In news equivalent to water being wet and night being dark, it was confirmed on Tuesday that all those holding their breath that the NCAA would one day drop the hammer on college football programs caught tampering should go ahead and exhale.
Oddly enough, the news was confirmed by the NCAA' itself, in announcing the resolution of its multi-year investigation into Iowa.
The facts of the case are straight forward: Hawkeyes wide receivers coach Jon Budamyr conducted 13 phone calls with an unnamed player (believed to be Cade McNamara) and McNamara's father throughout November 2022, before the opening of the transfer portal. In one of those phone calls, Budamyr handed the phone to head coach Kirk Ferentz, who assured McNamara he would have a place at Iowa. McNamara, the loser of an Old Testament-inspired QB battle to JJ McCarthy earlier that season, later transferred to Iowa. He started the Hawkeyes' first five games of 2023 before suffering a season-ending ACL tear.
There's nothing at all remarkable there, which, ironically, is what makes this case so remarkable. Iowa behaved no differently than anyone else, except in this case the NCAA's Committee on Infractions had Iowa caught red-handed, and Iowa agreed.
If ever was a heavy-duty construction tool was to fall on a body part, this was it.
The end result? Ferentz and Budamyr kept their jobs, as evidenced by the fact they're still in both positions today. Both men served 1-game suspensions, back in 2024. Iowa self-imposed a 2-week recruiting ban during the 2026 calendar year, as well as a 24-day reduction in recruiting days and personal reductions in which Ferentz (two weeks) and Budamyr (four days) could recruit, plus a $25,000 fine. The COI put Iowa on a 1-year probation, beginning today.
The only point of contention between the NCAA and Iowa was the organization's insistence that the Hawkeyes vacate all records in the games where McNamara played. Ferentz's career record will now drop from 213-128 to 209-127. Iowa argued the vacation-of-records penalty is outdated, the COI insisted on applying it "rather than penalizing a future team, coach or student-athletes who were not participating at the time the violations occurred."
In a vacuum, this makes sense. Recall how silly it was that USC players who were in middle school at the time were punished for the Reggie Bush scandal more than half a decade earlier.
However, this case exists well beyond a vacuum. If one of the few on-field punishments for blatant tampering is applied backward, what's to stop anyone from doing this in the future?
Sensing an inevitable backlash, the COI said its job was not to set a precedent. They couldn't punish all 10,000 tampering cases, only this one, and they were constrained by the rules as written.
"The COI is open to reevaluating the violations that trigger ineligibility or how ineligible competition should be penalized, but it would be inappropriate to do so in the context of a single infractions case and outside of the legislative process," the group said in a statement released by the NCAA.
Maybe so. But if the punishment for tampering to get a starting quarterback is that you might -- the NCAA only began its investigation after reading a news story on Iowa's recruitment of McNamara -- face the punishment Ferentz and the Hawkeyes received on Tuesday, most everyone will break the rules and get the quarterback.