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CHICAGO – Every football coach hopes to find consistency at the quarterback position each year, but in reality, that's never possible. 

Kirk Ferentz and the Iowa Hawkeyes are no stranger to quarterback battles, but the ongoing battle between Jeremy Hecklinski and Hank Brown may be one of the closest battles Ferentz has presided over during his 27-year tenure as Iowa's head coach. 

I asked him about this at Big Ten Media Days earlier this week and in true Ferentz fashion, he gave me both the simple answer and the long answer. He told me that this is probably the closest quarterback race he's ever been a part of, but not before going back in time to a three-year period that is pretty close to the top of the list. 

The three-year stretch he shared was arguably his most successful period in Iowa City – the 2002–2004 campaigns. The Hawkeyes won 31 games and a pair of co-Big Ten championships during this period, but they also did so while starting three different starting quarterbacks. 

Brad Banks led Iowa to an undefeated Big Ten campaign and finished as the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy in his only year as a Division-I starter, while Nathan Chandler, though not a JUCO prospect like Banks, produced similar results in 2003. Drew Tate was the lone man of the bunch to start for more than one season (he was a three-year starter), but he had to engineer the magical 2004 campaign as a true sophomore. 

Ferentz knows that he's unique in the fact that Iowa is one of just two Power Four programs to have a quarterback battle between two signal-callers that were on the roster last season, but that doesn't mean the Hawkeyes won't have good QB play in 2026. 

Though Banks, Chandler, and Tate were all first-year starters, they each had time to learn the offense for a year before taking the reigns. A similar strategy can be traced over to special teams, which produced some of the greatest players from those legendary early 2000s teams. 

"We thought we knew who they were going to be, but none of them had ever played college football before," Ferentz said. "Stories unfold in a lot of different ways, and we'll just see how this one goes." 

What Are Other Notable Battles? 

I wouldn't classify some of Iowa's previous quarterback races as "battles." Every time the quarterback position comes up in Hawkeye football circles, it's usually mired in controversy. 

You could almost find quarterback controversies in every season of Ferentz's tenure, but these are the two that stick out the most in my opinion: 

Stanzi vs. Christensen: Ferentz clearly made a mistake by starting the left-handed Jake Christensen over Ricky Stanzi early in the 2008 season, but quickly corrected it by naming Stanzi the starter after two weeks. The Hawkeyes finished 9-4, but it's hard not to wonder if their three-game losing streak would've been corrected with Stanzi entrenched as the starter before the season. 

Beathard vs. Ruddock: Would the 2013 and 2014 campaigns been different with C.J. Beathard as the starter instead of Jake Ruddock. Ruddock was serviceable, but it became very clear that Beathard was the better option early in the 2014 season. The unexpectedly incredible 12-12 season of 2015 washed away those bad tastes, but Hawkeye fans still wonder what they could've accomplished with Beathard as a four-year starter. 

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HawkeyeRoundtable publisher Brad Schultz has covered the Iowa Hawkeyes since 2023. To send him story ideas, scoops, or criticize his writing, reach him at bradschultz@roundtable.io

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