It's no secret which college football programs produce the most NFL players. Schools such as Texas, Ohio State and Florida do pretty well in that category.
But tucked away in the heart of Big Ten country, somewhat removed from the national spotlight, there's a different sort of football factory — one that specializes in coaches.
With a list of graduates that ranges from Oklahoma's Bob Stoops and Wisconsin's Bret Bielema to a crop of notable coordinators and assistants like Florida State's Mark Stoops, Iowa has been the undergraduate home to 16 of the nearly 1,200 head coaches and assistants working in Division I college football.
That's three more than Florida, four more than Michigan, 10 more than Notre Dame and four times the number from Wisconsin, Southern California and Stanford. When you include coaches who were assistants at Iowa but didn't play there, the list includes former Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez and current Hawkeyes coach Kirk Ferentz, among others.
Buffalo athletic director Warde Manuel, who has two former Iowa players on his football staff, said that when you consider how many coaches the school has produced, it would be fair to call Iowa "the Harvard of the profession."
Iowa's unsurpassed track record at turning college kids into successful football coaches is due in large part to one man: Hayden Fry. During his tenure from 1979 until 1998, in which he went 143-89-6 and led Iowa to 14 bowl games and three Big Ten titles, Fry quietly built a system designed to groom potential coaches.
"Every one of us has come through Hayden Fry," said William Inge, Buffalo's defensive coordinator. "He's the one who molded us into the coaches we've become."
In an interview from his home in Mesquite, Nev., Fry, who is now 82, said his approach to inspiring future coaches stemmed from the lessons he learned from his father while growing up on a farm in Odessa, Texas.
Fry's father would tell him he couldn't go to school until he filled the pickup with hay and fed the cows.
"I said, 'Daddy, we have 2,000 acres and creeks and trees, how am I going to find all those cows?' " Fry said.
"He said, 'All you have to do is drive out and listen. One cow is the leader, the bell cow. Find the bell cow, and you find the whole herd.' "
The "bell cow" theory not only stuck, it became a tenet of Fry's coaching philosophy. As a coach, Fry took the unusual step of tapping certain players to serve as player-coaches for their position groups. The idea, he said, was that they would develop leadership skills that could benefit the team on Saturdays.
Upon graduation, those "bell cows" who wanted to pursue coaching careers had an easier time of it than they did at other schools. The second phase of Fry's development process was to give the students entry-level coaching jobs on his staff — usually as graduate assistants. Of the 16 Iowa players now coaching elsewhere, 13 coached at the school early in their careers, including 10 who started as graduate assistants.
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