It may have seemed that the Hawkeyes were in for a quiet off-season, but in May, Evashevski charged Nagel with misappropriation of university funds, stating that two former and four current assistants had padded their recruiting expense account. Nagel counter-charged that Evy not only approved the expenditures but had instructed the staff to boost expenditures to aid in recruiting. Nagel's charges were confirmed by at least one former athletic administrative assistant to Evy. The Athletic Board, tired of the constant feuding between the athletic director and head coach and disgusted with the negative effect upon the team, their fans, and students on campus, notified both parties on May 19th that as of June 30th, Evashevski's resignation would be accepted and Nagel would be fired. Nagel moved on to Washington State as coach and AD and then to Hawaii where he was inducted into their Athletic Hall Of Fame as a result of the fine job he did as their athletic director. Former Michigan great player and coach, and current administrator Chalmers "Bump" Elliott took the AD spot and although extremely late in the off-season, was able to hire Toledo's Frank X. Lauterbur, winner of twenty-three consecutive games and three MAC titles in four years. FXL as he was known had been a star high school player at the University Of Detroit High School before entering the Marine Corps during World War II. Upon his separation from the service Lauterbur played football at Ohio’s Mount Union College and became a high school coach in the Cleveland area. His talent was immediately noticed and he became an assistant first at Kent State and then on Weeb Ewbank’s Baltimore Colts staff. He found more enjoyment working with young people in the college game and joined the sterling staff of Earl Blaik at Army as his offensive line coach in time to savor the final two years of Blaik’s glorious reign. Five years later he served at Pitt and then took the Toledo head job in 1963. At Toledo, he restructured a mediocre program, building them into a 9-1 squad that won the school’s first Mid American Conference title and then strung together a twenty-three game winning streak and two straight undefeated seasons. This led him to the Iowa job. Immediately putting his stamp on the Hawkeye program FXL changed the helmet color to black, breaking with a long-standing tradition but he was hired with the understanding that his was to be a “new era” and the goal was to distance the program from the racial problems, discord between athletic director and coach, and what had become nine consecutive non-winning seasons. The black helmet was decorated with Green Bay gold one-half-inch flanking stripes and a Green Bay gold “Flying Hawk” logo that was detailed in black, on each side of the new helmet.  RB's Frank Holmes and Levi Mitchell (with 623 yards) were the horses with QB Frank Sundsman throwing for 1297 yards in a miserable 1-10 season where worse-than-them Wisconsin was the only team Iowa could beat. One standout was DB Craig Clemons, a number-one draft pick of the Bears who played with them through '77. The team scored 121 points for the entire season while giving up 379. No one was surprised by the season’s result as supporters knew that the available talent was limited.

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