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Few people in college football will greet Tuesday night’s first College Football Playoff rankings reveal with less ceremony than Kirk Ferentz.
Asked during his weekly press conference whether he planned to watch the selection committee’s inaugural rankings of the season, which ESPN unveils Tuesday night, the Iowa head coach answered with a sarcastic “Oh jeez, I can’t wait” before confirming that, yes, the show was in fact that evening. A follow-up asked whether the rankings would at least offer a sense of where the Hawkeyes stand, and whether reaching the program’s first playoff was a goal. Ferentz gave the coaching-manual answer first, insisting that good things come with winning and that nobody could have predicted any of this season’s results back in July.
Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz sounds off on the College Football Playoff rankings show and ESPN:
“It’s great for TV, right? ESPN’s loving it, I’m sure. … They do seem to promote the sports they carry. You couldn’t find anything on the World Series. … Then I was like FOX, ESPN — oh yeah. … We [don’t play] on ESPN so we probably won’t make the rankings.”
— Eliot Clough (@EliotClough) November 3, 2026
“I’m a lot more worried about getting ready for Northwestern, quite frankly, and then we’ll see where we’re at on Sunday, and then we’ll turn the page on to the next one,” Ferentz said. “But my experience is if you’re looking down the road, it’s a good time to really go out there and perform badly.”
Once he had dispensed with the obligatory one-game-at-a-time sermon, Ferentz turned his attention from the committee to ESPN’s habit of amplifying the properties it pays for, and his evidence was the World Series, which aired exclusively on Fox and ended last Wednesday when the Milwaukee Brewers finished off the Tampa Bay Rays in five games.
“Not to make fun of it, but it’s great for TV, right?” Ferentz said. “ESPN’s loving it, I’m sure, and next time I look at my iPad, I’m sure I’ll be reading all about it and can’t wait. I did notice they seem to promote the sports that they carry. Is that correct? I’m figuring that out. You couldn’t find anything on the baseball World Series until the last game… I’m living in the same world, right?”
The gripe Ferentz voiced from a podium in Iowa City has circulated in network boardrooms too. This summer, anonymous Fox executives complained to Front Office Sports that ESPN gave short shrift to the World Cup, prompting ESPN to publicly tout its “comprehensive coverage” despite FIFA’s restrictive rules limiting how non-rights holders could use match highlights. Fox, for its part, publicly denied any issues with ESPN over the matter.
Having needled ESPN for sparsely covering a championship it didn’t broadcast, Ferentz wondered aloud whether the same favoritism might seep into the rankings and cost Iowa for its allegiance to Fox.
“I’m like, are they still playing the World Series or what? Like, oh yeah, Fox, ESPN. I got it. OK,” Ferentz continued. “And I better watch out because Fox is… well, I’m pro-Fox, right? I mean, you know, we’re a Fox conference and several others, but we’re not ESPN, so we probably won’t make the rankings. I haven’t gone that far, but anyway, I’m not too worried about it.”
The Big Ten hasn’t been an ESPN conference since 2022, when the network walked away from the league’s media rights negotiations and the Big Ten finalized deals with Fox, CBS and NBC that left ESPN without Big Ten football and basketball for the first time in roughly four decades. Fox emerged as the conference’s primary partner and, through its majority stake in the Big Ten Network, effectively controls the league’s media inventory. This spring, Fox was reportedly nearing a deal to buy back the 2026 Big Ten Championship Game from NBC, which had essentially sublicensed the game from Fox in the first place.
The playoff, however, belongs to ESPN, and so does the Tuesday night stage Ferentz was poking fun at. The weekly rankings shows were written into ESPN’s CFP media rights deal, and their roughly 1.7 million viewers per week last season give the network little reason to part with them.
Those viewers keep coming back despite years of mounting exasperation with the show itself. Critics, including our own Matt Yoder, have argued it should be abolished and exists primarily to generate content for ESPN, and Kirk Herbstreit, the network’s most prominent college football voice, has called for its end.
That frustration boiled over last December, when Miami vaulted past Notre Dame for the final at-large berth between the last weekly reveal and Selection Sunday, even though neither team played in a conference championship game. Committee chair Hunter Yurachek offered Rece Davis a muddled, unconvincing explanation for the reversal, then dismissed the idea that the weekly format needed an overhaul. Four months later, the committee was reportedly weighing whether to delay the first release, eliminate the rankings before championship weekend, and curtail the chair’s on-air interrogations from Davis.
Ferentz was only half serious in suggesting the committee might penalize Iowa for its television home, but the joke grazes a sore spot that past committee chairs have done little to soothe. Prior to last season’s first reveal, then-chair Mack Rhoades explained BYU and Texas Tech’s top-10 placements on the CFP conference call by nodding to College GameDay’s scheduled trip to Lubbock that weekend.
“We tried to help ESPN out with their ratings by getting BYU and Texas Tech together with GameDay in Lubbock, so enjoy that,” Rhoades said at the time.
Rhoades was being lighthearted, but the quip only reinforced a long-festering suspicion that the network and the committee operate in uncomfortably close quarters. ESPN pays the SEC billions, owns the SEC Network and broadcasts the playoff, and every November its studio analysts lobby for multi-loss SEC teams over one-loss challengers from elsewhere. That mistrust has occasionally escalated beyond talk-show grievance. In 2023, after undefeated Florida State was excluded from the four-team field, Florida’s attorney general went so far as to request communications between the CFP committee and ESPN.
Of course, the committee’s Fox aversion didn’t stop it from slotting Ohio State and Indiana at No. 1 and No. 2 in last season’s opening rankings, but Ferentz still has a point about who profits most from the weekly spectacle. Whether Davis and company take the bait tonight hardly matters to Ferentz, whose attention is already fixed on Saturday’s trip to Evanston, Illinois.
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https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/kirk-ferentz-jokes-iowa-won-233022103.html
