Under Tom Brands, Iowa wrestling has delivered a remarkable level of consistency that is unmatched by any Division I program over the past two decades.
The Hawkeyes have finished in the top five in 17 consecutive NCAA Championships, including national titles in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2021. Not even Penn State or Oklahoma State can say that. If not for the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Brands likely would have five NCAA team titles to his credit.
Yet as Brands has acknowledged many times, the standard is incredibly high as the head coach at a program where his coach and mentor, Dan Gable, led Iowa to 15 NCAA team championships over a 21-year stretch from 1976 to 1997 before retiring at age 48.
That standard is why this winter’s glaring dip in Hawkeye wrestling success has been so jarring to a loyal fan base that has gradually become more apathetic and led to outside speculation that Brands might be fired.
But on the inside, Brands has the University of Iowa athletics department’s backing.
According to sources with direct knowledge of the situation, athletics director Beth Goetz recognizes the program is not meeting championship expectations but does not plan to make a leadership change following the season. Goetz is planning a comprehensive evaluation of all aspects of the program, the sources said, to identify opportunities for improvement.
What Goetz, who has been the men’s wrestling sport administrator since her Iowa athletics arrival from Ball State in September 2022, already knows: Iowa wrestling’s past is undeniably strong.
Its present, by the program’s standard, is slipping. After losing a total of six duals in the previous seven seasons, the Hawkeyes went 12-6 in 2025-26. Their 20-match winning streak over Iowa State was snapped in late November. Their 32-3 home defeat to No. 1 Penn State marked the program’s most lopsided dual loss in 60 years.
The short-term future of Iowa wrestling appears even bleaker, as three program cogs with a combined five top-four NCAA finishes — Drake Ayala (133 pounds), Michael Caliendo (165) and Patrick Kennedy (174) — are in their final year of eligibility. Recruiting and development have lagged, leaving at least 60% of the lineup with major uncertainty for Brands’ 21st season as Iowa head coach, in 2026-27.
Thus, the big question looms: What changes can Goetz’s postseason evaluation with Brands unlock to inspire more confidence and momentum in the program at this time next year?
Or, more important, how much change is Brands willing to make in the weeks and months ahead?
Just days before the March 7-8 Big Ten Championships were set to begin in State College, Pennsylvania, Brands spoke for nearly an hour with the Des Moines Register to address some of the biggest questions facing his program.
“Ask away,” Brands said, perhaps an acknowledgment of needed transparency given his tight-lipped reputation with the media. “Hey, this is the worst year of my career.”
What has happened to Hawkeyes’ attacking style?
Recently, the Register’s Hawkeye text-message group was sent a feeler to gather thoughts about the state of Iowa wrestling — good, bad or indifferent. Out of nearly 300 passionate responses, the majority of the feedback thought it was time for a coaching change. However, there were plenty of proponents for staying the course, too, with support behind Tom Brands and twin brother/Iowa associate head coach Terry Brands.
“They are both Hawks through and through,” one reader said. “I trust they will dig us out of this small blip and bring back the national championship-type team.”
Among the detractors, the most common complaint centered around the deterioration of the Hawkeyes’ once-dominant and aggressive brand.
“This is the most discouraged I’ve ever been on wrestling,” one reader said. “Iowa used to always be on the attack. Now other teams attack, and we run to the side of the mat.”
In the Jan. 16 loss to Penn State, Iowa had a total of two takedowns in 10 bouts. Penn State had 15.
In a 24-9 loss at No. 2 Ohio State on Feb. 6, Iowa generated four takedowns in 2 hours.
What confounds fans is that Brands, the 1996 Olympic gold medalist, was known for a relentless pace as a competitor. In a 1991 NCAA semifinal, Brands scored 15 takedowns in a 33-19 victory. Fifteen!
The Hawkeyes’ lack of offense these days is troubling, even from their top guys. Iowa’s six most recent NCAA finalists have a combined one takedown and a 1-5 record in title bouts. The only Hawkeye with multiple takedowns in an NCAA final since 2011 is three-time champion Spencer Lee.
Pressed about Iowa’s style being too defensive or conservative, Brands emphasized that’s not his communicated approach to the team. To change the on-mat product, Brands said, requires better depth in his room.
And yes, that is the head coach’s job to fix.
Ayala and Caliendo, returning NCAA finalists, plus Kennedy have shown offensive aggression. But the rest of Iowa’s lineup has generally lacked scoring punch.
“The way that you compete should send a message to your competition that frankly it … scares the dickens out of them,” Brands said. “To have a team reputation about being feared, you need 10 weights with depth … you need 10 weights plus the backups that convey that fear.
“Part of being dominant is having momentum. Instead of the majority, we have five or six or seven guys (who attack). We need 10 weight classes plus their backups. We need to get better in that attitude. That is communicated. That is who we recruit. We know we need to get better with that.”
The impact of injuries: Does Iowa over-train?
After Iowa’s humbling dual loss to Penn State, Brands acknowledged, “We’ve been beat up before, but not like that.”
In that same press conference, he articulated that he had the “right guys” as Iowa’s gap continued to widen vs. mighty Penn State, which has won 12 of the last 14 contested NCAA titles and all four since Iowa’s 2021 championship.
The last four years at the NCAAs, Iowa has finished (in succession) 57½, 55, 105½ and 95½ points behind the Nittany Lions. Seventh-ranked Iowa’s top-five NCAA team streak will be in serious jeopardy March 19-21 in Cleveland; so will its iconic run of 34 straight NCAA Championships with at least one finalist.
So, if Brands has the right guys as he said … and these are the results … what must change?
“You can imagine I get a lot of advice,” Brands told the Register. “We have the right people. I mean a lot when I say that.”
Brands expanded on the answer while delving briefly into a topic he historically doesn’t address publicly: injuries.
“When I say that we’ve got the right guys, we do have the right guys. This is the worst year of my career,” Brands said, doubling down on that message. “There are some reasons for that doom. And it’s not just performance, because they’re not performing. There’s a reason they’re not performing. We’ve had late-January surgical issues to try to get guys back on the mat. We had a major, major injury in the middle of January.”
Goetz attends most home Hawkeye wrestling duals and surely has taken the team’s injury plight into consideration when evaluating Brands’ job status. Ayala and heavyweight Ben Kueter have been wrestling hurt; 141-pound transfer Nasir Bailey broke his finger and didn’t take the mat in February; 184-pounder Angelo Ferrari was ranked No. 1 when he got hurt during a 2-1 loss vs. Penn State’s Rocco Welsh and hasn’t competed since. (Ferrari, the consensus overall No. 1 recruit in the class of 2024, and Bailey are on Brands’ lineup card for the Big Tens.)
“The excuses aren’t going to come out of my mouth,” Brands said. “… These guys are focused on being the best they can be at the most important time of the year.”
The Hawkeyes beat Oklahoma State earlier in November, 18-16, despite forfeiting at heavyweight. But they were drilled on Feb. 22 by the No. 3 Cowboys, 32-11, with a short-handed, banged-up lineup.
Iowa’s 2025 hopes, too, were derailed by injuries, with Arizona State transfers Kyle Parco (knee) and Jacori Teemer (hamstring) arriving as championship hopefuls but combining for 2½ NCAA team points. Additionally, 2023 All-American Nelson Brands’ final year was limited by a knee injury. Depth piece Ryder Block, who is Iowa’s starter at 149 pounds this year, endured a second ACL tear. And Kueter battled through a hip injury (which required offseason surgery) to reach the All-American stand as a freshman.
Nonetheless, Iowa still finished fourth in the 2025 NCAA team race, 29½ points clear of fifth place.
Are these injuries just bad luck … or self-inflicted?
Brands seemed open to change in a lot of aspects of his Register interview but pushed back on the assertion that Iowa over-trains and wears down its athletes over the course of four or five years.
“If you were to sit in our room for 30 straight days and you have that stereotype on your mind, you would be amazed at how much these guys have the autonomy to do what they feel is best for them,” Brands said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t put out (effort). But if you have a guy that has a concern and he’s not feeling quite right, there is not a fear that, ‘I’m going to get brow-beat if I speak up.’”
Brands cited Lee, Caliendo and 2025 NCAA 197-pound champ Stephen Buchanan as examples of guys who scaled back as needed, with coaches’ consultations, to get their bodies to their respective finish lines.
“No, I don’t think we over-train,” Brands said. “We have guys we communicate with, and recovery is important.”
Can Tom Brands execute a reversal on negative narrative?
There are interesting parallels between 2026 Iowa wrestling and 2014 Iowa football.
In the fall of 2014, fans’ pitchforks for football coach Kirk Ferentz’s job were rampant. So was the apathy after Iowa delivered a disappointing 7-6 season and middling five-year record of 34-30, on the heels of a Ferentz-era high No. 7 final ranking in 2009. Season-ticket sales plummeted 16% ahead of the 2015 season. A lot of fans were checking out.
Also in late 2014, the Hawkeyes had freshly inhabited a $65 million state-of-the-art football facility that Ferentz pushed for. Likewise, Brands was tireless in raising cash for a $31 million wrestling training center that now sits adjacent to Carver-Hawkeye Arena and opened on May 30, 2024.
One of Iowa wrestling’s annual selling points is the nation’s best fan support. But Iowa wrestling attendance is sliding. The Hawkeyes’ announced attendance averaged 11,756 for six duals this season, a 20.8% two-year drop from the average of 14,847 in 2023-24.
Ticket scans obtained by the Des Moines Register via an open-records request revealed that an average of 6,711 fans actually showed up for six home duals at Carver-Hawkeye this season. That marked a 21.9% one-year drop from the average of 8,593 scans in 2024-25.
Ferentz and the football program bounced back in 2015, with a historic 12-0 regular season. Ferentz signed a lengthy contract extension after that season … and is still going strong with the Hawkeyes today at age 70.
For Brands to find a similar rebound of success and fan support, what can he learn from Ferentz’s example?
Ferentz didn’t change the way he coached in 2015. But he did change practice routines and the way he communicated with the public. Ferentz had gotten bristly with the media in that 2014 finish, so he hired an outside public-relations agency to help craft better messaging. He became more accessible to the media after being guarded for years and revealed a more human side. Fans appreciated that transparency and connection to the head coach.
Brands, in the Register interview, acknowledged that he can appear insulated when it comes to what he shares with his passionate and competitive fan base.
“We need to do a better job of communicating always,” Brands said. “We’re communicating with a lot of people. We’re communicating with our administration, we’re communicating with our fans, we’re communicating with our donors, with our team, our staff. We need to do a better job.”
One other big change that Ferentz made in 2015, just six days after an embarrassing bowl loss to Tennessee: A rare January depth chart that announced C.J. Beathard as the new starting quarterback. The shakeup sent two-year starter Jake Rudock to the transfer portal. Beathard had a gunslinger mentality and represented Iowa football’s turning of the page. That renewed hope (combined with subsequent excellent performance) eventually won back apathetic Iowa fans. Kinnick Stadium’s active sellout streak is currently at 28 consecutive games and counting.
In the Register interview, Brands addressed two public-relations hits that his program has endured over the past eight months but stopped short of going deep into the reasons behind them.
First, there was the June decommitment of FloWrestling’s No. 1 pound-for-pound 2026 prospect Bo Bassett, a high-motor Pennsylvanian and an influential social-media personality. Bassett had the potential to give Iowa’s program image and firepower a jolt. Bassett and his adopted brother, Melvin Miller (the No. 1 pound-for-pound prospect in 2027), wound up committing to Virginia Tech.
And then there was the sudden removal of fourth-ranked 197-pounder Massoma Endene from Iowa’s roster in early January, shortly after the birth of the Wartburg transfer’s first child. Endene’s departure was never publicly explained by Brands, and Endene didn’t respond to requests for comment.
What Brands told the Register on Bassett: “On the record, we are always going to do what’s best for the team and the individuals. And we’re going to do it within the framework of the rules.”
On Endene: “We’re not going to talk about it. We’re going to wish him the best when he moves on.”
According to Register sources, Goetz got involved in both matters and fully backed Brands’ decisions.
Should Tom Brands make organizational changes?
As for seeking fresh voices, Goetz has shown she can influence needed staff change in her top programs. She was willing to remove football offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, whose tenure became surrounded by negativity, in late 2023. And she moved on from 15-year men’s basketball coach Fran McCaffery last March after fan apathy reached a breaking point.
Brands, to his credit and perhaps to a fault at times, is tremendously loyal to his staff.
There are three ways that Brands could freshen Iowa’s image and approach, and people the Register spoke with who have detailed knowledge of the program agree that all three areas need to be addressed.
One is via the Hawkeye Wrestling Club, which is operated outside the university but enables former college stars to train with the current crop of Hawkeyes. Such an overhaul would require deep pockets.
This has been a strength for coach Cael Sanderson at Penn State for years. The well-funded Nittany Lion Wrestling Club, coached by 2012 gold medalist Jake Varner, has in its ranks Zain Retherford, Bo Nickal and Kyle Snyder — major names in the sport. The Hawkeye Wrestling Club is coached by Daniel Dennis and features five post-graduate wrestlers in Lee (a 2024 Olympic silver medalist), Buchanan, Austin DeSanto, Brandon Sorensen and Jesse Ybarra.
The second avenue of possible change: Brands could shake up the coaching staff with an outsider or two who could bring a change in voice. That would likely be outside the comfort zone of Brands, who typically stays inside the Hawkeye family for hires. His twin brother has been on his staff since 2008. Ryan Morningstar, a third-place NCAA finisher for Iowa in 2009, has been an assistant coach since 2012, when he took over for ex-Hawkeye Mike Zadick. Bobby Telford, a three-time all-American heavyweight for Iowa, has been on staff since 2018.
“We evaluate that at the end of year,” Brands said. “Just like we do every other year.”
The third and biggest piece is the starting lineup, and to get difference-makers requires good outside funding. Iowa wrestling, despite some of its transfer-portal misses in recent years, continues to have the backing of its biggest financial supporter, Colorado businessman and Iowa alum Bob Nicolls.
In order to return to the top three in the NCAA next year, the Hawkeyes need to keep their best guys (like Ferrari); get better luck with injuries; see a year of healing and progress for guys like Bailey and Kueter; have redshirting freshmen like Leo DeLuca (125 pounds) and Harvey Ludington (197) plug into opening lineup spots and live up to their billing; and acquire at least two if not three major additions via the NCAA transfer portal, which is open from April 1-30 for wrestling.
Brands acknowledged that he and his staff haven’t done a good enough job vetting some recent transfers. That is a major priority this cycle.
“April 1, there will be a lot of activity. We’ll assess when guys start getting in the portal. We’ll talk to their people,” Brands said. “When I’m talking about the portal, we’ve got to do a better job of looking at who those guys are, not just who’s in it. Who are these guys? What’s their lifestyle like? And go from there in a thorough, thorough way.”
How will Tom Brands’ Iowa story end? ‘We’re going to have to adapt’
Brands will turn 58 in April, the same age John Smith was when he retired in 2024 after leading Oklahoma State to five NCAA titles (the last coming in 2006) in 33 years. Smith’s success waned over time. His final three finishes in the NCAA Tournament were a tie for 14th (2022), a tie for 18th (2023) and 10th (2024). Oklahoma State replaced Smith with a home-run hire in former Penn State star David Taylor, and the Cowboys appear to be galloping past Iowa in recruiting and performance.
Brands’ current contract runs for three more seasons, through June 30, 2029. Several Hawkeye wrestling supporters who spoke on background for this story felt a coaching change was needed but also thought that the Brands brothers deserved a chance to turn things around and finish out their contracts. Brands is still the most recent NCAA coach to beat Penn State in a dual (Jan. 31, 2020, in Iowa City) and at the national tournament (2021).
“Fire Brands and who do you get? Is that coach going to recruit and get us to No. 2?” one Register text-group subscriber said. “I don’t think anyone is going to hang with PSU for a while. It may be a cyclical thing where no one could hang with Iowa … until they could.”
Brands’ salary for the current season is $725,000, and that will bump to $750,000 in 2026-27. Even though men’s wrestling loses money on Iowa’s balance sheet, precedent has shown that Goetz would not be held up by finances if she wanted to make a leadership change. That said, Brands’ contract buyout without cause does drop from $750,000 to $500,000 on July 1. (Terry Brands’ buyout would be the lesser amount of $250,000 or the remaining dollars on his contract, which expires on June 30, 2028.)
How long does Tom Brands want to coach?
“We have a potential top junior class,” Brands said, referencing Iowa’s committed (but not signed) high school class of 2027 having four top-25 recruits and being ranked third nationally by FloWrestling. “We have a (freshman) class in our room right now that we recruited, that when we recruited them we told them that we would be here. That’s important to me.
“So, the next question is, how do you ever stop then? You’re going to have to be honest with the people you’re recruiting, and you’re going to have to have the future leadership in place.”
In other words, Brands knows his Iowa legacy would be enhanced if he could reverse this current dip and re-establish the Hawkeyes as a national contender to make way for a clear successor.
Coaching is a tough business. As great a wrestler as Jim Zalesky was at Iowa in the 1980s (winning his final 89 matches and three NCAA titles), he is arguably remembered most for getting fired by then-AD Bob Bowlsby in 2006 after a post-Gable regression … and replaced by Brands.
As Brands’ coaching future appears to be on solid ground beyond the 2026 NCAA Championships, he knows he is under pressure. The spotlight is squarely on him and Hawkeye wrestling, like it always is, to see what happens next.
If things are still on the downturn a year from now, Goetz may be ready to make a change.
“When you’ve been a winner your whole life and you’ve been about domination and you’ve backed that up for the most part, you will get your own words used against you,” Brands said. “You know what? I’m OK with that.
“These standards and how we operate, that’s something where our commitment isn’t going to change. But we’re going to have to adapt. Some of that’s happening now for the offseason, even as we’re focused on having our guys at their best for this postseason. That’s where we are at.”
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: On Tom Brands’ future, possible changes for Iowa wrestling | Leistikow
Reporting by Chad Leistikow, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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