Pair of Iowa players from Hayden Fry era use podcast to reconnect with old teammates

IOWA CITY — Nick Gallery and Brion Hurley were talking to a fellow former Iowa football player and “good friend.”

“He was on the podcast, and he was joking and laughing,” Gallery told The Gazette. “He’s a really animated, really funny guy. And then at the very end of it, he said, ‘I almost canceled today.’”

Gallery and Hurley naturally asked why.

“He said, ‘Well, my six-year-old niece just passed away, so I really needed this,’” Gallery said.

That moment exemplifies the connections Gallery and Hurley — two specialists on Hayden Fry’s teams in the mid-1990s — have facilitated with their “Gallery & Hurley Unfiltered” podcast.

“Nick and I have stayed together in touch for the whole time, but most of the other guys, I haven’t,” Hurley said. “Just here and there at a game or at a bowl game or something. It’s been enough time that it seemed like a good time to kind of reconnect and find out how everyone’s doing.”

Even with Gallery having a relatively recent connection to the program — his brother Robert was added to the Kinnick Stadium Ring of Honor in 2023 — staying in touch with teammates has been easier said than done.

“Matt Sherman, who was my roommate — I hadn’t talked to him in probably 15, 20 years or whatever it was,” said Gallery, who still has the program record for average yards per punt in a bowl game with 52.0 against Texas Tech in the 1996 Alamo Bowl.

The former Hawkeyes have done 26 episodes so far with a guest lineup that has included Sedrick Shaw, Matt Hughes, Brad Quast and other players from the Fry era.

“It’s either memories we forgot about,” Gallery said, “or we talked to three different people, and they each have a part of the story. So it kind of pieces it all together. It’s funny how you remember back to some of those things.”

The podcast also serves to “reconnect the fans back to some of these players and hear their backstory.”

“A lot of them are pre-internet, so there’s not a lot of video of video of guys talking,” Hurley said. “I was just thinking most people may have never heard these guys talk. They might have seen their name in a paper in a quote, but unless they were interviewed on TV, which is pretty rare, they may have never heard them speak.”

Gallery and Hurley’s guests have not exclusively been players from the Fry era. They also have interviewed actor Tom Arnold, Ferentz era kicker Nate Kaeding and former Iowa athletics trainer Phil Johnson.

“We’re just kind of seeing where it goes,” Hurley said. “I don’t know if we have a set plan yet. We’re just enjoying the conversations and trying to gain some interest. … I think a lot of fans would really enjoy learning about these players.”

Gallery and Hurley literally record the podcasts from coast to coast. Gallery has a photo and video production company in the San Francisco area, and Hurley has a process improvement consultancy firm in South Florida.

Gallery and Hurley are not the first pair of former Hawkeye football players to enter the podcast foray. Former walk-ons Tyler Kluver, Drake Kulick and Kevin Ward have the “Washed Up Walkons” podcast, for example. Former Iowa wide receiver Max Cooper did his “Men on Melrose” podcast for a couple years after his career.

Then, of course, there are all of the Hawkeye football podcasts from various media outlets (including The Gazette’s Hawk Off the Press podcast) and Iowa’s athletics department itself.

“We didn’t want to do the normal sports talk radio where everybody gets involved and super critical of the players and the staff and that part,” Gallery said. “That just wasn’t our gig.”

Instead of evaluating connections between a quarterback and receiver on third-and-long, they have focused on a different type of connections.

“We’re also finding out like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you lived there,’” Hurley said. “’I was just down there in your area a year ago or six months ago or two weeks ago. I would have reached out had I known.’ So we’re kind of slowly building up all our contact lists again.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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