At 6 a.m. every fall Monday, Kyle Frederick orders two large, iced Americanos at the ground-level coffee shop of his Minneapolis apartment building.
“Same order, every time,” he said. “Simplistic.”
By 7 a.m., he and identical-twin brother Connor are in a downtown Minneapolis recording studio, sipping Starbucks and discussing Iowa football X’s and O’s on a podcast that has developed a cult-like following among Hawkeye fans … and even opposing fans.
“The ANF Podcast” stands for “America Needs Fredericks,” although the 31-year-old twins — both in-house corporate attorneys at separate companies in Minneapolis — don’t actually introduce themselves during their shows. That’s representative of how their podcasts emphasize substance over flash.
A roughly hour-long show — in which the brothers sit across a table from one another and break down a menu of plays they’ve carefully selected from the recent Iowa game and its next opponent — almost feels like you’re behind the scenes in a film room or a game-planning meeting with the Hawkeyes. The amount of planning, preparation and knowledge that goes into each episode is mind-boggling for what is basically a hobby.
“It’s a weird obsession,” Connor said. “But I think we’ve found a way to express it through this podcast.”
How the ‘obsession’ became a podcast
Kyle and Connor Frederick grew up in Cedar Rapids. They tailgated at every Iowa football home game from 2002 to 2004, soaking in all the joy that came from the Hawkeyes winning 31 games and two Big Ten championships over those three seasons under Kirk Ferentz.
That’s where the Hawkeye piece of the “obsession” began. The other piece that led to the podcast was an obsession with film study, which they credit to their time playing for Chris Evers at Alburnett High School. Connor was a tight end and defensive end; Kyle was a guard and defensive end. They realized how going over tape for hours on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday could help them on Friday nights. Alburnett went 11-1 in their senior year of 2011, falling a few games shy of a state title.
Kyle didn’t play college football, but Connor played one year at St. Thomas University in Minnesota, where they both earned their undergraduate and law degrees. The brothers’ thirst for football only intensified after their playing days were done.
“We probably spent 10 years rewatching (Iowa) games for no reason,” Connor said. “I wasn’t watching TV shows. I wasn’t playing video games. I would just sit down, and I’d watch games, over and over again. And it was always (with) an eye of, ‘I want to understand why.’ … and tapping into that football obsession that we got into in high school.”
Flash forward to a watch party of 20-25 people for the 2015 Big Ten Championship between Iowa and Michigan State. Leading up to the game, for fun, Kyle had studied countless Michigan State games to understand what the Spartans might try to do against the 12-0 Hawkeyes.
When Michigan State’s Connor Cook rolled out for an option-pass, Kyle remarked to the group that the Spartans had run the same concept in a 2013 win at Kinnick Stadium.
“Everyone said, ‘Why do you know that? Why is that part of your life that you know how they attacked in 2013?’” Kyle said. “That was almost a decade ago, and we’ve been doing that type of focus rewatching these games (since).”
Iowa’s remarkable coaching stability has helped two program outsiders like the Fredericks seem like insiders.
“You can learn something in 2017 about how Iowa plays option-reads, and you know that for nine years,” Kyle said.
As Connor put it, if a defense gives up a play of even 4-6 yards, something went wrong, and the brothers love to crack the case on why. That taps into their lawyer side, and this podcast has essentially become a creative outlet for that.
The twins got the idea to launch the podcast after a walk together in which they were arguing about something like defensive-end techniques, thinking that other people might be interested to hear these things, too.
As luck would have it, a close friend, Nate Reinhart, had founded a Minneapolis-based company that manages and assists digital content creators. Without him, “The ANF Podcast” never would’ve gotten off the ground as it did in 2023.
And now, it’s become must-watch/listen content for Hawkeye fans who love high-level talk about the X’s and O’s. The Fredericks noticed the show really started to take off this year during the buildup (and review) of the Iowa-Iowa State game on Sept. 6.
They are complimentary of Iowa’s opponents while also looking for weak spots that the Hawkeyes can exploit. They also aren’t afraid to harshly analyze their favorite team, but dutifully provide facts and film clips as supporting evidence of their critiques.
“We realized if you pitch a moderate approach and you don’t talk crap about the other side,” Connor said, “you can usually get a larger audience.”
Their preview episode of Iowa-Indiana correctly forecasted the dangers of Curt Cignetti’s Hoosiers squad. Indiana fans widely praised the objective content before and after the game. Their Oregon preview episode, No. 56 in their three-year venture, drew their biggest metrics yet on platforms like YouTube and Spotify, thanks in part to complimentary Ducks fans who flooded the comments after gobbling up their show.
At this year’s Penn State game, the Fredericks began to understand how warmly and broadly their work has been received when “20 to 30” fans approached them as they entered Kinnick Stadium to share their love of the podcast.
“We expected people to enjoy it, because we knew the depth of knowledge would be there,” Connor said. “But I don’t think we ever expected it to potentially grow into something larger.”
How does each ‘ANF’ come together and what are future plans?
The Fredericks are both married with demanding jobs, so executing the podcast is a weekly challenge. Kyle looked at USC film on Wednesday through Friday leading up to the Nov. 8 Oregon game, but the majority of his podcast preparation happens on Sundays, from about 7 p.m. to midnight, after his 14-month-old son goes to sleep.
“We don’t want it to impact our full-time jobs,” Kyle said. “We do cram at nights and on weekends.”
Connor is admittedly even more obsessive with piecing together scouting clips for their show. He’ll hunker down at about 10 a.m. on Sundays and grind film until midnight, or whenever he falls asleep. Kyle laughs that he might have a few clips to throw into the show on Monday mornings, and Connor might present 10. After they finish recording, they walk about five minutes to get to their respective offices by 8:30.
There’s another two hours or so of editing on Tuesday nights before each episode is released, usually on Wednesdays. It’s a lot. And, yes, they are starting to feel the pressure of growing anticipation from fans, as the show has exploded in popularity.
“You’ve got to make sure it’s better or at least as good every week,” Connor said, “so people don’t get let down.”
Neither was comfortable speaking in front of an audience in their younger years. They credit their grandfather, John Cragan, a longtime communications professor at Illinois State University, for teaching them how to include narratives and stories into their job interviews after law school.
They’ve applied that same approach to the podcast.
“When you prepare for an interview, you want to stack four to five stories (and) move progressively through it,” Connor said. “When we do the pod, we think of these plays as stories.”
At the end of each episode, they make predictions for the upcoming game — often disagreeing with one another (for example, Kyle picked Oregon to beat Iowa; Connor picked the Hawkeyes) — and reach across the table to fist-bump the other before saying in unison, “Go Hawks.”
Though they’ve been encouraged by fans to expand the reach of their show to other programs, they seem content to focus on their love of the Hawkeyes. But they seem to sense there is a bigger market for their work at some point.
“(We’ll) take it week by week,” Kyle said. “Put a good product out, and if people like it, only good things can happen. … At this point, it’s a hobby, and that’s how we view it.”
Hawkeyes columnist Chad Leistikow has served for 31 years with The Des Moines Register and USA TODAY Sports Network. Chad is the 2023 INA Iowa Sports Columnist of the Year and NSMA Co-Sportswriter of the Year in Iowa. Join Chad’s text-message group at HawkCentral.com/HawkeyesTexts. Follow @ChadLeistikow on X.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Meet the twin brothers behind the popular ‘ANF Podcast’ about Iowa football | Leistikow
Reporting by Chad Leistikow, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
