Kirk Ferentz addresses Iowa's approach to transfer portal

Monday marked the opening of the NCAA transfer portal as all of the nation’s six-plus win teams are now tasked with preparing for a bowl game and managing their roster.

Iowa is one of those teams ahead of their Cheez-It Citrus Bowl matchup against Tennessee, and with the portal now open, Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz was asked about his approach to the transfer portal this offseason following a year where Iowa was more active than ever in the portal.

“First of all just to comment on that, obviously this whole thing’s progressed and last year it made more sense to be more active than the year before. How it will go this year, it’s hard to predict,” Ferentz admitted. “A year ago at this time we had already met with our players, we met with them the week after Thanksgiving and just talked to each and everyone about their futures, what they’re thinking about just so we had some indication of what our roster’s gonna shake out to be and just encouraged guys to take last week and this week to make a decision.”

“As you might imagine, last week that really wasn’t appropriate to talk to players about what they were thinking. Our focus was solely on the championship game.”

The Hawkeyes fell to Michigan in the Big Ten Championship last weekend, with their participation now delaying their process of managing their roster as it relates to the transfer portal. But Ferentz made it clear that he and his staff will still be meeting with all of Iowa’s players soon to get a pulse on their attitudes regarding transferring.

“So we’ll meet as a staff tomorrow morning and just talk jointly about the roster, then we’ll go through the process again touching base with all our players here the next two days. Already had one player call and indicate he is going to enter the portal. So all in all I think what you want for every player is for them to be happy with their situations,” Ferentz explained. “If a guy’s not sure he wants to be here or sure he doesn’t want to be here, then my encouragement would be maybe check something else out. We operate better with guys that are really fully invested.”

Investment seems to have never been an issue at Iowa, with the Hawkeyes recently achieving their third 10-win season in the last six years under Ferentz. But with the transfer portal paired with NIL in an unprecedented way, the likelihood of players seeking greener pastures elsewhere has increased across the entire college football landscape.

Regardless, Ferentz and the Hawkeyes plan to run business as usual, assessing their roster following departures before dabbling in adding players to their team from the transfer portal ahead of the 2024 season.

“So we’ll do it pretty much the same way as last year outside of again, we weren’t able to utilize last week to just get some information. But my guess is by the end of the week we’ll have a little bit better idea of what our roster’s gonna shape up like and from then we’ll have a better idea of how we can move forward too in terms of looking in the portal and seeing what might be of interest to us,” Ferentz concluded.