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UNIVERSITY OF IOWA FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEDecember 16, 2016Brian FerentzIowa City, Iowa BRIAN FERENTZ: We're excited to get back to work. Been off the road since last week. Have got a chance to start on Florida. Playing a really good football team up front. Been very impressed with a lot of their players. They've had a lot of guys in and out of their lineup, things parallel to things we've experienced this year. Starts with their defense at tackle. Brantley is an excellent player. Going to be a real challenge for our interior guys to handle. They've had guys in and out of the lineup on the edge spots. When Bryan Cox Jr. is in there, he's a really, really good football player. Maybe not as talented as some of their young guys with the speed and the athletic ability, but he's a guy that just jumps off the tape as being a football player. Certainly the kind of guy that you have to game plan for. We're not sure where everybody is at, who they'll have. They have the middle linebacker who is a really good player, been a little bit hobbled, No. 40. But we're preparing for them all as if they'll be there, except for the guys we're sure are not. We're up to the challenge, but it's going to be a big challenge. Obviously last week we were very humbled and very honored to receive the Joe Moore Award as an offensive line unit. I did want to take a minute to touch on that. As I said, we're humbled. I mean that very sincerely because Coach Moore, it's been well publicized, been a very good part of my father's life, but he was a very big part of my life, a big influence on me, on Chris Doyle, the head coach. But even this building, the facilities here, the team here, everything that's been built here since 1999, Coach Moore's fingerprints are all over that. So to receive the award that bears his name, very humbling. A tremendous honor for our players, they earned it. It wasn't always easy. We had some bad days. North Dakota State obviously was a really tough day. You got to give credit to the players because it would have been real easy to kind of give in. There was a lot of dirt being shoveled on them, but they came to work every day and they began to improve. We had other tough days along the road. We had a tough night up in State College. But the guys really stayed the course, they continued to work and improve each day, come back to work with just a positive attitude. No matter who was in the game, they found a way to get it done and a way to win. All the credit on the award goes to those players. And certainly the fullbacks and tight ends had a lot to do with it as well. But, again, just very humbling because Coach Moore certainly means a lot to my dad, he means a lot to me. If you ask any of our players, they know who Joe Moore is. They've seen his cutups, seen his tapes. The way we cut up, block, we tried to emulate what he did for a long time, whether it was high school football, Pitt, Notre Dame, Tampa, any of his stops. With that I'd open it up to questions. Q. In your season, the track and offensive line season, Keegan, his first day of work was North Dakota State, his last day of the season was Nebraska. BRIAN FERENTZ: I hope it's not his last day of work. Actually Keegan stepped in and finished the Iowa State game for us. Played pretty well in that game. I think Keegan is a microcosm of our offensive line, which is a microcosm of our football team really this year. There were bumps in the road. There were times when things weren't going well. Any time you face some adversity, it's about how you respond. Keegan had rough patches along the way. He's still not all the way there. The guy, he shows up to work every day, positive attitude, and is working to get better. That's been going on a long time. I think just like with our football team, our line, it's been going on a long time. Unfortunately you don't always see it on the field. Sometimes you see less than that. But I think that's a great point. Keegan has done a tremendous job. He's gotten better each an every day. Really he got a lot of work in the spring. Obviously we were missing James. So he had lot of work at guard in the spring. At camp, Sean was in and out of there, so he had a lot of work at guard as well. We felt pretty comfortable with him heading into the season, but you just never know what's going to happen. Really going from the six man to being the third man at some points in the year, I thought he handled that very well. Q. You didn't have one First-Team All Big Ten selection, not even sure Second Team, but you win the Joe Moore Award. What does that say about the foundation, the whole being better than the parts? BRIAN FERENTZ: I think we talk about that all the time. The sum is always going to be better than the parts if you're going to have a winning football team, especially at the University of Iowa. But really anybody that plays football, you better have a team that's better than the individuals because it's the ultimate team sport. So I think obviously it speaks to that. We vote for the coaches team. We make those selections. I don't know how everyone else does that. As a staff, we sit down and talk about the players we played against. I don't know if people do that in our league or not. I don't know what your guys' selection process is. I think the offensive line is a really subjective position anyway. Most people, to include most head coaches, don't know what they're watching. You're going to see that team, it's always populated, the first and second team, by the people who have the most success throughout the conference. Rightfully so. That's just how it works. We understand that. I think we did manage to have a Second Team All-American, which is interesting. Our conference is pretty tough, I suppose. We feel like we have good players here. As alluded to earlier, one of the primary requirements to come play here is do you have an unselfish attitude, are you more interested in your own personal success or are you willing to sacrifice that for what's best for the collective. So especially on the offensive line, that's a big requirement. So to have guys come in that buy into that, then they're able to be recognized for that, I think that's pretty special. Q. Building an offensive line, there are tangibles and intangibles that I'm sure you look at that are non-negotiable. Without being too specific, how can you describe what you're looking for and how do you build an offensive lineman to become representative of Iowa? BRIAN FERENTZ: There's no trade secrets. I wouldn't hold anything back from you. The 5'9", you know, 165-pound guy, it's all about what you're asking him to do. If you're coaching at West I, that guy probably could play for you. It depends on what your system is, who he's going to be working against. Like you said, it is all about the intangibles. At times we're going to have to block guys like Brantley from Florida. I'm sure he's 300 pounds, he's 6'2", he can move, is an athlete, all those things. There are those requirements that go into it. Once you find the physical characteristics, which exist, I won't say they're bountiful out there, but there are a lot of guys that have the physical ability to play at our level. The intangibles, as alluded to, you're looking for guys that love football, that want to compete, have unselfish attitudes. I wish it was as easy as saying, Here is a survey, here is a test. That's what they do in the NFL, right? Everybody takes a personality test. You look at all that data. At the end of the day, what does it really mean? There are some franchises that have that information. They really believe in some of those tests. They've had success with them. Recruiting doesn't really work that way. But you do get exposure to guys. You bring them to camp, you see how they compete in camp, how they respond to coaching, how they respond to adverse environments, which are of our creation, so they're as adverse as you want them to be. You try to do it subtly so guys don't always understand what we're doing. You evaluate everything they do, how they respond to A, B and C. You get to know their family, the people that coached them, the environment they've grown up in, what they've been subjected to. You just try to get a feel for them. There's no socioeconomic indicators. There's no geographic indicators. There's nothing simple about it. To me it's about kind of, if you know people that have had success in this building, in the other building, you have a pretty good idea what you're looking for, it's hard to quantify, but you kind of know it when you see it. But it gets vetted. It's an extremely long process. We're very slow to recruit offensive linemen. We're very hesitant to go far beyond our radius to recruit offensive linemen because you don't know them as well. I think Sean Welsh is a good example. Sean was a guy I'd been in school there several times, I'd been around. We went late, relatively late. It's all relative now, on Sean Welsh, compared to other schools. But we were getting to know him. He was a guy that couldn't come to camp. Guys can't wear pads, guys from Ohio. It would have been a waste of his time. You really do a lot of work trying to figure out what his makeup is. James Daniels is a guy, we had known him since he was young. We had contact with him since before you should, because you're doing a home visit with LeShun. He's sitting over there. They have another young one, which I probably can't talk about because I'm sure that is a violation, he's nine. I'm watching him wrestle their dog. I was evaluating that, right, as you would. But you get to know the people. If you know the people, then you know there's pretty good indicators about maybe where that young guy's headed. That's what you try to go off of. So that's a long answer. As I say, there's no trade secrets. I'll tell you guys whatever you want to know about our evaluation process. People ask about the development of offensive linemen. That's more about who you bring in here. We'll give you the tools. That's never going to change. But who comes in here, how willing are they to accept that coaching, how responsive are they to the environment, that's going to determine their success, not what we do. Q. On the field, evaluating the player, what is the biggest trait they need to have? BRIAN FERENTZ: Well, you're talking about physically? Athletic ability? Q. Anything that you see on the field. BRIAN FERENTZ: Competitive nature. Competitive nature. Physical toughness and competitive nature. It's a brutal sport. You have to be willing to inflict brutality, but you're going to absorb a lot of it, too. To me, your physical competitiveness, your physical toughness, and your competitive nature, that's going to roll into how well you can play on the offensive line, more so than your athletic ability. How many times are you willing to get hit and keep getting up. Because you're going to get hit, you're going to get knocked down. Will you get up, keep fighting. If you do the knocking down, will you keep fighting. It's hard to evaluate. It's very hard. It can be deceiving. That's why it takes a long time. You need a big sample size. Some guys you see it right away, it's a no-brainer. Q. You talked earlier about putting guys in the right position, making sure you're asking them to do what they can do. What goes into that? BRIAN FERENTZ: Sometimes it's as simple as making sure you don't put guys in the wrong position, make sure you don't ask them to ask them things they cannot do. That's probably an easier answer than asking them to do things they can do. It depends. It depends on how deep you are at any given point in the year, any given point in practice. Sometimes it's easier than not. Levi Paulsen is a good example. I don't mind telling you because I called him. We called a timeout in the Purdue game to keep him out of the game, right? That pretty much goes unnoticed because it's like 49-0, whatever it was at that point. Got a little more interesting later. But we're backed up. We have a third-and-seven. Sean Welsh's helmet comes off. By rule he has to leave for a play. We called a timeout so that we could put him back in the huddle on third-and-seven. Levi went running out there. I was looking, Well, I don't know, probably not going to need this timeout later in the first half. Hey, coach, what do you think about calling a timeout here? Fast forward to the Michigan game. There's nobody left. He's the only guy left. Levi, you're in. Go get 'em, you're going to be great. Forget about that timeout we called a couple weeks ago. You're going to kill these guys (laughter). He'd be the first one to tell you, he went in there, his head was spinning. He was basically trying to figure out where to line up. We moved him around a little bit. Within two of those series, Sean played different positions. We moved Levi inside and outside, just trying to make sure we could function and get out of the game. Then going into the Illinois week, now you can spend a little bit more time saying, All right, here is a young guy, hasn't played a lot of football. These are things he does really well. These are things that we know he's going to struggle with, let's make sure we protect him to the best of our ability. But the bottom line is, it's kind of like your kids, you'd love to protect them, you'd love to shield them from everything for their whole life. Impossible, right? Just impossible. Levi that first game, my biggest concern with Levi was how was he going to hold up in pass protection in a one-on-one situation. By the fourth third down of that game, it was hard to hide him. He had to block a guy. He blocked the heck out of him. He did a great job. Now, he didn't the whole game. But it just goes to show, at some point they got to get out of the nest. Q. With an example like Levi, all the shuffling you guys had to do, does that make the Joe Moore Award even more especially because of the adversity you have faced? BRIAN FERENTZ: It's really hard for me to quantify. I want to be careful here because I don't want to get emotional. I know my dad is pretty good at that. That award is just so special on so many levels. On a personal level for me. But that's a little bit uncomfortable because you're put in the uncomfortable position of feeling gratified for an award that you did nothing to win. Those guys are out there doing the heavy lifting. I just stand on the sideline. But it is special. I hope for the players, I do hope that there's an extra level of, you know, just kind of a sense of accomplishment because it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy. There were a lot of mean things said about them, which they deserved, and I deserved. But they kept battling. Back to the evaluation point. How many times will they get up. When you get knocked down once, it's easy to get up. What about when you get knocked down twice, will you keep getting up. They did. They started knocking other people down, then they kept doing it. They didn't take any mercy on them, which is also good. Q. Seven different starting lineups this year. Does that make it more gratifying that you were able to stay the course? BRIAN FERENTZ: Sure. And every guy that played, I think there were eight guys that started games, they should all feel very much a part of it, just like the guys that didn't play because there's a lot of things that go behind the scenes. Guys certainly don't make it out on game day, but we did a lot of guys that did work just to help us practice. So I hope everybody feels that kind of sense of accomplishment about the award. Q. Sometimes in the mid part of the season you guys went 22, it was third-and-one, you wouldn't get it a lot of the time. Then contrast that to the last game, Nebraska, that last drive. I think you had 24 plays where you went heavy in that game, ran for like 120 yards. What kind of growth did you see that enabled you guys to go from not being successful on third-and-one a lot of the time early in the mid part of the year to dominating the line of scrimmage? BRIAN FERENTZ: In the Penn State game we had three opportunities, four, where we didn't convert. That's disappointing. Credit to Penn State. Played very good defense. They took it away from us. We weren't doing anything much different at the end of the year. Certainly the execution was better. I know nobody wants to hear that it's about execution, but it really is about execution. But the execution part of it is very much physical. The improvement that I think we made, I really think we started making a lot of improvement actually before that Penn State game. I know it didn't show up that night. That was discouraging. That's what made it such a long flight home. You feel like, A, you had a good couple weeks, you're on the right track, making improvements. Then you start to question everything on that plane ride home because, boy, none of it showed up tonight, maybe less than none of it. Really hard to even look at that night and say, Boy, here is a positive we can take out of this. I guess the positive is, our buses didn't crash, our plane made it back, and we were all here on Sunday. That would be about it. We didn't suffer any significant injuries that night. They all run together. To make that improvement, from the Penn State game on, I think it started before the Penn State game, but certainly I think what really happened is guys just stayed the course, guys stayed the course. A big part of any kind of success up front is belief in what you're doing. At no point do I think anybody on our group, anybody on our offense, questioned, Hey, are we doing the right things. We're doing the right things, but we have to do them better. I think that's what you saw show up the last three weeks. Q. With that said, you've been around this program for 18 years, what did that Michigan win mean to this offensive line, this program, in retrospect now? BRIAN FERENTZ: That is a good question. I don't know. I can tell you what it meant to our season. To come out of State College at as low of a point as we've been, to come back and reach such a high, boy, that felt really good. But I would take it a step further. I think in that first series, I think the first play we ran a little insert play, it made about seven yards or so. There was just a sense in the building that, Okay, this is going to be a fight. Look, it's human nature. I know what all the pundits said. I don't know what you guys said. I wouldn't hold you guys accountable to it. I don't read that stuff. But I doubt anybody in this room gave us a realistic chance to win the football game. Maybe to compete, maybe to keep it close, but to win the football game... People in this state I think appreciate how we play football and what we're about when it's going well. I think right from the start of that game, offense, defense, special teams, it was pretty apparent that this was going to be an Iowa football team. Nobody in the first quarter could have told you what was going to happen, but they knew it was going to be a fistfight. Then obvious it just kind of snowballed. I think the win obviously is very big. The field goal went through the uprights, it's a happy story. But from the first snap of the game, I was encouraged because I said, again, not to belabor the point, but how many times can you keep getting up. We got up. It was clear from the opening kickoff that we were there to play. That's what you worry about coming out of State College. Did they break our backs or are we going to keep fighting. You don't know that for sure, till you know. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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