Role/success of Iowa QBs has been much different under Kirk Ferentz than Hayden Fry
By Pat Harty
IOWA CITY, Iowa – When Chuck Long joined the Iowa football team in 1981 as an unheralded freshman quarterback from suburban Chicago, little did he know that he was about to become a key piece to a perfect offensive storm.
Hayden Fry was entering his third season as the Iowa head coach, and though Iowa had finished just 5-6 and 4-7 in Fry’s first two seasons, a foundation for success was being built, and it was largely centered around the quarterback position.
That was hard to tell in Fry’s first two seasons, and even in Iowa’s 1981 breakthrough season, because the quarterback play was average at best in those three seasons.
Iowa won a share of the Big Ten title in 1981 and played in the Rose Bowl that season, thanks mostly to its veteran defense and to All-America punter Reggie Roby.
In Fry’s first three seasons at Iowa, the quarterback was mostly a game manager.
But that would start to change when Long became the starter as a redshirt freshman in 1982.
Fry and his offensive coordinator, Bill Snyder, saw something in Chuck Long that few other major college coaches saw in him.

Long had mostly been a running quarterback in high school, and yet, Fry still believed that Long was the right quarterback to help Iowa’s offense evolve at a time when most Big Ten offenses still were emphasizing the run in what was called a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust mentality.
Long would go on to become the first Big Ten quarterback to pass for 10,000 yards in a career, and he finished as the runner-up for the 1985 Heisman Trophy. He also led Iowa to the 1985 Big Ten title, and to four bowl games.
“I had the benefit of Hayden Fry and Bill Snyder, two college football Hall of Fame coaches,” Long said in a recent telephone interview. “I mean how many guys can say that? They coached you. It was the perfect storm for me to be coached by those two guys.
“Hayden had a great eye for talent, unlike anybody else in the country. I was in the right place at the right time under Hayden’s leadership early in his career at Iowa. He was making his mark, a maverick, his innovation was far and above anybody else in the country.”
Long said he often was approached by fans during his Iowa playing days who were excited about what Iowa was doing on offense, and about how they were doing it.
“We were doing things that nobody else was doing in the Big Ten,” Long said. “I don’t know how many people came up to me; ‘Gosh, you guys are doing some great things. It’s awesome what you’re doing when I was playing there.
“We knew we were ahead of its time.”
However, it didn’t stay that way forever.
Different offensive philosophies
The performance at quarterback would eventually start to decline under Fry in the 1990s as Matt Sherman was the only Iowa quarterback to receive all-conference recognition during a seven-season stretch from 1992 to 1998.
Sherman made second-team All-Big Ten as a junior in 1996.
Over the past 33 seasons, including 26 under current Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz, only twice has an Iowa quarterback made first-team All-Big Ten as Brad Banks and Drew Tate were honored in 2002 and 2004, respectively.
C.J. Beathard also made second-team All-Big Ten in 2015, but that’s been it for Iowa quarterbacks under Kirk Ferentz.
“(Hayden) wanted to be known as being at the forefront of the passing game,” Long said. “And so, we emphasized that. It was more, ‘hey, ‘we’re going to throw the ball and set up the run so to speak.
“So, the emphasis was on the quarterback. That was the guy that he put out on the forefront and wanted that guy to be one of the leaders of the Big Ten.
“But in the 90s, things started to evolve in different ways. Defenses started catching up. Late in his career, he probably should have looked into changing his system, or I should say, updating his system. And that happens at the end of careers, it gets a little stale. It gets stale and you get behind the times instead of constantly evolving and updating your system.”
Some younger Hawkeye fans might have a hard time believing that Iowa was ever at the forefront of quarterback innovation based on how the position has evolved, or some might say how it’s failed to evolve, under Kirk Ferentz.
“Hayden’s philosophy was a lot different than Kirk’s philosophy,” Long said. “The quarterback position under Kirk has not been the focal point. It just hasn’t been. It’s been more of a game manager, don’t make the mistake instead of airing it out, spreading it out and pushing the ball down the field aggressively in the passing game.
“That’s Kirk’s philosophy, good, bad or indifferent. So, that’s why you have not seen quarterbacks under his regime become All-Big Ten.”
One of the biggest criticisms about Kirk Ferentz is that he is too conservative and unwilling to modernize his offense.
There is hope that new offensive coordinator Tim Lester will help to change that once he has more time to implement his offense.
But Kirk Ferentz has also won a lot of games by playing football a certain way.

“It starts with emphasis of philosophy on the offensive system,” Long said. “Kirk’s philosophy and emphasis is on the running back, the running game. It doesn’t always work out that way. The rush offense did not do well for two or three years in a row. But that’s what he wants at the end of the day. He wants the quarterback to be a good manager of the offense. Manage it, don’t make mistakes.
“So that philosophy, I don’t think Kirk has ever changed that.”
Long sees a lot of similarities between how Fry rebuilt the Iowa program with how Joe Tiller rebuilt the Purdue program about 20 years later in the late 1990s.
“Purdue with Tiller came in and he was ahead of his time,” Long said. “In fact, Joe Tiller reminded me a lot of Hayden. You take a place like Iowa or a place like Purdue, you’re not a blue blood and you have to do something different to get noticed by recruits and to elevate yourself to the front of the Big Ten.
“Purdue is different, and he had to research a place like Iowa and how did they do it there? How did they do more with less at Iowa? And that’s what Joe Tiller did at Purdue, and it worked.”
Hayden Fry and Bill Snyder both had gift for coaching and for developing quarterbacks.
Long made first-team all-Big Ten in 1983, 1984 and 1985, while Chuck Hartlieb was honored in 1987 and 1988 followed by Matt Rodgers in 1990 and 1991.
Don Patterson coached the Iowa quarterbacks when Rodgers played for the Hawkeyes in the early 1990s.
Patterson came with Fry from North Texas in 1979, and by that time, Fry already had a reputation for being an innovator on offense dating back to when he was the head coach for Southern Methodist University.
Patterson said that’s one of the reasons former Iowa Athletic Director Bump Elliott hired Fry shortly after the 1978 season.
Elliott had coached against Fry’s SMU team when Elliott was the head coach for Michigan, and what Fry’s offense did that day made an impression.
“Hayden had a reputation for being ahead of his time when he was at SMU,” Patterson said. “That’s why Bump hired him. He did more with less talent than other coaches.”
Fry wasn’t afraid to be different, or to think outside the box if he thought it would give his offense an edge.
He had his tight ends stand at the line of scrimmage when nobody else was doing it, and he allowed his quarterbacks to change the play at the line of scrimmage when few other were doing it.
“That was big,” Long said of being able to change the play. “The more years I started the more comfortable I got with that.
However, changing the play also came with a risk.
“The old joke with Hayden was, ‘hey, if you’re going to change the play on me son, you better make sure it works,'” Long said. “But he gave us a lot of autonomy at the line of scrimmage. We had a lot of flexibility there and the trust factor grew with the more snaps I got, and that was true with any quarterback.”
Fry surrounded himself with one of the greatest coaching staffs in the history of college football during his first decade at Iowa.
But over time, his staff started to part ways, including Bill Snyder leaving after the 1988 season to be the head coach for Kansas State where he would go on to lead arguably the greatest rebuilding job in the history of college football, maybe even better than what Fry had accomplished at Iowa.
Snyder was ready to be a head coach, and he wanted to step out of Fry’s shadow and run his own offense.
“One reason Bill left I think is he was a little bit frustrated because he didn’t have as much control of the Iowa offense as he would have liked to have,” Patterson said. “And the reasons were obvious; it was because of Hayden.
“And I’m not taking anything away from Hayden because Hayden was a great offensive mind. But let’s face it, Bill Snyder had more time to do the work and get ready for a game than Hayden did as the head coach.”
Patterson considers Fry, who passed away in 2019, and Snyder to be two of the greatest offensive minds in the history of college football. He said it was a privilege to coach with both of them at Iowa.
Fry and Snyder were both ahead of their time and their offense sort of took the Big Ten by storm once the right pieces were in place, pieces meaning talent, which of course, made it easier to execute.
“Even the best calls require execution,” said Patterson, who served as Fry’s offensive coordinator from 1992 to 1998, and quarterback coach from 1989 to 1998. “So we’re still going to sink or swim by what you do on the field. And I’ll do all I can to help. I’ll call the best game that I possibly can. But we’re still going to be relying on you to carry out the assignments.”
Mystifying plateau
Brad Banks in 2002 was the last Iowa quarterback to make first-team all-Big Ten as a senior.
Tate was a sophomore in 2004 when he was honored, but he would neve make first-team again.
“It’s mystifying that quarterbacks have plateaued under him,” Long said of Kirk Ferentz. “For some reason they don’t make a big jump. I always said the biggest jump used to be year four to year five, or year three to year four, those are your really big jumps. So, that part has been mystifying to me. Why haven’t they gotten better in their last year?
After playing nine seasons in the NFL, Long would go to become a college assistant coach for Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas, and a head coach for San Diego State from 2006 to 2008. He spent most of his career coaching offense, and particularly quarterbacks.

Long had concerns with Kirk Ferentz’s decision to hire his son, Brian Ferentz, as the Iowa offensive coordinator in 2017. Brian Ferentz also started coaching the quarterbacks in 2022, and that didn’t sit well with Long. either, because Brian Ferentz never had coached the position.
Long’s concern would prove to be legitimate as the performance of the quarterbacks started to decline after Nate Stanley finished his career in 2019.
The situation became so bad on offense, and with the quarterback position, that Brian Ferentz was fired with four games left in the 2023 season and eventually replaced by Lester, whose performance this past season drew praise from Long.
“I like Tim. He’s very smart,” Long said. “He did a nice job with what he had this year. I think he played to the strengths of the football team. And as a coordinator you have to do that. You have to able to adjust and play tom your strengths. Too many coordinators that year, they’re stubborn. I want to do it like this. But what I like about Tim is that he adjusted.”
While the Iowa quarterbacks, including eight-game starter Cade McNamara, showed little progress in Lester’s first season on the staff, the running game improved significantly as junior Kaleb Johnson led the Big Ten in rushing with 1,537 rushing yards and with a program-record 21 rushing touchdowns.
Johnson has since declared for the 2025 NFL Draft.
“Sure, you know Tim’s a quarterback, he wants to throw the ball,” Long said of Lester, who threw for over 11,000 yards during his career at Western Michigan. “He’s thrown a lot of passes. So, naturally, he could have really forced that issue and that position could have made a lot of mistakes in the meantime.
“I just like the way he said, okay, I’m an old quarterback who likes to throw the ball and I want to throw the ball, but you know what, we have a really good running back and I want to find different ways to get him the ball and different schemes to cut him loose. We’ll just have our quarterback manage the game. So, hat’s off to Tim there.”