Iowa football: Ferentz has earned new contract
Even though I wasn’t at his news conference Monday, it seems obvious that Iowa State football coach Paul Rhoads was providing some levity in preparation for Saturday’s intrastate showdown when he told reporters that he sent Kirk Ferentz a text message asking for some spending money.
Rhoads made the comment in reaction to Ferentz being given a new contract extension that runs through the 2020 season and makes Ferentz the highest paid coach in the Big Ten at $3,675,000 annually.
The fact that Rhoads made the comment proves how out of whack college football coaching salaries have become, considering he makes over $1 million annually.
Rhoads got a laugh out it, and so did Ferentz when he responded to the comment Tuesday during his weekly news conference.
“He should have sent it to my wife, that simple,” Ferentz said. “I’m like everybody else. You’re asking the wrong guy on that one.
“I’m up to $20 a week now. That’s my allowance. That’s pretty good.”
Ferentz isn’t like everybody else because most people don’t earn in a lifetime what he earns in one year coaching the Hawkeyes.
But what’s Ferentz suppose to say in that situation?
For him, it seems like the worst part about being a millionaire is having to talk publicly about it. The subject makes him uncomfortable because Ferentz is a humble guy and he knows there are people who take exception to how much he earns as a football coach.
George Wine retired as the Iowa sports information director in 1993 at a time when college football coaches were paid well, but not like rock stars.
“It’s really gotten away from the universities the last 10 years,” Wine said.
And although Wine is surprised by today’s coaching salaries, he’s even more surprised by the reaction, or lack of reaction to it, especially among college faculty members.
“The interesting thing about the salaries today; the faculty does not seem to care one way or the other,” Wine said. “There is no reaction that I know of from the faculty.”
That wasn’t always the case.
Wine said there was big fuss in 1958 when the Iowa athletic department spent approximately $500,000 to build the old football press box. And that was during the glory years under former coach Forest Evashevski.
“The faculty was up in arms,” Wine said. “They thought we were throwing money down the toilet. And somebody wrote a letter to the Daily Iowan, a funny one that I remember said, ‘the faculty is starving to death in the shade of the press box.’
“And now there just doesn’t seem to be any reaction at all to the money it takes to run a major college athletic program.”
It could be because of the fact that some Division I college football programs, including Iowa, are self-supportive and the driving force financially behind other sports programs. In other words, the Iowa football program pays all of its bills, including Ferentz’s salary, and then some.
You can gripe all you want about how much money Ferentz makes, but it sure beats the alternative.
It makes more sense financially to reward Ferentz and to take steps to keep him at Iowa rather than risk slipping back into another dark age.
Iowa fans have seen what happens when the wrong person is hired to run the football program.
The Big Ten Network recently showed some footage of an Iowa game from the mid-1960s when the program was in decline. The camera followed an Iowa receiver as he advanced down field before a bunch of empty seats in what now is called Kinnick Stadium.
Empty seats are more costly in the long run than paying Ferentz a lot of money to keep them filled.
“This is a difficult place to win, I think people understand that, despite the fact we’ve had three very good decades of football here” Wine said. “It’s not easy to win at Iowa just because we don’t have a lot of home-grown talent.”
It takes the right fit to win at almost any school, but especially at Iowa where there are built-in obstacles that come with the job.
If you skimp on Ferentz’s salary, you risk losing him and then you risk hiring the wrong fit to replace him.
Iowa Athletics Director Gary Barta doesn’t want to take that risk and you can’t blame him.
One argument against the rising salaries is that it comes at the expense of the student-athlete.
There are some college football and men’s basketball coaches that make enough money to take care of their grandchildren for life, whereas a student-athlete on scholarship in those two sports and not named Reggie Bush still only gets tuition, room and board and books.
Wine said he and former Iowa football coach Hayden Fry have discussed this topic numerous times.
“I personally would like to see some of that money shared with the players, because as Hayden Fry says you can play the game without the coaches and you can play it without the administrators, but try playing it without the players,” Wine said. “You can’t.”
Iowa offensive lineman Julian Vandervelde said he is fine with the current financial setup.
“We do get paid,” Vandervelde said. “We get our scholarships. You get your school paid for. That’s why you come to college to get your education.”
Vandervelde also has no problem with how much some coaches make. He and his teammates actually laughed at coach Ferentz’s latest contract extension.”
“More power to him,” Vandervelde said.
If we’re to believe Ferentz, it’s actually more power to his wife. But together they’ve earned it.
Reach Pat Harty at 339-7368 or pharty@press-citizen.com.
Category: Iowa Hawkeyes Football
George, You got that right…PAY THE MAN!! Be thankful the Hawks will have him through 2020.
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