Iowa Is a Deliciously Awful Football Miracle

The 10–2 Hawkeyes have the worst offense in FBS yet are playing for a Big Ten title and could throw a major wrench in the CFP. How is that possible?

Near the end of his press conference this week, Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz dropped this thought: “If we would win, that would really screw things up, I’m guessing. Might be kind of funny, actually.”

Oh, it would screw things up. If the three-touchdown underdog Hawkeyes defeat No. 2 Michigan on Saturday night for the Big Ten championship, it would throw the College Football Playoff selections into tumult. It would almost certainly eject their own league from the four-team bracket. It also would be a blow to ESPN’s CFP ratings, which would lose a lightning-rod program with a massive fan base.

Iowa scrounged together 10 wins despite having the worst offense in the country this season.  :: Jeff Hanisch/USA TODAY Sports

And, yes, it would be funny. Not just generating laughs from the Jim Harbaugh haters who want to see the scandal-dogged Wolverines fall. More broadly, an Iowa win would also hilariously flout an established truth of football: that a team has to have at least a hint of offensive competence to achieve something significant.

Iowa does not possess that. Just by getting this far, this team already violates precedent and common sense. The Hawkeyes’ success is one of the strangest developments in modern football history.

They are the best bad football team of the 21st century or the worst good football team of the 21st century. Take your pick. The team with the literal worst offense in the country, No. 133 out of 133 in the FBS ranks, has a 10–2 record. Iowa’s 18 points and 246 yards per game are a fireable offense for offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, the head coach’s son, who will be let go when the season ends. Yet the Hawks have manufactured a No. 16 ranking in the CFP top 25 out of that mess.

Since 2000, the FBS team that finishes the season last in total offense has never had a winning record, much less 10 wins. In fact, it has never even won half that many games. The best record for the worst offense in that time: 4–8 for Central Florida in ’08. The last-place offensive team has been winless six times and gone 1–11 six times. The average number of victories this century for the team with the worst offense: 1.43.

Iowa is 4–2 when it has scored 15 points or fewer, which is basically impossible. The last time anyone won four Big Ten games while scoring 15 or fewer points was 1950, when Wisconsin did it and dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

Injuries took a toll on this Iowa offense, taking out starting quarterback Cade McNamara and two star tight ends, Luke Lachey and Erick All. But it should be noted that McNamara, a Michigan transfer, had his career-low pass efficiency rating at the time of his season-ending injury in the fifth game. Iowa was bad at offense even with all hands on deck.

Yet in a testament to fortitude and good fortune, the Hawkeyes have learned to fly with lead weights around their ankles. The elements of this football miracle are threefold: defense, special teams and Big Ten West membership.

Iowa has always been a good defensive program under Kirk Ferentz, who has been the head coach since 1999, and especially with defensive coordinator Phil Parker, who has been on the job since 2012. This year has been Parker’s best work yet, both statistically and contextually.

The Hawkeyes are allowing 12.2 points per game, lowest in Parker’s tenure and have surrendered just two rushing touchdowns—one from two yards out, the other from one. They’ve done this despite an offense that did the defensive unit no favors in terms of scoring enough to allow any breathing room. In short, Parker’s defense had to be great, or the record would be closer to 2–10 than 10–2.

Iowa also has always been good at special teams under Ferentz. Hawkeyes fans have embraced this staid part of their culture, wearing sweatshirts that read “Punts” and T-shirts that read “Punting is winning.” (In a lot of places in college football, punting is considered surrendering. Not in Iowa City.)

In an era when coaches enthusiastically—and sometimes heedlessly—go for it on fourth down, Ferentz stands old-school firm with his brilliant punter, 26-year-old Australian Tory Taylor. Iowa has punted 80 times this season, most in the nation. It has gone for it on fourth down seven times, second-fewest in the nation. (The only team that has gone for it less often on fourth is Alabama, just four times, including a rather important fourth-and-31 conversion last week.)

Kick it and play defense, the Iowa Way. That philosophy has won Kirk Ferentz a ton of games and virtual emperor status. Hawkeyes fans can take pride in finding ways to win, but also would be forgiven for wondering whether they might actually compete for a national championship if someone other than the coach’s son had been the offensive coordinator.

The third factor cannot be overstated: Iowa plays in a terrible division, one full of similarly inept offenses, a place where the mesmerizing mediocrity runs deep. After the Hawkeyes, the other six teams in the Big Ten West are all clustered between 7–5 and 4–8, with a grand total of zero wins over ranked opponents. Outside of Iowa, the West went 1–6 in nonconference games against fellow Power 5 programs, and 6–12 against the Big Ten East.

Brian Ferentz was fired as offensive coordinator for not reaching his contractually obligated goal of averaging 25 points per game. If that provision were in the contracts of every OC in the West, they’d all be fired. No team in that division averaged more than 24.5.

Given the West’s historic futility against the East, Iowa is a fitting final representative in the last Big Ten title game before the league expands to 18 teams and scraps divisions. The West is 0–9 against the East in the championship game, and most of them have not been close. That includes the 2021 game, in which Michigan bludgeoned Iowa 42–3.

This game could be a reprise of that, although it’s hard to see how the Hawkeyes would get the three. But, hey, they will play the game. And as Kirk Ferentz said, it would be kind of funny if the best bad/worst good team in America found a way to win one more.