CFB51 College Football Fan Community
The Power Five => Big Ten => Topic started by: Hawkinole on January 07, 2025, 11:48:25 PM
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Hawkeyes land South Dakota State University Jackrabbits' QB Mark Gronowski from transfer portal. He led the Jackrabbits to two national championships, a third national championship game, and to the semifinals losing to eventual champion NDSU in 2024.
Gronowski has thrown for 10,309 yards, and 93 touchdowns vs. 20 INTs. He is mobile, having run for 1,787 yards.
Gronowski grew up in suburban Chicago. His dad has an Iowa connection. His dad played QB for Drake. This is the best transfer portal acquisition since 5-star left tackle Kaidyn Proctor transferred to Iowa for the Spring 2024 semester, then transferred back to Alabama at the start of the Summer 2024. Iowa has to have tightened up its NIL contracts by now, one can hope.
We will see if Gronowski stays on for the Fall 2025.
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He must love the rural midwest.
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He must love the rural midwest.
Apparently the choice came down to one more year of college eligibility at the FBS level with NIL funding, or taking his chances in the NFL draft.
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A QB going to Iowa seems unwise.
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Gronoski is another one of those 23 year Olds that seem to have been playing for forever.
His freshman season was supposed to be in fall of 2020 but got postponed to spring of 2021 due to covid. Gronoski got hurt with an ACL in the spring 2021 FCS NCG and he ended up sitting out the entire fall of 2021 season.
Then he came back and led SDSU to national championships in 2022 and 2023. SDSU ended up losing in the FCS semis in 2024.
So 2025 will be his 6th year. He got both a covid year and medical redshirt year.
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(https://media.gettyimages.com/id/81935131/photo/a-senior-man-with-football-in-the-air.jpg?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=rZ45oKieEzaEqkgd0MMNQzD3ziV6FQZ40tHUrotWiNg=)
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I just read and article on a Chicago channel 5 sports website stating that Iowa's QB recruit Gronowski was being paid a 7 figure NIL deal. Gronowski believed this was better than going pro because if he were drafted and didn't make the team that wouldn't pay so well. According to him this was more of a gaurantee. Who knew college kids get paid this much from NIL?
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I just read and article on a Chicago channel 5 sports website stating that Iowa's QB recruit Gronowski was being paid a 7 figure NIL deal. Gronowski believed this was better than going pro because if he were drafted and didn't make the team that wouldn't pay so well. According to him this was more of a gaurantee. Who knew college kids get paid this much from NIL?
Also it turns out Gronowski is hurt, needs surgery, will miss spring practice, and is out until at least June.
Knowing this, it makes a little more sense why he is taking the NIL money from Iowa.
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His injury isn't mentioned in the Channel 5 article. I am aware and it definitely would subtract from his value in the NFL draft as he couldn't go through The Combine
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I just read and article on a Chicago channel 5 sports website stating that Iowa's QB recruit Gronowski was being paid a 7 figure NIL deal. Gronowski believed this was better than going pro because if he were drafted and didn't make the team that wouldn't pay so well. According to him this was more of a gaurantee. Who knew college kids get paid this much from NIL?
Carson Beck got $4 Million to transfer from Georgia to Miami.
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Carson Beck got $4 Million to transfer from Georgia to Miami.
Get your wallet out if you want to see the Badgers win, or should I say, get your briefcase out, because most of us would get sore sitting on Badger fans' fat wallets.
Who is paying for these NIL deals at Iowa and Wisconsin? At some point college athletic departments will incorporate. Their donors will become stockholders, and if the team does well they receive some kind of return on investment, even if only it is a little bit.
I am happy for the athletes. I had always thought they should be paid $100-$200 for laundry, alcohol, and pizza outings each month, and then years advanced, and so maybe $400 or $500 per month. But, no, the NCAA would not agree, and now we see the result.
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The Badgers don't have a megadonor and Wisconsin is a Packers state. They shop for the bargain bin players in Madison. Not a lot of fat wallets in Wisconsin.
In the current landscape, it's doubtful that Wisconsin will ever win the B1G again.
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The Badgers don't have a megadonor and Wisconsin is a Packers state. They shop for the bargain bin players in Madison. Not a lot of fat wallets in Wisconsin.
In the current landscape, it's doubtful that Wisconsin will ever win the B1G again.
I lean toward this position for all teams like Iowa and Wisconsin, but then we have outliers in the first year of the FBS playoffs. ASU presented well. Indiana made the playoff. I don't think Indiana's situation is sustainable longer term. It was a unique situation. However they could become the 1980s-2020s Iowa Hawkeyes, or the 1990s-2010s Wisconsin Badgers, with a Big Ten championship here or there.
Iowa seems distant from getting a Big Ten championship, too. That said, we had a logjam like this in the late 1960s through about 1980 with Ohio State and Michigan controlling things, and then it broke for about 25-years, until it started coming back and then tOSU and Michigan resumed domination almost full force, but with MSU breaking through once or twice. I think the NCAA will allow payments from athletic departments and limit the amounts of those payments. But the advertisers will brake the back of this parity, although as with the Caitlin Clark effect, if there is one really great athlete, he (or she) could be anywhere. It is very likely that in football that athlete will be in Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, or Michigan, and occasionally in California. We run a bit short on billionaire football fans here in Iowa.
I saw an article today that claimed Iowa's new QB NIL recruit - Mark Gronowski's surgery involved a shoulder injury on his throwing side.
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I just read and article on a Chicago channel 5 sports website stating that Iowa's QB recruit Gronowski was being paid a 7 figure NIL deal. Gronowski believed this was better than going pro because if he were drafted and didn't make the team that wouldn't pay so well. According to him this was more of a gaurantee. Who knew college kids get paid this much from NIL?
I think every P4 starting QB, or at least most of them, are getting 7 figures
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So now that Ferentz has won his 200th game at Iowa (October 12 win over Washington) how long does he stick around? I figured Ferentz was holding on until his 200th win, would then retire come the offseason, so now what?
(https://i.imgur.com/6JfNJoU.png)
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I think he needs a few more to pass Bo for alltime Big Ten wins
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He says he enjoys coaching and plans to coach in 2025. He will turn 70 Aug. 1, 2025.
While there is no known succession plan, Levar Woods would be the logical successor. Seth Wallace, assistant head coach and linebackers coach, was the acting head coach for Iowa's first game of 2024. Ferentz was suspended for that game because it was disclosed he had spoken to Cade McNamara before McNamara entered the transfer portal a couple years ago. I don't think that his assistant head coach designation would make Seth Wallace the most logical successor. Woods and Wallace are both 46.
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IOWA CITY — Iowa quarterback Brendan Sullivan has entered the transfer portal, a program spokesperson confirmed to the Register Friday. Pete Nakos of On3 was first to report the news.
Sullivan departs Iowa after one season in the Hawkeye program.
Sullivan posted the following message via social media:
"Hawkeye Nation,
I have loved and enjoyed every second I spent here. Thank you to the coaching and support staff, my teammates, and the fans. You have all made this an awesome experience.
After continued prayer and conversations with my family, it is in my best interest to enter the transfer portal for my final year of eligibility. Thank you, Iowa!"
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I don't really know what to say about him. I think he's an easy G5 starter, but a P5 package QB. So, good luck to him. I hope he finds what he's looking for.
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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.”
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I like it.
"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.”
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eventually isn't good enuff for most kids
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(https://i.imgur.com/6SD5MB3.jpeg)