Where Kirk Ferentz Is Wrong About College Football ‘Getting Back to the ’70s’

A Familiar Warning From College Football’s Longest-Tenured Coach

Few voices in college football carry the historical weight of Kirk Ferentz’s. As the longest-tenured head coach in the FBS, Ferentz has coached through scholarship limits, the rise of the transfer portal, and the entire NIL era. So when he speaks about the sport drifting toward dangerous competitive imbalance, it’s worth taking seriously.

Speaking to ESPN’s Max Olson at Big Ten Media Days in Chicago, Ferentz compared today’s college football landscape to the sport’s state when he broke into coaching as a UConn graduate assistant back in 1977 a decade he remembers as brutally top-heavy. It’s a warning worth examining closely. But while Ferentz raises a legitimate concern, he’s also overlooking a more recent and more extreme example of exactly the kind of imbalance he fears, one that happened well within his own tenure at Iowa.

What Ferentz Actually Said About College Football’s Growing Imbalance

Ferentz’s comments centered on a specific piece of Big Ten history he lived through firsthand. He pointed to Iowa’s 1981 Rose Bowl appearance under Hayden Fry as a breakthrough moment, noting that in the 13 years before that trip, only two Big Ten teams — Ohio State and Michigan — had made it to Pasadena. In Ferentz’s own telling, that meant every other program in the conference was effectively competing for a distant third place year after year.

His concern is that college football’s current trajectory could recreate that same kind of stagnant hierarchy, just with a modern twist involving revenue sharing and roster spending. Ferentz has been explicit about the financial side of that worry, warning that the sport could drift back toward a reality where only eight, 10 or 15 programs are truly well-funded enough to compete at the highest level.

Where Ferentz Is Right About the Current Landscape

To be fair to Ferentz, his underlying concern isn’t unfounded. With a handful of exceptions, the Big Ten and SEC have clearly separated themselves from the rest of college football in recent years, both in prestige and in results. The Big Ten has won three consecutive national championships, while the SEC continues to dominate the sport’s television ratings and overall media attention.

That gap does resemble the 1970s in some real ways — a decade dominated by a clear class of blue bloods like Alabama, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas and USC, teams that became legendary to the generation of fans who attended college and watched them in record numbers during that era. The 1970s eventually gave way to the 1980s, when new population centers like Florida and evolving offensive philosophies reshaped the sport’s competitive balance creating the very opening that allowed Iowa to reach its first Rose Bowl since 1958. Ferentz, in essence, is trying to make sure that same kind of door stays open for programs like his own.

Where Ferentz Is Wrong: He’s Forgetting an Even Worse Era He Lived Through

Here’s the problem with using the 1970s as the cautionary benchmark: college football already endured something considerably more restrictive in the mid-to-late 2010s, and Ferentz experienced that stretch firsthand from near the top of the sport.

It’s true that FBS football is currently splitting into something like three tiers a wealthy Big Ten and SEC, a middle class made up of the ACC and Big 12, and a lower class across the Group of Six. That reality has put real pressure on the sport’s upper-middle and lower-middle class programs, the ones that used to provide some of the season’s best surprises.

But compare that to the far more rigid competitive dynamic of the 2010s. In 2015, Ferentz led Iowa to a perfect regular season, coming within a single late loss to Michigan State — 16-13 in the Big Ten Championship Game of reaching the four-team College Football Playoff. Had the Hawkeyes won that game, their reward would have been a matchup with one of Alabama, Clemson or Oklahoma — three programs that were essentially guaranteed playoff fixtures year after year during that stretch, closing the door on outside contenders almost entirely.

Contrast that with 2021, the first season after NIL earnings became legal. Iowa opened that year unranked outside the top 15, then rocketed into the top five within two weeks and climbed as high as No. 3 nationally, aided in part by traditional powers like Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State stumbling early as the sport adjusted to the combined disruption of NIL and pandemic-related upheaval. Iowa ultimately couldn’t fully capitalize on that opening, but it marked the beginning of the end for the rigid, closed-door dynamic of the four-team playoff era.

A More Level Playing Field Than Ferentz Gives It Credit For

The clearest evidence against Ferentz’s “back to the ’70s” framing might be the most recent national champion. Indiana’s 2025 national title stands as proof that real breakthroughs are still very much possible within today’s system commercialism, expanded playoff format and financial imbalance included. It’s exactly the kind of outcome that would have felt almost unthinkable during the closed-shop dynamic of the mid-2010s, when a small handful of programs effectively locked up access to the sport’s biggest stage year after year.

None of this means Ferentz’s broader concern about financial imbalance is unreasonable. Structural inequities in revenue sharing and roster spending are real, and they deserve serious attention as the sport continues to evolve. But framing today’s landscape as a return to the exclusionary 1970s overlooks a far more extreme, far more recent example of that exact dynamic one Ferentz didn’t just witness, but nearly broke through himself in 2015, only to watch the sport’s four-team playoff era finally start to crack open just a few years later.

Final Thoughts

Kirk Ferentz’s warning about college football’s growing financial divide comes from a place of real, lived experience, and his instinct that unchecked spending could recreate a rigid, closed-off hierarchy isn’t wrong on its face. But the comparison to the 1970s undersells just how locked-down the sport actually was as recently as the 2010s an era Ferentz experienced up close, both in the near-miss of 2015 and the sudden opening of 2021. If anything, today’s landscape, messy and imbalanced as it may be, has already proven more permeable than the world Ferentz is warning college football might return to.