How Iowa’s continuity has turned a strength into a weakness
Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel, Pete Thamel and SI’s Pat Forde discuss the allegations of biased behavior against Hawkeyes strength coach Chris Doyle and how the “old way” of doing things may be going away in Iowa City.
Video Transcript
DAN WRIGHT: The focus seems to be on longtime Iowa strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle. It started slowly and built up on social media with a number of former Hawkeye football players speaking about negative experiences they had while playing for Iowa, and specifically in the weight room. It was not limited to African-American players, although, that certainly was part of it.
Doyle, just to give you the update on the story, has responded, saying, I've been asked to remain silent, which I thought was interesting. But it is impossible for me to do so. There have been statements made about my behavior that are not true. I do not claim to be perfect. I have made mistakes, learned lessons, and like every American citizen, can do better. At no time have I ever crossed the line of unethical behavior or bias based upon race. I do not make racist comments. I do not tolerate people who do. He says, he's confident that his body of work will speak for itself.
PAT FORDE: It's very interesting. And this is one of those places, yeah, that has just been this absolute rock of consistency and pretty much noncontroversial consistency for two plus decades with Kirk Ferentz. I think there comes a point, where doing things the same way forever, which is kind of in the Iowa way, can come back from [INAUDIBLE] and go from being a strength to a weakness. And I think this might be one of those instances where that's the case.
You know, this is a guy that's been an old school coach with old school ways, old school mentality. That trickles down to in terms of control to the fact that they had a very restrictive social media policy that apparently has very recently been changed. A tweet from Adam Rittenberg, Iowa clarifies social media policy for players original agreement last week called for one pre-approved tweet per player.
But now, there are no restrictions on players in their Twitter participation. Well, welcome to the 21st century, Iowa. It's nice that the players can tweet without pre-approval. But i mean, that's what we're looking at here, though, is just this old school idea of control and this idea that basically, we're Iowa.
We're going to do things the way we've always done things, so I think you just get this insular continuation of ideas and doing things. And nobody can tell Kirk Ferentz to change. Well, now the outside world's coming in, and the form of former players tell them, you've got some problems. And you need to address them, and you need to change.
PETE THAMEL: I'm reading the Chris Doyle situation this way. This is a guy who pushed players to the absolute limit, and developed players very well, and was one of the best of what he does, right? He's an elite strength conditioning coach. He was paid that way. He was a fulcrum of an Iowa program, like y'all said, that have been very consistent, OK?
Now in doing that, I mean, this is about power. And in doing that, he accumulated enough power, where he felt like or was naive to the fact he was doing it. He basically was demeaning to the players and had no self-awareness, and his motivational techniques were from generations ago. Not acceptable then and should not have happened then, but that may have been how coaches spoke or how they acted.
And right now, that's not how you can act. Like it's been made very clear that stereotypes used as motivations, for example, which is one of the things that players brought up in this example, that can't happen anymore. And I was most disappointed in Chris Doyle in his statement.
Because, first of all, when a statement starts, I shouldn't be talking, but I have to, it's probably not going to go well. But then he basically called his accusers, who are victims, liars. And it just was like, how does a guy do something so unself-aware and really just released a statement that's stupid?
Everything Kirk Ferentz has said to me has been on point in all this. And he's accepted blame and has been open minded, and listening, and letting the players dictate how the program should move forward. And that's how it has to go, and it heartened me to see Kirk Ferentz's comments.