Former Iowa great Drew Tate ‘enjoying the ride right now’ as he coaches from coast to coast

IOWA CITY — Drew Tate was in Boca Raton, Fla., in the spring for professional development with a coach at Florida Atlantic when a quasi Iowa reunion ensued.

The coach he was there to see, David Beaty, has no direct connection to Iowa. But Tate was not the only former Hawkeye in attendance at the Florida Atlantic spring practice.

“I look over, and I’m like, ‘Well, that guy looks pretty familiar,’” Tate said. “’You, you got to be a Ferentz.’ Well, it was Stevie Ferentz."”

The happy surprise in the Sunshine State has been part of a long, winding road for Tate as the former Iowa quarterback pursues a coaching career.

“I want to be a head coach, period,” Tate said on The Gazette’s Hawk Off the Press podcast. “The fastest way I think I can get there is being an offensive coordinator. So wherever that is — in the CFL, in college, in high school — coaching is coaching.”

For right now, he is the receivers coach for the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the Canadian Football League. His other stops have spanned geographically from coast to coast since wrapping up his CFL playing career in 2018.

He was a defensive analyst at Coastal Carolina, quarterbacks coach for the CFL’s B.C. Lions in Vancouver, quarterbacks coach at the University of Tennessee-Martin and tight ends coach at Northern Iowa — all between 2018 and 2023.

It followed a lengthy playing career in the CFL with stops in Saskatchewan (2007-08), Calgary (2009-2016), Ottawa (2017) and then Saskatchewan again (2018).

“This is my eighth city in eight years,” Tate said. “It’s just kind of my thing. It’d be weird to be at a place two years in a row, I think, at this point.”

Tate’s coaching success is far from a surprise to the coach he had at Iowa.

“He’s a competitor,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz told The Gazette this week. “I won’t say half-crazy.”

Tate also “relates well with people because that’s who he is.”

“He’s very authentic,” Ferentz said.

Ferentz said coaching is a “really natural progression” for Tate, the son of a longtime Texas high school coach.

“It’s in his blood,” Ferentz said. “He’s a football rat all the way.”

Tate has now coached three different offensive position groups — quarterbacks, tight ends and wide receivers. The chance to add the last one to his resume was an appealing factor when he left UNI to go back to the CFL.

“Hopefully with all the experiences I’ve tried to gather and make a resume out of the stops I’ve had, hopefully it leads to something pretty good down the road,” he said.

Tate has enjoyed the Canadian game, which has “some different rules, but still has all the same components as American football does.”

“It’s a lot of fun,” Tate said. “It’s a lot of throwing, a lot of motions. And with the 12 players, there’s a lot of creativity that you can have with concepts and things like that.”

The CFL also has a much different calendar for coaches than college football.

“You only work six months and then you’re off six months, but you get paid 12 months, so not bad,” he said.

“I always wanted to coach college football, and I got to do it with these last two years at the FCS level. But to be honest with you, with the world of college football, it wasn’t what I thought it was.”

Tate “didn’t mind” the non-coaching aspects of being a college football coach, but he was not spending as much time doing what he enjoyed most about coaching.

“The best part of college football is the players, period,” Tate said. “But you’re only with the players for August through November and then maybe a month for spring ball.”

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Whether Tate would return to the college game is dependent on “who and where and what — those kinds of things.”

So if Iowa called its starting quarterback from 2004-06? “I think it’d be an awesome deal,” Tate said.

Back on that day in Boca Raton, Steve Ferentz seemed to have no issues giving his fellow Hawkeye a little bit of a hard time.

“We’re just sitting there talking,” Tate said of Kirk and Mary Ferentz’s youngest son. “He had made a comment that his mama said that pro football is where bad coaches go to hide.”

In all seriousness, though, Tate is embracing the twists and turns of his coaching journey — wherever it takes him and the belongings he fits in his car with each move.

“You always think you have a plan; you have an idea of what you’re going to do,” Tate said. “But when you coach football, it’s a one-year deal, and you don’t know what you’re going to do or where you’re going to go, so just enjoying the ride right now.”

You can hear the full conversation with Tate on this week’s episode of the Hawk Off the Press podcast, which is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Stitcher.

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com