1. Brian is a terrible OC who would have been fired midseason anywhere else.
2. The play of the OL was worse than Brian’s play calling. That has to be addressed first.
3. I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that Brian taking over quarterback coach occurred before Spencer Petras’s worst season at Iowa (in year three as a starter no less).
4. Kirk is not the first legendary coach to hang on too long. The bottom line is we conveniently forget before Brian Ferentz there was Greg Davis. Don’t get me wrong, Brian is the worst OC ever under Kirk, but let’s say for the sake of argument Brian leaves and Kirk replaces him with someone halfway competent, how much do you actually expect the offense to change? Sure, there probably won’t be the same predictable Brian patterns of first down runs with second and third down shotgun incompletions, sacks, or 2-yard shallow crossing routes, or the feeble attempts at cuteness inside the red zone (the 1-2 times the offense gets there after a special teams play or turnover) with jet sweeps and reverses that have worked 0/456 times in the past, or abandoning a successful running game down one score with 3 minutes left and two timeouts against a horrible rush defense, but honestly, all of that aside, do you really expect significant improvement coupled with a modern style of play?
Get real. We’ve been talking about the same stale, boring, inefficient offense for over ten years now. Nothing is really changing regardless of who the OC is so long as Kirk is running the show. The way this is most likely going down is 2023 becomes a repeat of 1998. Hayden was battling cancer. What’s Kirk’s excuse? He’s stubborn and arrogant. That’s all it is.