Going Iowanfinite: The Rise of a Football Revolutionary

 

Note: The following excerpt from the author embedded within the Iowa football program in the spring of 2023, is from a book originally completed before the 2023 football season and published on Friday, October 27, 2023.     

“Let me ask you something,” Brian Ferentz said to his offensive coaching staff.  He sat at the head of a large u-shaped desk at the Hansen Football Performance Center leaning back, his arms behind his head.  “What’s the most efficient play in football?”

He stared at the group before him, wizened old coaches whose heads bore permanent marks and indentations from years of headset squinting through half-glasses, eager young graduate assistants still in playing shape and looming like distant mountains in the corners of the room, afraid to say anything, and me, trying not to be noticed as I wrote everything down.

“Three point three yard run,” wheezed out Mackett.  Walt Mackett had been with the Hawkeyes since he played as a nasty fullback in 1952 and unofficially led the Big Ten in biting incidents.  Mackett officially retired in 1997, but still hung around in meetings and prepared detailed longhand scouting reports that he passed around.

“Wrong,” Ferentz said.  “Plannitz.”

Plannitz, a nervous assistant who had just graduated after five years as a walk-on and who never got into a single game because the one time they decided to send him in in a blowout against Western Illinois he was on the toilet, gulped.  “Uhhh, five yard out,” he said.

“Wrong.”  He began randomly pointing around the room with his marker.

“Tight end screen.”  

“Nope.”

“Jet sweep.”

“No.”

“Flea flicker.”

“That's not even real. Oh Grady, you think this is boring?  Well, enlighten us.”

Grant Grady, a hotshot receivers coach who was not too fond of Ferentz’s little quizzes, had been folding a playsheet into a paper giraffe in a sort of hostile origami.  “I don’t know Brian, what about a fuckin’ punt.”  

Everyone laughed.  The stagnant nature of Iowa’s 2022 offense was a running joke in the football media and one that Ferentz didn’t think was very funny, which is why he was in the meeting room.

“You know what you’re not that far off.”

Ferentz stood up and sauntered over to the whiteboard.  He maintained the bulk and bearing of a former lineman.  He uncapped his marker and wrote a two on the board.  

“Safety.  How many plays did the offense run?”

“The offense, coach?” said Plannitz.

“Yeah.  How many did we run?  It’s not a trick question.”

“Uh, none,” Plannitz said.

“Damn straight.”  He put a slash sign with a zero next to the two.

“Fumble return, how many did we run?”  He wrote a six on the board.

This time two or three coaches chimed in at the same time.  “Zero.”  Six slash zero on the board.

“Right.  Punt return?” He wrote another 6 then a slash.  

All of the coaches said “zero” in unison as Ferentz wrote it on the board except for one or two that said “none” and Grady, who was intently drawing teeth on his giraffe.  

“How about a situation where a team lines up for an extra point or two-point conversion but somehow manages to lose possession of the football in its own endzone on the complete other end of the field?”

“Zero,” they yelled out because that was the pattern but many of them looked confused.  “That’s right,” Ferentz said and then wrote a one slash zero.  “Do the math on those.  Which one is most efficient? We’re talkin’ points per offensive play.  Who here knows basic division?”

A few brows furrowed.  Plannitz pulled his phone halfway out of his pocket and then sheepishly put it back when he noticed no one else doing that.  A heavy silence settled in the room.

Grady looked up.  “They’re all horseshit.  You can’t do ‘em.”  “You can’t divide by zero.  It’s not allowed or something.”

“That’s absolutely right.  They’re all exactly the same.  The same efficiency.  Zero plays for the offense.  It’s so efficient that it is scientifically impossible to determine.  Every other offense in the country is running plays.  They’re trying to do yardage.  They’re trying to do points.  Well guess what, you take the best offense in the goddamn country and you know what they’re doing?  Look at their efficiency numbers.  They exist.  Ours don’t.  There’s no defense in the goddamn universe that knows how to stop our shit.”

Grady exhaled deeply.”

“Got something to say, Grant?”  

“This is the absolute stupidest shit I’ve ever heard, Brian,” he said.  Ferentz walked over to him and they met forehead to forehead.  

“Get the fuck out of my football performance center,” Ferentz said.

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Grady said as he gathered his stuff and walked out.  “Good luck, fellas.  I mean that.  Good fuckin’ luck.”  Ferentz grabbed the giraffe in his meaty hand and crushed it.

“Undetermined.  That’s our strategy.”

**********

You would not think that Iowa’s football team, a notoriously staid institution where Brian’s father Kirk has been churning out the same defense, tight ends, and punts operation for decades as the longest-tenured coach in the Big Ten would be something I would write about.  My interests tend towards the cutting edge.  For example, in Jeeves Nation, I explored the world’s most innovative search engine poised to remake the entire concept of searching the World Wide Web.  In Liar’s Pogs, I examined the burgeoning pog economy emerging in schoolyards that turned into a complex international financial system of its own.  My own interest in sports came out in The Trestman Cometh, a story about a coach whose battle to bring revolutionary strategies from Canadian football to the NFL was derailed by the fact that he looked like a ventriloquists’ dummy from the cover of an R.L. Stine novel.

College football represents a far more diverse array of strategies than the NFL.  Teams are limited based on their own resources and available players.  Teams are also molded to coaches' idiosyncratic preferences.  Some teams like to try to gradually run over their opponents like a slow-moving molasses calamity.  Some teams try to move as quickly as possible and exhaust their opponents.  Other teams, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force teams unable to field players with the wide-bodied bulk of their peers, like to confuse opponents by running archaic option configurations that befuddle defenses unsure of who can run the ball.  

At Iowa, though, whatever system they had was not working.  In 2022, Iowa ranked dead last out of 130 total teams in yards per game, averaging nearly 30 yards fewer than the next-worst team Eastern Michigan.  They averaged only 117 passing yards per game; the only teams that threw for fewer yards were Navy and Air Force, which intentionally eschew the forward pass as part of their offensive strategy.  Despite the pitiful and ineffectual play of its offense, Iowa's defense still managed to carry the team to eight wins, including a victory in the Music City Bowl.  But Brian Ferentz was sick of hearing about how crappy his offense was.  With his offense already at rock bottom, Ferentz was prepared to unleash his new concept and forever change how college football was played.

I first came to know Brian Ferentz after publishing “Boylenball”, an article for the New Yorker that featured a coach who revolutionized the concept of the timeout in the NBA using innovative mathematical models to time them while philistines dismissed him as a bald asshole taking pointless timeouts while already hopelessly behind because he was mad.  Ferentz reached out to me to ask about a photo that ran in the article where Boylen wore a pork pie hat because, as a man with an equally enormous head, he had trouble finding a one that could accommodate his bulbous cranium.  I told him that Boylen was no longer talking to me because he thought the article made him seem like a “boob” but the photographer tipped me off to a place called Fred Gazoo’s Huge Haberdaschery that specialized in hats for the large-headed gentleman.  We started corresponding after that and finally met for a drink when he was scouting a player not far from where I was embedded with the founders of WebTV.  This is when I learned about Undetermined Football.

The easy way to talk about Brian Ferentz is with the cliched story of a son desperate to escape the enormous shadow of his own father.  After all, that is how things appear.  He played for Kirk and then, after a brief foray coaching in the NFL, returned to coach for him, steadily rising through the ranks, rankled by charges of nepotism while never being able to satisfy the old man.  The book practically writes itself.  But, at least as Ferentz tells it, that has nothing to do with his entry into football.  He instead sees it not as some sort of complicated King Lear-style family drama but as an intellectual puzzle.  He’d be happy to run his experiments anywhere.  But Iowa provided an opportunity and a head coach who would at least have to listen to his ideas because his mom would yell “Kirk! Listen to Brian’s ideas.”

Ferentz had been nurturing the idea for undetermined football for some time.  He tells me that the idea is rooted predictably in rebellion.  He had grown up with the idea of staid Iowa football and as a teenager became obsessed with offense, with elaborate ways of marching down the field and scoring points.  He studied the then-novel spread offense, the air raid, the old run & shoot.  As a boy, he hid play sheets showing the run/pass option under his mattress.  But as he got older, Ferentz grew tired of exotic offensive looks.  He had in mind something better.

“Do you know about Napoleon in Russia?” he said.  I told him I did but he kept going as if I said I did not.  Ferentz, a history major and the owner of several books about horse-based  warfare, began to explain how, as the Grande Armée penetrated deeper into Russia, the Russian forces defeated them by retreating further, stretching the French supply lines as winter encroached upon it.  “I thought to myself, well in the Big Ten we have a hell of a winter.  What if we also have retreat?”  

Ferentz told me that his new offensive gameplan was not just based on mathematics and the impossible “divide by zero” principle but also had elements of psychology.  He showed me papers on the concept of “mirroring” where humans as social animals had an unconscious need to emulate other humans in a similar setting.  Therefore, instead of having his team model brilliant offensive behavior such as by completing multiple forward passes or earning first downs, his team would instead foster an environment hostile to offense.  His running backs would run pointlessly into defensive tackles.  His quarterbacks would throw the ball mainly to the turf.  The other team, unaware of basic human psychology, would find themselves also playing like dogshit subconsciously out of a fear of ostracization that resided in the vestigial lobes of our primate brains.  Pretty soon both quarterbacks would be hurling themselves into linebackers or letting snaps fly over their head but only one would be doing so by design.  “Everyone's trying to run plays that work.  But we don't.  That’s the advantage right there,” he said to me as he drilled his running backs on letting a ball hit them in the face.

The idea was as counterintuitive as it was brilliant.  An offense that functionally refused to act, that performed the minimum amount of offense allowed in a football game, would act as a fulcrum where the defense and special teams would have more and more opportunities to score points.  This process would become so efficient, at least according to Ferentz’s calculations, that Iowa would become one of the highest-scoring teams in the country.  And this year he was going to find out.

It was unclear around the program whether Kirk Ferentz was on board with his son’s program or simply didn’t notice.  I tried speaking to him about this, but during our brief allotted interview time he simply squinted at me and ate an entire white onion like an apple.  

I had found a new innovation.  My publisher told me to go ahead and embed myself with the Iowa offense during training camp for the 2023 season.  To make things even more interesting, Ferentz had Iowa’s athletic director add in clauses to his own contract about how many points the team would score.  I was nervous about fitting in, so I started wearing hats and coach-style sunglasses and constantly spitting and calling things “horseshit” until I seamlessly blended into the sideline. That summer, I observed Iowa secretly installing new drills that no one had ever seen: fumbling, taking idiotic penalties at the exact wrong time, and summoning the punt team.  My publisher sold the film rights for $12 million.

It was obvious that Ferentz had stumbled onto a revolution in football strategy.  No one in the Big Ten knew what as coming.  No one in the football press knew this would happen, except for one person: me.

Please enjoy my next project Planet of The Apes: How NFTs Reshaped the Global Economy.