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.
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