. For weeks it has baffled me. Tennessee fans once staged a revolt over leaked information so successful the school backed out of a memorandum of understanding with a new potential head coach. Michigan fans once indirectly fired an Athletic Director and notably submitted for evidence in their public trial was a modestly embarrassing brand activation. Revolutionary energies better suited for perhaps any other cause have terminated multi-million-dollar contracts.
After the Illinois game, I entertained a possibility I sent to my Iowa friends, among them a longtime college football blogger and a university development director who cut his teeth in athletic departments. Following the bye, Iowa is headed to Ohio State to potentially be strafed by their “backyard football” passing attack. Kirk Ferentz’s teams rarely get blown out; their most lopsided defeats (by 35 and 46 points) had occurred during his inaugural season in 1999, until a 39-point defeat in last year’s Big Ten Championship Game (the bricks last season landed methodically for ten wins up until this point). Would losing by, say, 49 in Columbus somewhat move a needle?
Their response: “no, you should know better.” And I remembered that I did. Kirk Ferentz’s recent extension and buyout make him too firmly entrenched to remove for a program currently without a coterie of billionaire agri-business boosters. The university has every reason to move on from athletic director Gary Barta, and yet they do not. Instead of revolution, Iowa fans seem to accept their lot in a niche version of Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation. They may be beginning to understand something the rest of us do not.
After all, reader, your school and my school are, have been, or will be, just as bad. Maybe it is telling that one requires the position of a disinterested third party to examine in another’s fandom what they may fitfully digest or otherwise amputate from their own. One of college football’s uglier truths is that the mask doesn’t begin to slip until the winning stops, the brand activations beget the unearthing of institutional and moral rot, revealing the whole twisted and hideous and uncanny cyborg face behind all of this. If you open your mental aperture too wide, if you’re already prone to cynicism, you are forced to consider the absurdity of it all: a multi-billion dollar amateur sport with deep and weird historical and cultural roots lurching toward becoming all but a licensed semi-professional league—only with worse player compensation and protections, more graft, than the professional one—for increasingly bizarre machines of rent-seeking and capital accumulation the chief output of which is debt and zombified credentialism.
The Iowan gambit is to steel yourself against this, to maintain strategic cognitive dissonance. Only, why? For what? What is the upside? The prospect of maybe enjoying watching a football game?
Then there was that historic weekend for the sport, exploding in hyperreal autumnal orange. Tennesse’s Chase McGrath got a “knuckleball” between uprights and up over a crossbar, all of which are now resting at the bottom of a river. Maybe it was tipped, and that is why it looked so ugly going up, even though it never seemed anything but true. McGrath says he doesn’t know. He looked liked he could barely believe the moment himself, barely believe it was his leg, his misfit position, winning a generational blockbuster of a game on the same night his teammate Jalin Hyatt caught five touchdown passes, any one of them befitting of a walk-off ending, any one of them the sharp edge of a sword that decapitated Old God Alabama after an age (15 years in football time); cigar smoke rose from Neyland like steam coming off the giant’s fresh corpse. Sometimes the spectacle is so overawing it seems ludicrous not to feel legendary sentimentality, to be moved by mirrors of your own symbolic overcomings.
But football takes place in the real world. In Rice-Eccles Stadium, Utah hosted USC, and swiftly followed up the pandemonium in Knoxville with Cam Rising’s two-point conversion. It was what, if you watch this stuff habitually, you don’t tire of calling a “thrilling upset.” You watched to be entertained. And yet Utah’s helmets that night were hand-painted diptychs of their one-time teammates, Ty Jordan and Aaron Lowe. Both wore the number 22. Both died before their time, 9 months apart. The game ball was presented to their mothers.
Elsewhere, Michigan football is still watched by Meechie Walker, and Meechie Walker is still watched over by Michigan Football. It’s easy to see through the surfeit of “human interest” stories in sports, in college football especially, to all the engagement the networks seek to farm from end-users far beyond the sickos and the diehards of America’s weirdest sporting pastime, easy to imagine the Tom Gruniks behind each overwhelmingly heart-stringing segment. But it is difficult to argue with tangible connection, to not to find serious historical resonance in something like a “moment of loudness,” a ritual established to honor collective grief, wrest flourishing from within it. Collective grief! Here, in this country, where we’re achingly longing to honor it beyond infographic special edition newspapers, or too weary to consider it, or too terrified to even countenance the gravity of its recent toll, less it, like a losing football team, reveal some deeply unpleasant truth about how we’ve organized things. Is the college football stadium one of the few venues left where collective grief and healing on a community scale can physically take place? Last night, you could have fooled me. Just as I know those places are also a potential threat to health, monuments to nationalist mythmaking, a flashing billboard selling your life insurance, and housed on a campus humming with dark money, cutting miles of settlement checks. The alienated edgelord and the burned-out activist still have to piss in the same trough underneath the stands, though. The team will never move towns. Sometimes the LSU band will get to play “Neck.” So this is maybe just where God lives, now, if God is a sign that can only ever be inaccurately, imperfectly signified.
An old friend, an Iowa fan, sent me a picture of his outdoor firepit last night, the USC Utah game visibly on TV in the background. “I go through the same ritual every year when we have our bye week,” he wrote, “and I remember that football is sometimes fun. It’s not always a trip to the dentist!” But I know next weekend he will be solemnly watching the Hawkeyes take the field at Ohio Stadium, under what will certainly be a doom-gray sky, to fail spectacularly. Their defeat is almost inevitable, the world’s violent and nihilistic absurdity and willfully insoluble crises will continue to close in around us. The escapist fantasies of our fandoms will remain a very weak buttress against it all, except maybe insofar as it will minorly rehearse what life’s endless horizon of crushing defeat and failure prepares us for: survival, solidarity, joy. Brian Ferentz asked a question, and he should already know the answer. There is no upside. Football cannot save us. We learn how to save ourselves inside of it.
This is Prettyman. A (hopefully) weekly newsletter about consuming college football, every Sunday or so. You can subscribe to it.