Ferentz camp strategy differs from super camper Harbaugh

IOWA CITY — There is more than one way to be a teacher, IT professional or pretty much any profession. There is more than one way to be a college head football coach.

Wednesday evening, Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh held one of his 39 satellite camps in New Jersey, at Paramus Catholic High School, a prep football powerhouse in the state. He pulled the microphone off the lectern and told the crowd of about 600 that the moment for him was like coaching in the Super Bowl, which he did with the San Francisco 49ers in 2013.

Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz's summer camp tour began and ended last weekend with the Iowa Ladies Football Academy.

In response to a question on how many satellite camps he's done this June, Ferentz said, 'I've been to the Ladies Football Academy. Had a wonderful day.'

Were there are a lot of recruits?

'Prospects not recruits,' Ferentz said.

The Ladies Football Academy had 414 participants and they raised nearly $350,000 for the UI Children's Hospital. It's safe to say more got done in that non-satellite camp than any real satellite camp out there.

In the face of the Harbaugh headlines — Harbaugh wore a Derek Jeter Yankees jersey at the Paramus camp, and there's a whole list of jerseys he's worn so far during camps — Ferentz doesn't feel pressure to keep up.

Remember, there's more than one way to do this.

'Not at all,' Ferentz said during an interview Wednesday. 'I'll go out on a limb, there are schools that are going to recruit really well again this year. There are a handful in every conference who are going to do well and get those 5-star guys and then everybody else kind of figures out what's going on.

'I don't see the world changing a whole lot. Maybe, if anything, more mistakes will get made because everyone is running around doing this and that.'

June has become old school recruiting month for college football. Basically, it's anything goes. Ferentz used the example of renting a high school's football field to hold a practice on. Michigan did that at the IMG Academy in Florida during its spring break. Iowa also did this at Valley Stadium in West Des Moines.

The Discovery Channel has 'Shark Week.' College football now has June, and we'll call it 'Harbaugh Month.'

During last month's Big Ten athletics director meetings in Rosemont, Ill., Michigan athletics director Warde Manuel said Harbaugh's camp schedule — 39 camps in 22 states and American Samoa and Australia — isn't about recruiting as much as it was about building Michigan's brand (and, by extension, Harbaugh's).

'I've had no conversations with Jim where he's said, 'My goal for this is to recruit,'' Manuel said. 'We know the majority, 95 or 98 percent, of the prospects in the country that we're going to recruit before he goes to one camp. To say this is about recruiting and put it in that light, it's not the perspective that he has and it's not the perspective that I think we should have on this.'

Michigan people can say that. The rest of the college football world sees recruiting.

'In almost all of the discourse, this is recruiting,' Ferentz said. 'This is legalized recruiting. What doesn't make sense is we're controlled in the spring and we're controlled in the fall (in recruiting), every part of the year except for June. It seems silly to me that we can send anybody out every day of June and have face-to-face contact with prospects and even pay money to high schools to rent their fields, those kinds of things.

'I think we need to reign it in and come up with some kind of control on it, just as we do for the rest of our year. That perspective of being going from major college football for nine years (referring to Ferentz's time in the NFL from 1993-98) and coming back, things were a lot more sane recruiting-wise. This is like a flashback to the old days and the wild, wild west thing.'

Ferentz knows Iowa has to be in this and so it is. From June 1-15, Iowa assistant coaches will participate in 10 satellite camps. Hawkeye coaches were at the Paramus camp on Wednesday night. On Thursday, a few Iowa coaches will be at the Sound Mind Sound Body camp in Detroit, where the Iowa staff first made contact with senior cornerback Desmond King. By June 15, an Iowa staffer will have been to satellites in St. Louis, Mo., Dallas, Texas, Cleveland, Ohio, New Jersey, Detroit, Mich., Birmingham, Ala., Chicago, Atlanta, Ga., and Kansas City, Mo.

'Not that everybody is out, but we have a couple of guys here and there,' Ferentz said. 'Just about everyone is out for at least a couple of days, looking at prospects, putting eyes on them and that type of thing. We're not going to commit the whole week to it. I want to make sure we do a good job with our camps on campus. We want to do a quality job there.'

Also this month, Iowa will hold 13 camps in Iowa City, ranging from a kids camp to 'Elite 4 Lineman University.'

Wait, wait, wait. Ferentz did break some news here. He said his football team, staff and players, is this month going to spend some time on ... wait for it ... football.

Oh yeah, that.

'Oh yeah, by the way, we're going to do a little work on football in there, too, somewhere in the month of June,' Ferentz said with a laugh. 'Someone told me we have 12 games that were scheduled. We probably should put a little time into those opponents and just talk about our situation.'

l Comments: (319) 398-8256; marc.morehouse@thegazette.com