Iowa Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz is busy preparing his players for the Big Ten Championship against the Michigan Wolverines. Any time any team plays Michigan this year, coaches will be asked about the sign-stealing scandal. Ferentz sounded off on the scandal but not in the way you would think.
Iowa Hawkeyes Kirk Ferentz On Sign-Stealing Scandal
Ferentz admitted that he really hasn’t paid much attention to it and offered a more big-picture view of the situation. He wants to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
“If you want a bigger picture view, this is something that probably could be corrected really easily. Whoever’s got to get together, just have a vote. And a lot of stuff, different technology has been talked about, it seems like, for maybe not quite a decade, but close to. And it’d be a simple way to fix everything. I know baseball had some issues, I think they’ve got that fixed. We could have fixed this probably a decade ago.”
“So it’s like a lot of things have happened in the NCAA and college football. We’re a really slow-moving train when it comes to being progressive, trying to improve things, just improve the quality of the game. So it kind of fits in that category. … That’s really, hardly a concern of mine. But one of these days, maybe we’ll take the steps needed to be taken just to take this off of the board as a topic for anybody,“
Response From Many Coaches? Get It Fixed!
This response has been common among a lot of head coaches. They recognize that this is bad but also know that there is an easy fix to this. The NFL has helmet communication technology making signs obsolete. Ferentz sees this as a problem that shouldn’t exist. It will be interesting to see if the pressure to prevent this from happening again will cause the NCAA to cave and finally implement helmet communication technology.
Iowa is a heavy underdog but they have shocked teams before. Michigan still has to come out and play their best. If Iowa happens to pull off the upset, it will be one of the most popular teams in college football.