The University of Iowa's assistant football coaches only meet the press twice a year. Once is at the team's annual Media Day in August, and the other is the week of the Hawkeyes' bowl game.
That's unfortunate, because Ken O'Keefe and Norm Parker are bright guys who I find interesting. But they don't like doing interviews, which is probably one reason why they enjoy working for Kirk Ferentz, because he lets them stay hidden and concentrate on football.
Defensive coordinator Parker, by the way, squashes the latest annual Ferentz/NFL rumor. This one has him replacing Bill Cowher as the Pittsburgh Steelers' coach at season's end. Ferentz being a Pittsburgher and all makes this a natural. In some minds, anyhow. Ferentz flat-out said last week that he wasn't a candidate for the job, that he knew people on Cowher's staff, and strongly believes one of them will be Cowher's successor should the coach of last season's Super Bowl champions step down. Parker doesn't see Ferentz leaving Iowa for any NFL job, and Parker knows the Captain's thought processes better than you do or I do.
"I think Kirk Ferentz is more interested in where he lives,'' Parker said. "Kirkf's real value of a job is not where you're at, it's who you're around on a daily basis. That's how you judge how good a job you have.
"You can be at whatever that school is that you think is the golden school. But if you're working with a bunch of idiots or a bunch of egomaniacs, it's a miserable existence. It's who you're around on a daily basis.
"The NFL, that's the land of super-egos. I don't think that interests him one bit. He's been down that road before."
Parker, 65, has lived in Iowa for only eight years. But for those who got a little rankled about Hawkeye quarterback Drew Tate's innocuous comments about Hawkeye fans the other day, what Parker has to say is probably more up their alley.
"Just living there and being there,'' he said, "it's really a pretty well-kept secret. It's a heck of a place to live. But I think the misconception by so many people is ... if you went out east to recruit and you asked someone to point to Iowa on a map, they don't know where the hell it's at. You ask a kid in Florida 'Where's Iowa?' he thinks it's someplace near the North Pole. And they think it's just full of corn. It's not that.
"The people are great. The people that live in Iowa - honest to God, I believe this - they're farmer-based people. Either they're a farmer or they're dad was a farmer or their grandfather was a farmer, so they have a work-ethic. Iowa people are hard-working people. And they're honest people.
"We don't have mountains and we don't have an ocean. So the only thing we have is each other. Maybe not having that other stuff is really, in the end, an advantage."
I never thought of it that way. When it's 70 degrees out and cloudless in Iowa, I have heard people say they wish every day could be like that. And I say, but then there would be 10 million people living here and the place would be wrecked.
San Antonio will be around 70 degrees this afternoon, and the several thousand visiting Iowans will love it for that. This is a nice place to visit. But you know what? I wouldn't want to live here.