Seth Wallace and Tyler Barnes joined me for a live recording earlier this summer to discuss their upcoming season, how NIL and the transfer portal have changed their approach to recruiting, and how managing the Iowa football team is often similar to managing a business. Seth Wallace previously worked as the Assistant Defensive Coordinator for the University of Iowa Football Team before being elevated to Assistant Head Football Coach at the beginning of this year. Tyler Barnes previously served as the Recruiting Director before stepping into the role of Chief of Staff and General Manager earlier this summer.
I learned a lot, and I think you will too.
Sponsored by MidWestOne Bank, this is the latest edition of the CBJ’s Real Success with Nate Kaeding and notable Iowa business and cultural leaders.
Nate Kaeding: Seth, we’re going to start with you and the Iowa defense. We’re going to go back in time to 1999. Coach Ferentz just got hired and one of his first hires is Norm Parker. What was it about Norm’s defensive philosophy that was a perfect fit for what Kirk was trying to build here at Iowa football?
Seth Wallace: Well, first off, it is a pleasure to be here and, on behalf of Coach Ferentz and our staff, to have the opportunity to speak amongst a bunch of community leaders. This is really a pleasure.
I had the unique opportunity to be a graduate assistant for Norm back in 2006 and ended up becoming what I would consider to be Norm’s caddy. When it came to Norm Parker, it was the steadiness and the simplicity, the way that he approached the game, the way that he approached our defense, and the way that he taught it to our players that was very, very unique.
We get a lot of credit for being a really good defense and having a lot of consistency through the course of 26 years’ time. A lot of that credit does go back to Norm Parker and the hire that Kirk Ferentz made. But I think what you see is a blueprint that was developed back in ‘99 that is very similar to what it looks like now.
So that’s where I think we’re unique, and that’s where I think we’ve got an edge on our competition — the fact that it’s been around for a long time and we’ve all been together for a good deal of time as well.
What are those foundational principles that make Iowa defense special?
Seth: There is a level of toughness, and I’m talking both the mental and physical sides. You have to endure so much in this day and age with all of the scrutiny and all of the standards and expectations that are placed on you, so it really does start with just being able to handle the toughness of it from a mental standpoint. Then there’s 14 games, a bowl game, and a championship game, so the seasons get longer. It used to be 10 games back in the day, and now it’s exceeding 13 or 14 games. So being able to just endure the physical side of college football is pretty big for a high school kid transitioning to college in their first or second year.
Our players end up appreciating the little things. They appreciate the basics. They appreciate the fundamentals. And I think that just then helps transition them into the real world once they get past football.
In business, we talk about KPIs, or key performance indicators. What is it that you guys look for specifically when it comes to measuring success?
Seth: Obviously the biggest indicator is what we’re measured on week in and week out, and that’s how many points you give up. That is something that we have total control over.
However, there’s some performance indicators that really will tell the story behind the scoring defensive number. Prior to the ball being snapped, there is so much that we’re asking our guys to look at and digest. Then, once the ball is snapped, we’re asking them to execute whatever it is that they found in the pre-snap. That goes back to pre-snap penalties, not shooting yourself in the foot, all of that type of stuff.
One big number for us, and you guys can start to track this if you want to, is the number of plays of 25 yards or greater that we give up. We have found, over an 11-year study, that if we give up two plays or less at 25 yards or greater, we’re actually winning 75% of our games. That’s not asking for any other assistance by offense or special teams. It’s what we can control defensively.
Our players are well aware of that. They’re pretty critical of themselves collectively and individually when those plays are given up during practice. I do think you have to find a number or some type of performance indicator that you show to your players or show to your colleagues or your employees, and that’s what you’re fighting for each and every day.
Tyler, you’re at the forefront of coordinating the recruiting and the filling out of that Iowa Hawkeye football roster. Talk a bit about what your role looks like day-to-day.
Tyler Barnes: My job is to make the recruiting process as efficient and as simple as possible for our coaching staff. I have a staff of seven and we work with the coaches on a daily basis, specifically Coach Ferentz. There’s about 18 core principles that we came up with. That’s what we’re trying to identify. Then we break it down to each position. Seth has key characteristics and position traits that we’re looking for, and it’s going to shift by position, obviously.
But it’s things like being accountable, being a leader, being a winner, physical and mental toughness — there’s a whole list of them. Those are things that we just can’t compromise, whether we’re recruiting a high school kid or a transfer portal kit. That’s something that has stuck with this program for 26 years. It’s my job and my staff’s job to work with our coaching staff to make sure we’re doing everything we can to be a conduit to make the process as simple and as efficient as possible for those guys.
Coach, can you talk a bit about how you gauge the character of a player as you’re going through the recruiting process?
Seth: Yeah, I think a lot of that ties directly into what Tyler was talking about from a recruiting standpoint. At the end of the day, there does have to be a unique appreciation for what we do, how we do it, and why we do it because we are a little bit unique that way. We are unique in the way that we do things, and there does have to be really an unwavering appreciation for how we do things because it’s not that way at other programs.
We encourage those that we are recruiting to go see other programs like Iowa State, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, and if you end up coming back to Iowa and this is where you want to be, then you’re probably coming here with that unwavering appreciation for what we are, how we do things, and why we do things.
We don’t get to do home visits before the decision is made like we used to, and that was a very, very important factor in judging somebody’s character. We were seeing how a kid was around his family, around his siblings, or around grandma and grandpa. We are fortunate that, in a unique way, we’ve recruited a region in a four-to-six-hour radius around Iowa City, that we’ve built our roster from. A lot of those kids are able to get over here three or four times before a decision is made. So we get that unique opportunity to be around their family and be around them more.
Tyler, take us back through the last couple of years and how things have changed with the evolution of the transfer portal.
Tyler: It’s been really unique. Retention is key. I mean, retention’s key in all businesses, but for us, our biggest thing is that we need to recruit the right guys. We had 10 guys this year, whether it was NFL opportunities or other schools recruiting them, that chose to stick around. Six of them are in their sixth year, or their COVID year, which is unique.
It has completely changed how we go about recruiting. That December and January time used to be a head start time for our coaching staff. This past year, we took seven to 10 days just to keep our staff off the road to meet with every guy on our team and a couple of guys multiple times to talk through the process. “What are you thinking? Are you going to leave for the NFL?” We had to talk a couple of guys off the ledge that had pretty good offers elsewhere.
But a big part of that is how we identify those guys out of high school and the culture we have within our building. Some of those guys will even start recruiting other guys. We had six guys that I thought were going to move on to the NFL. Once we got one back, the snowball started rolling and those guys started recruiting each other.
In your mind, what would be the perfect way for the NCAA to structure the transfer portal to give it some more organization and guardrails?
Tyler: That’s a really loaded question, Nate. How much time do we have?
Let it rip.
Tyler: The portal is what it is, and the portal really isn’t any different than how transfers used to work five or six years ago. I think the main difference is the media coverage. It is celebrated when guys hit the portal. I live on Twitter. Unfortunately, I have to. There’s actually national media that cover only the transfer portal now. That’s how big this has gotten.
Most college athletes have agents now. They can’t be called agents or marketing agents. But you see a transfer announcement and it pops up and it gets a million retweets and a million likes. We celebrate kids leaving and we celebrate kids coming to new schools, which is awesome. When you’re hiring new people, you need to find a way to hire good people and you want to bring in good people.
But there’s not a lot of articles written about the 10 guys that chose to stay back in Iowa last year, and you’re talking about probably six NFL draft picks. We can’t go out in the portal and find six NFL draft picks. It’s just not going to happen every year. That’s what kind of bugs me a little bit. It’s not the media’s fault. They’re doing their job and I get it. But from a structure standpoint, it’s turned into the wild, wild west a little bit.
I think the revenue sharing is a step down the right path, and we’ll find out what that’s going to look like in the next year and a half. Beth Goetz does a great job staying at the forefront of everything NCAA-related, and she’s a visionary. We’re in a good spot there. But I think there’s just got to be a way to really bring everything back under one guidance. Just finding a way to really enforce the rules. Revenue sharing is a big thing. The salary cap would be huge.
I think Coach Ferentz has done a really good job. When all of this happened, he said, “We’re going to sit back. We’re still going to recruit the same guys we’ve recruited.” Like Seth said, there are enough guys out there that have a true appreciation for how Iowa football operates, and that includes in the transfer portal.
Seth, what impact has these things like NIL and the transfer portal had on your ability to build culture and develop players within the program?
Seth: We always see the individual as what he may be three or four years down the road and not what he’s going to be as soon as he steps foot in our program. That’s a big deal and that’s a comforting piece when it comes to recruiting because you are able to go out there and you are able to recruit a developmental player. We’re not stressed with how we go out and recruit. Coach Ferentz simply just wants us to go out and find the right kids. We go out searching for traits.
How about red flags? Are there things that pop up and you’re like, “We might want to steer of clear this guy”?
Seth: Yeah, and Tyler can speak to that as well. We see it when we’re actually out on the road recruiting and you start to get around the kids. There’s the obvious stuff: The way the kid acts during practice when things aren’t going the right way or during competition when things aren’t going the right way. The red flags would be poor academics. We look at transcripts. We look at how often a kid misses a day of school or how often he’s absent. Those are things that matter to us.
One of the interesting anomalies in the sports recruiting world out of high school in the social media era is the onset of the parent promoter for their kid. Tyler, what role does social media play as you’re looking at recruiting a kid?
Tyler: Speaking of red flags, that’s an easy one. You might have high maintenance employees. High school kids tip their hand pretty easily on social media. If you’re on there with seven or more tweets per day, that’s something that I’m going to take into account. If you’re high maintenance in your life right now and you’re going to be high maintenance here, it’s probably not going to be a good marriage. It’s just not how we operate.
Parents are good and bad. When we have kids on campus, we’re with them for 10 to 12 hours a day so we get a viewpoint into how the whole family dynamic works and how the kid treats his parents. Does he respect them? How does he answer questions? How is his demeanor for the whole day? That’s our job to report that back to the coaching staff when we see things that might be red flags.
If a kid brings up money as one of his top three most important things when choosing a college, we’re immediately out. That really should not be in the top five. We don’t even want to talk about that. But most parents, I think for the people we recruit, are really good. We’ve got some high maintenance parents. It kind of is what it is. I think the coaches do a good job. I don’t coach any of these kids, but my biggest thing is that I do stay close to a lot of these parents. I’m the in-between when they want to know about how Johnny’s doing and if things are going okay.
The beauty of my job and the thing I love the most is that I’ll start recruiting these kids, some as sophomores in high school, and then I’ll see them come into Iowa and then be drafted. It’s really gratifying to see the kids leave with their degrees and fulfill their dreams.
