Hlas column: From Beltsville and Fostoria, Hawkeyes found a nice end to 2010 road

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Iowa's football coaches have no choice. They must punch in all sorts of different area codes as they work the phones, must cover a lot of different geography to try to unearth gems other major programs haven't spotted.

Marcus Coker. Beltsville, Maryland. DeMatha High School, which for decades has been known for its basketball. He is a freshman. He is 18.

What would the Hawkeyes have done Tuesday night in Sun Devil Stadium had they been without the use of Coker at running back? They sure wouldn't have notched a 27-24 Insight Bowl win over Missouri. They might have had to put a scarecrow in the backfield to pretend they had a running game.

Iowa found Coker in a place few other big-time programs were looking. Because of an injury suffered early in training camp and because Adam Robinson was a one-man running back corps that was working just fine, Coker didn't play significant amounts of ball this season until the eighth game of the season. With Robinson suspended for Game 13, against a Mizzou defense that had allowed just 15 points per game, Coker carried the ball 33 times for 219 yards. Two hundred and nineteen yards!

Micah Hyde. Fostoria, Ohio. That's 90 miles north of Columbus, where a pretty good football program thrives. He is a sophomore. He is 19.

In the summer of 2008, Hyde was called a two-star recruit by Rivals.com. That was as a quarterback. The other schools that recruited him in the early going were mostly from the Mid-American Conference, even though his brother Marcus Hyde was playing defensive back for Michigan State at the time. When MSU Coach Mark Dantonio got wind that Micah was paying a recruiting visit to Iowa near the signing date? Lo and behold, a Spartans scholarship opened up for Marcus' kid brother.

“I don't want to go to a school that if they can't get another player, they can get me,” Hyde told the Advertiser-Tribune of Fostoria. “Michigan was the same way. They offered a bunch of 5-star or 4-star athletes and if they didn't get them, they were interested in me. Iowa has been here the whole time since the beginning. They've been here every week and I've been talking with them all the time. I went there and they showed me a lot of love.”

Iowa defensive backs coach Phil Parker saw plenty he liked in Hyde before those other Big Ten coaches did. Hyde became a Hawkeye signee in February 2009. Less than two years later, he made an epic interception return. His fourth-quarter pick of a Blaine Gabbert pass was important enough at the moment, but Hyde then showed the vision and instincts of a special player when he took the return 72 yards for a touchdown.

Coker and Hyde. The name of the game in college football is recruiting, it always has been, always will be. Kirk Ferentz and his staff have to win some battles for the best of the best preps, like they did with senior Adrian Clayborn of St. Louis. But they seldom will get the best of the best from, say, Ohio. Or Maryland, a state worked hard by Penn State among others. So they study the two-stars and three-stars a little harder, see if something is special in them that others may not be noticing.

Ricky Stanzi is in that group. He's another Ohio guy, a quarterback from a town called Mentor who never really got Ohio State excited. Stanzi capped a pretty darn fine career here. He got picked off twice, but he made a lot of plays that had Iowa moving up and down the field just as well as Mizzou for much of the game.

When Stanzi rolled right on 3rd-and-3 from the Tigers 40 with :53 left in the game and hooked up with Allen Reisner for a 39-yard play, it was more than guts shown by Iowa offensive coordinator Ken O'Keefe. It was faith that the senior quarterback would have forgotten his previous picks and do what he did in 2009 after enduring some hardships. Which was, making a winning play in the clutch.

Stanzi exits with a career mark of 26-9 as a starter, and is the only Hawkeye quarterback to start for three bowl-winners. Not bad, not bad at all.  

This season was tough for this program, brutal in sections. The off-field misadventures of former key offensive players has been well-documented. The hospitalization and amputation endured by defensive coordinator Norm Parker was a flat-out rotten thing, and Parker's return to full-time coaching for the bowl would have been enough for this to be a feel-good trip in at least some measure.

But good character was shown in various ways, too, and isn't that what we're supposed to want to find through all these games and seasons?

Iowa's defense was riddled and ridden hard most of the game, allowing 434 Gabbert passing yards and 512 total. But Hyde made the play of plays when the opportunity was there.

None of Iowa's three top running backs in August were with this team in Tempe. Enter Coker, who gained almost as many yards after one helmet-to-helmet collision with a Missouri safety than any Tiger back did for the whole game. With Iowa's offensive line in as good a form as it had been in a long time, Coker showed how much belt can come from Beltsville. Tiger tacklers did not relish meeting this guy, and that was clear early in the evening.

Look, Iowa could so easily have lost this game. But that isn't a criticism. Iowa lost to Minnesota by the same 27-24 score it won by here. After being an uncharacteristic 1-5 in games decided by one score, the Hawkeyes went and grabbed a win instead of letting it slip through their fingers.

"December was December," Ferentz said. "We had a bowl bid and we went back to work."

After the game, longtime Iowa trainer John Streif summed it up perfectly for the program and its fans.

"We needed this," Streif said.

Needing something is one thing. Doing something about it against an excellent opponent, that will endure through the offseason.