It might surprise some that the supposedly old-school Ferentz, who turns 70 on Aug. 1 and is leading the Hawkeyes for a 27th straight season, has been so receptive to some of the latest massive shifts in the college model. But, looking closer, Ferentz’s past comments have revealed his desire for a more NFL-style approach to the college game – including a salary cap of sorts, which would be coming with the proposed House vs. NCAA settlement that needs Judge Claudia Wilken’s final approval. The deadline for her ruling is June 27 but could come any day.
“I don’t see any signs of him slowing down anytime soon,” Tyler Barnes, Iowa football’s general manager/chief of staff and Ferentz’s son-in-law, told the Des Moines Register in a 40-minute interview on June 4. “He’s still working out once, if not twice, a day. He’s still one of the first ones in the office, last ones to leave at times. He enjoys what he’s doing.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Ferentz will be coaching for another 10 years. But with revenue sharing – where universities can pay players directly – expected to begin July 1, Iowa feels that its longstanding model of high school recruiting and development has potential to thrive. So why would Ferentz leave his $7 million-a-year job now?
Barnes’ title change from Iowa’s recruiting director to GM/chief of staff last August was a reflection of college football’s evolving times. Of the planned $20.5 million cap (a calculation derived from 22% of Power Four revenues) in player payments, the wealthiest programs – including Iowa – are expected to spend $14-$15 million on their football rosters.
For much of the last year, Barnes has been tinkering with numbers to develop Iowa’s ideal model of how much to pay its roster (which as of early June was at 106 players).
Unlike NFL salaries, what Iowa (or any school) pays its athletes will not be public. That also makes it harder to know what the market value will be for certain positions. But Iowa under Ferentz has always done things its own way. And in this case, Barnes’ approach was to study (and mimic) the most successful teams in the NFL, in which all 32 teams operate in a regulated salary-cap structure.
He gathered data over a 10-year period and examined the NFL’s eight best-performing franchises – the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers, as examples – and the eight worst-performing. Barnes wanted to understand if there were correlations in how they spent (or misspent) their money.
“Those top eight teams, all but one, they hit on a quarterback. And a really good one,” Barnes said. “Then you look at the bottom eight teams, they did not hit on quarterbacks.”
That’s something that we’ve heard Ferentz – at a recent Polk County I-Club event – and offensive coordinator Tim Lester talk about lately, too. Iowa needs to get better at this, and Lester’s obsessive focus on quarterback play should help.
The Hawkeyes, as their fans painfully know, have been poor performers in quarterback recruiting. Recent high school QB signees didn’t pan out and transferred to lower-level schools (Deuce Hogan, 2020, to Nicholls State; Joe Labas, 2021, to Central Michigan; Carson May, 2022, to Abliene Christian; Marco Lainez, 2023, to Elon; James Resar, 2024, to UNC-Pembroke).
Lester, Iowa's second-year OC, as of June 8 will have brought in one sophomore (Hank Brown) and three freshmen (Jimmy Sullivan, Jeremy Hecklinski, Ryan Fitzgerald) to learn his NFL-style system behind big-ticket transfer Mark Gronowski.
If at least one of them hits, that’s going to be – in theory – a major step forward in how Iowa can maximize its finances under the new structure. QBs are the costliest position at both the NFL and college levels. In the NFL, finding a low-cost rookie and developing him and eventually paying him is the best financial plan.
Yeah, Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson are getting paid enormous dollars now. But they didn’t begin their careers with robust price tags, which allowed their franchises to build a winning infrastructure around them.
“We want to hit on a high school kid rather than going to the portal every year for a quarterback,” Barnes said. “Because when you hit a high school kid, inherently they're going to be a little bit cheaper in the long run, versus a one-year or two-year rental as a transfer.”
Additionally, Barnes discovered, the bottom eight teams spent a disproportionate amount of dollars on edge rushers and cornerbacks – premium positions in the NFL but not necessarily at Iowa. That revelation was somewhat reassuring, because the Hawkeyes – with how they’re constructed under longtime defensive coordinator Phil Parker, the 2023 Broyles Award winner – aren’t inherently tempted to overspend in those departments.
“In the NFL, there's a lot of man-to-man corners, right? We don't play man-to-man,” Barnes said. “In the NFL, they're obsessed with pure edge rushers. We don’t necessarily run the same structure of a defense where we don’t need to worry about having a true edge rusher.”
Again, we’ll never officially know exactly where the dollars are going at Iowa.
But there are a couple principles that can be safely known and counted on.
No. 1: The Hawkeyes will spend to bolster the line of scrimmage
Maybe we’ve seen a hint of that in the 2026 recruiting class, which as of June 5 had five offensive-line commitments out of nine total. Last year’s College Football Playoff and Super Bowl also underscored the value of overpowering trench play. And, of course, that has always been Ferentz’s specialty as a former offensive-line coach.
“O-line and D-line,” Barnes said. “It starts up front on both sides.”
No. 2: The Hawkeyes will pay for production, not potential
The expectation is that Iowa’s veteran, proven players will end up getting paid. And younger players will have to earn it.
That approach makes perfect sense in how Ferentz structures his program. He sets high expectations of accountability and recruits prospects who are wired to meet them. That, ideally, is a way to also curb locker-room jealousy.
The better and faster a player develops, the more likely he is to get paid − both at Iowa and then, on a much richer scale, in the NFL.
“Our best, most productive players and top leaders on the team are going to make the most money,” Barnes said. “That’s how we're built. It's very hard for us to go out and grab a transfer at really any position and bring them in and pay them more than one of our top guys (who) is going to be an NFL Draft pick.
"If money's your driving force (as a prospect), we're out of it. If it's in your top three factors, we're probably not crazy about it. Because we've got a lot to offer here, and you're going to get paid (eventually) at every level.”
