On Saturday afternoon, sometime before kickoff, Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz and Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald will meet in the middle of the field at Kinnick Stadium. They will shake hands and talk, just as they’ve done before every game between their two teams.
This coaching ritual will happen in every stadium across the country. What makes this meeting between Ferentz and Fitzgerald special, however, is that no pair of coaches in the country have done it as often.
Ferentz’s and Fitzgerald’s teams will meet for the 13th time on Saturday, ever since Fitzgerald brought his very first Northwestern team to Iowa City in 2006. No other two coaches can match that string of longevity.
Ferentz, 63, is the longest-tenured coach in FBS, taking the reins in 1999. He is the only college coach remaining who was hired in the last century. Fitzgerald, still just 43, is tied for sixth on the longevity list; both he and Rick Stockstill of Middle Tennessee State got the top job at their respective schools in 2006.
There are four coaches that fall in between Ferentz and Fitzgerald – Gary Patterson of TCU was hired in 2000; and Mike Gundy of Oklahoma State, Frank Solich of Ohio and Kyle Whittingham of Utah all got their jobs in 2005. But none of them have met another one every year since they were hired. Not even Patterson and Gundy, whose schools are both in the Big XII, because TCU didn’t join the conference until 2012.
No, Ferentz and Fitzgerald have been going longer than everyone else. In this day and age of annual coaching carousels, that’s quite an achievement.
When Ferentz succeeded the legendary Hayden Fry at Iowa, Bill Clinton was in the White House and the Big Ten had 11 teams. Fitzgerald came aboard seven years later, after the sudden death of head coach Randy Walker, when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office and Donald Trump was hosting The Apprentice.
There were some famed coaches in the Big Ten in 2006, when Ferentz and Fitzgerald first met. Jim Tressel was at Ohio State, Lloyd Carr was at Michigan, Joe Tiller was at Purdue and Joe Paterno was at Penn State. Some of the names might surprise you, too: Bill Callahan was still floundering at Nebraska (though they weren’t yet in the Big Ten), and both BTN analyst Glen Mason (Minnesota) and John L. Smith (Michigan State) would get fired at the end of the year.
Since that 2006 first meeting, when Fitzgerald’s Wildcats upset Ferentz’s Hawkeyes 21-7 to give him his first Big Ten win, 41 coaches have coached at least one season at the other 12 Big Ten schools. That’s an average of 3.4 per school, all while Ferentz and Fitzgerald just kept doing their thing.
Minnesota leads (if that’s the right word) with five head coaches since 2006; Illinois, Michigan, Penn State, Purdue and Nebraska have had four. And that doesn’t even count interim coaches who finished out the season after a firing.
Ferentz and Fitzgerald are 1-2 in coaching tenure in the Big Ten. (The next longest is Mark Dantonio, who started at Michigan State the year after Fitzgerald, in 2007.) Not coincidentally, both Ferentz and Fitzgerald are also their school’s all-time winningest coaches.
Very few programs in history can match Iowa’s track record of long-lasting coaches. The Hawkeyes have had two head men in the job since 1979: Fry coached 20 seasons, from 1979-98, and Ferentz is now in his 20th season. Ferentz, who has 161 wins in Iowa City, passed Fry on the all-time victories list earlier this season and has won two Big Ten titles (2002 and 2004) and one conference title (2015) during his tenure.
For Northwestern, Fitzgerald has become an icon, the face of not only the football program, but arguably the university. He was one of Northwestern’s all-time great players from 1993-1996 and returned as an assistant in 2001 before getting elevated to the head job, so he has been at Northwestern for 21 of the last 25 years. He has 92 wins and owns three of the five 10-win seasons and three of the four bowl wins in school history.
Fitzgerald holds a 7-5 edge over Ferentz in head-to-head matchups and is 4-3 at Kinnick, one of the most difficult places for visitors to play in the Big Ten. The Wildcats are coming in with a 5-1 league record and Fitzgerald will have a chance to take a major step toward his and the school’s first-ever West division title. If Wisconsin and Purdue both lose, the Wildcats could even clinch the crown with a W on Saturday.
Chances are, Ferentz and Fitzgerald will exchange pleasantries at midfield quite a few more times. Both are signed at their schools until 2026, when Fitzgerald would be 51 and Ferentz 71. It’s hard to imagine either school removing its head coach unless some sort of ugly incident forces its hand – and that seems very unlikely for a pair of men known for running clean programs. Both of them will leave their jobs when they want to, a rarity for the profession.
Iowa and Northwestern fans will both criticize the decisions of their respective coaches on Saturday – it’s inevitable, the nature of the beast. Some will question whether their head man is too comfortable and complacent in his job.
But when the two of them come together to chat before kickoff on Saturday, both fan bases should take a moment to appreciate these two old-school coaches, symbols of permanence in a transient business.
