Iowa

Kirk Ferentz has coached Iowa since 1999. He is the longest-tenured head coach in FBS football, and the program he has built in that time is one of the most precisely reproduced things in the sport: a punishing defense, a punter who flips the field, a run game that grinds until the second half, and a final score that tends to live in the twenties. Iowa wins the same way. Iowa's opponents know it. Iowa wins anyway. The Hawkeyes have stopped pretending this is anything other than the plan.

The 2025 season added FCS-champion transfer QB Mark Gronowski to the mix — a splash move, by Iowa standards — and produced the textbook Ferentz year: a 37-0 shutout of Wisconsin, four narrow losses to legitimate top-20 opponents, a bowl win. Gronowski's eligibility is now up. The eternal question in Iowa City returns with him gone: can the formula raise its ceiling? The 2025 losses — a combined fifteen points to four ranked teams — are a ledger that reads two ways. Hawkeye fans read it as hard luck, near misses, the toll of playing the hardest schedule the right way. Everyone else reads it as the ceiling.

Entering 2026, Iowa has held its floor for a quarter century. The Wave — when the whole stadium turns to the children's hospital after the first quarter and waves to the kids watching from the windows — is the most beautiful tradition in American sports, and it is purely Iowa City's. The program can hold this floor forever. The open question is whether one season, with the right roster, the formula finally breaks through. Ferentz will be coaching his twenty-eighth year. The math says it's possible. The history says watch the defense.