The Short List: The Barnett Hypothesis
Kirk Ferentz is Big on Promoting from Within. Would he do it again?
Iowa Football doesn’t really do coaching searches. I just turned 43 years old, and there has been exactly one head coach vacancy in my lifetime. Perhaps more shocking: There have been just four defensive coordinators since 1979 (Bill Brashier, Bobby Elliott, Norm Parker and Phil Parker) and only six offensive coordinators (Bill Snyder, Carl Jackson, Don Patterson, Ken O’Keefe, Greg Davis, Brian Ferentz). So when a coordinator position opens up, we go to FlightAware and try to have some of the fun that everyone else gets when they can their coach like tuna.
There hasn’t been much room for promotion in Iowa’s program under Kirk Ferentz. Both his offensive and defensive coordinators have been firmly entrenched for years, and both of those coordinators were internal hires. Ferentz hired Greg Davis from the outside, but mostly as an apprentice program for his son and ill-considered attempt at modernizing his passing game. But with an opening at offensive coordinator, and a desire to continue with the same type of offense he’s currently running, could Ferentz repeat history and promote from within? If so, isn’t the obvious choice not Jon Budmayr but offensive line coach George Barnett?
The mere presence of Barnett’s name on this list will probably trigger half the Iowa fans reading this. Rightly or wrongly, he’s become a lightning rod for criticism, especially in the face of what was thought to be Brian Ferentz’s inevitable return. If Iowa fans couldn’t get anything accomplished on Junior Ferentz, couldn’t they at least bring the pressure to bear on the most glaring culprit in Iowa’s offensive woes, the underperforming offensive line? Things got so bad after the Penn State game that Ferentz was forced into publicly saying Barnett was a “tremendous football coach and outstanding human being” like he’d had his corporeal body temporarily possessed by 2008 Tim Brewster.
Barnett is in his third season as coach of Iowa’s offensive line, a spot revered as the “next in line” for something big. Prior to Barnett, Iowa’s prior offensive line coaches under Kirk Ferentz included current Wyoming coordinator Tim Polasek, current Iowa coordinator Brian Ferentz and former Dolphins head coach Joe Philbin. It’s not much — Kirk Ferentz’s coaching tree is more of a shrubbery — but it’s the biggest stepping stone Iowa offers, at least on the offensive coaching staff.
However, Barnett’s results with the Iowa offensive line have been lackluster at best. Iowa’s success is built on the foundation of Iowa’s zone running game, so the struggles in Iowa’s running game during Barnett’s tenure have stalled out the entire offense. While there has been improvement this year, it has largely been through gap running that is antithetical to Ferentz’s core offensive beliefs. Without a baseline track record to work with, Barnett is unlikely to step off this particular stone to a better job, though others would likely be available. But Barnett’s next step might come less from his performance as an offensive line coach, and more from his more distant past.
Before coming to Iowa, Barnett spent most of his career in a somewhat unlikely group for a Ferentz hire: The Brian Kelly coaching tree, Chuck Martin branch. For those who haven’t spent days Googling coaching resumes, Brian Kelly is the current coach of LSU, before that Notre Dame. He followed a progression as a head coach, moving from Grand Valley State in Michigan, to Central Michigan, then Cincinnati, then the big job, with generational success at all of them (though there are some obvious issues there that we don’t need to delve into for this exercise).
One of Kelly’s longtime assistants was a defensive coach named Chuck Martin. Martin spent four years as an assistant coach and defensive coordinator for Kelly at GVSU. When Kelly left for Central Michigan, Martin inherited the program. He acted as head coach for six seasons, winning two national championships and playing for a third, before leaving GVSU to join Kelly’s staff at Notre Dame. After two years as a position coach and recruiting coordinator in South Bend, Martin weirdly shifted to OFFENSIVE coordinator for two seasons1, before getting the head coaching job at Miami (Ohio). He’s been there for the last decade, and holds the school record for wins at a school that has had some pretty damn good coaches. Barnett twice worked for Martin as offensive line coach, first at Grand Valley State in the late aughts, then seven seasons at Miami a decade later. And because Martin’s offense is largely Kelly’s offense, that means Barnett was coaching a more spreadable version of Kirk Ferentz’s bread-and-butter: Zone running.
There really aren’t any professional connections between Kelly/Martin2 and Ferentz, and so the connection is somewhat unusual. That’s where we turn to Barnett’s job between those two stints with Martin: In the interim, Martin was the offensive line coach for Illinois State, coached since 2008 by former Purdue assistant and Ron Swanson cosplayer Brock Spack. If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that Kirk Ferentz loves him some Brock Spack. When Brock Spack was named as head coach at Illinois State, Ferentz offered a two-paragraph quote praising his performance at Purdue and comparing it to the Bill Walsh-era San Francisco 49ers.
"I've admired Brock's work for many years now. He was a very good football player for Purdue. More recently, I've had great admiration for what he has done with the Purdue defensive unit. The success that Purdue has had under Brock and (former head coach) Joe Tiller is well documented. I think of Purdue's recent success as being similar to what the San Francisco 49ers did under Bill Walsh. The 49ers had the `West Coast Offense.' But the common denominator, the thing that got them to the Super Bowl, was the fact that they played great defense, as well. I see Purdue as being very similar to the 49ers in that way.
"Under Joe Tiller, Purdue had a tremendous offense, but it also had a great defense, and that was guided by Brock Spack. Purdue has had an awful lot of great football teams, and Brock has been a part of many of those great teams. I think he's an outstanding coach, and he'll do an outstanding job at Illinois State."
Kirk Ferentz loves his family, but I doubt he’s ever written two paragraphs comparing any of them to the Bill Walsh-era San Francisco 49ers. Dude loves Brock Spack.
In his last year under Spack, Barnett was Illinois State’s co-offensive coordinator. Barnett was a co-coordinator during his seven-year stint under Martin at Miami, as well, though it’s unclear whether he was responsible for playcalling in either organization; both stops had a standard split of duties between the quarterbacks coach and offensive line coach, and usually the passing guy gets to call offense in those setups. If he has not called an offense, it’s questionable whether that experience is sufficient to meet Ferentz’s standard for the job.
And that’s where things get crazy.
That last year under Spack, Barnett was promoted into the co-coordinator spot. Spack chose to pair him with a new quarterbacks coach, Eric Koehler. Prior to joining the Illinois State staff, Koehler had been at another familiar location: Grand Valley State, where he was offensive coordinator for Chuck Martin. Koehler had been Barnett’s boss at GVSU, and now Barnett was reaching back to bring him up to the FCS.
The following year, Martin took the top position at Miami, and came to Normal for two former assistants. And so Barnett and Koehler assumed the same positions at Miami: Barnett as offensive line coach, Koehler with the quarterbacks, coordinator duties split between them. That is where they remained until 2020, when Barnett left to join the staff at Iowa. Koehler stayed with Martin through the 2022 season.
Not only does Barnett have significant history with Koehler, but Koehler has significant history with Iowa — the state, not the University. Before going to GVSU in 2008, Koehler had cut his teeth in collegiate coaching with six seasons at Wartburg College, first as an assistant before two seasons as the head coach. He went 16-4 as the head coach (which, to be fair, is pretty much the standard up there).3 And, of course, Wartburg is 102 miles up Highway 218 from Iowa City.
So fine, there’s a Miami assistant who has a longstanding connection with the current offensive line coach and some old connections to the state of Iowa. And sure, there’s that whole thing where this same offensive line coach worked to have him hired into what would be the exact same spot at a different program a decade ago. That doesn’t mean anything, you may think. Barnett doesn’t even have the job yet, you may say.
Except there’s also this: Koehler isn’t at Miami anymore. His 2022 Miami offense was not particularly good. His fifth-year starting quarterback Brett Gabbert (who you may remember going 17/27 with two scores in Iowa’s 2019 season opener) missed almost the entire year after an injury in the season opener. The replacement looked like October Deacon Hill, and the offense managed just 20 points per game, though the Redhawks did go bowling. On January 30, Koehler was tweeting daily as a member of Miami’s staff. On January 31, his Twitter account went quiet. On February 6, he was announced as an analyst on P.J. Fleck’s Minnesota staff.
One of two things happened4: Martin constructively fired Koehler, which we’ve seen at Iowa on a number of occasions. You don’t want to embarrass a long-time assistant with a public sacking, so you let him find a landing spot and call it a mutual parting of ways, with a polite and respectful exit permitted. Given the 20 points per game, that’s certainly the most likely scenario.
The other scenario is a low-level Sean Lewis-ing. Sean Lewis spent five years as the head coach at Kent State, taking a usually-moribund program to a division title and two bowl trips. All of that work got him zero buzz for a promotion, and when you’re at Kent State, almost every job is a promotion. So Lewis took an unusual route: He gave up his MAC head coaching position for the offensive coordinator spot on Deion’s staff at Colorado. If you can’t generate buzz in the MAC, try doing it on a more visible stage.
Koehler could be trying to do the same, in an odd way. An analyst spot at Minnesota isn’t going to raise anyone’s profile, but it does separate Koehler from Martin’s shadow and leave him completely available for a Power 5 job as soon as it’s available, especially one with his old colleague and a head coach who never fires anyone.
When Iowa hired Greg Davis in February 2012, I kicked myself for not having seen it coming. Davis had all of the traits that Ferentz was looking for. He had called plays for a big-time offense, where he had showed unyielding loyalty to his head coach. He was known as a teacher, and had a limited shelf life, so he’d be fine with mentoring Brian and then stepping aside in five years. He knew quarterbacks, which nobody else on his staff really did. He was fine with being a human shield, absorbing bullets meant for his boss on the regular. The offense was incidental. Iowa football is Kirk Ferentz, and so the hire has to address what ails the coach.
Eric Koehler does a lot for Ferentz, circa 2023. It has an almost-simplistic internal logic: Two guys who have worked often together, who had success together and struggled apart, and who have run a system that’s no more than an arm’s length from his. It’s a natural fit that can be sold to the press and donors with relative ease. It’s also classic Ferentz, in that it’s a nod toward offense modernization without any actual commitment.
But a Koehler-Barnett team also will drive the same people who demanded Brian’s firing into absolute madness, and in doing so settle a big chunk of family business. Hiring Koehler would put Ferentz’s much-maligned offensive line coach, a coach he had to defend as an outstanding human being, in the spot where they just fired his son. “You thought Brian was bad? I just promoted the guy you REALLY wanted to fire.” Plus, he gets to take an assistant off that insufferable weirdo P.J. Fleck as a cherry on top. For the guy who wants to reassert football’s autonomy over an athletic department and university administration that he clearly feels overstepped its bounds — and who loves nothing more than putting his thumb in the eye of those who think they know better how to run his program5 — it’s a flawless victory.
The discussion of an in-house coordinator candidate has centered around Jon Budmayr. There are good reasons for that, and we’ll get to him later. But Budmayr doesn’t check every box on Kirk Ferentz’s list. George Barnett does, which is why I believe you discount his candidacy at your own peril.
Martin’s move to offensive coordinator in 2012 opened his previous position, coaching safeties. Kelly and his defensive coordinator, Bob Diaco (former Hawkeye), turned to an old hand: Bobby Elliott (former Hawkeye). It was Bobby’s last job: He stayed in South Bend for five years before retiring in 2016, and passed away a year later.
Except, of course, for Ivory Kelly-Martin.
Shoutout Rick Willis.
OK, one of three things, but only if you take the red pill:
On January 26, the Patriots hired Bill O’Brien as offensive coordinator. This was always thought to be the first domino on a Brian Ferentz exit: O’Brien, building a pro staff, would go back to his prior work with/courtship of Brian Ferentz as offensive line coach, allowing everyone to save face with his departure.
On January 30, Koehler’s active Twitter account goes silent for a week.
On February 1, Iowa announces that Brian Ferentz is not going to be replaced. On February 6, it leaks that Koehler is leaving a MAC coordinator position for an analyst job with Minnesota.
If the plan had been to replace Brian, but only after the NFL thing got signed, Iowa would likely have been lining up replacements in the interim. The delay in hiring Greg Davis in 2012 had caused significant problems that plagued the offense throughout the following fall. Kirk couldn’t risk that happening again.
It wouldn’t be out of line for Iowa to reach out to potential candidates so that an immediate hire could be made. Perhaps Iowa set everything up for an announcement at the same time that Brian’s departure was finalized. Perhaps the soon-to-be offensive coordinator told his boss about his departure for the end of the month. And perhaps Bill O’Brien and Bill Belichick couldn’t afford Kirk Ferentz this favor, and Iowa had to change course and retain Brian, and Gary Barta would have no time to come up with a justification for the decision and act like it, because the plan got thrown out and replaced.
And in the game of musical chairs that is coaching changes, perhaps that coach was stuck without a chair, and had to go spend a season with a sentient motivational poster to bide his time.
Like I said, that’s the red pill version.
Shoutout 2011 Assistant Coach of the Year Chris Doyle
Pat, you’re fucking insane. I’ve missed you. Nice to read your words again.
God, this is so uninspired and depressing that OF COURSE it will be what happens. I think if it does come to pass, it is also a sign that Kirk's time is short. No way is this a "long-term" (read: more than 2 years) play for him; instead it is, as you note, flipping the double birds to the administration on his way out the door by saying that nothing is going to change until he leaves.