Why Seth Wallace is ‘very open-minded’ with Iowa’s linebacker situation ahead of 2025 season

IOWA CITY — It was hard to not have Jay Higgins on the field in his two years as Iowa football’s starting middle linebacker.

He had to exit Iowa’s Nov. 9 loss against UCLA with an injury, but he was back on the field two weeks later for Iowa’s win over Maryland. Asked how he was feeling, he said “good enough to play.”

“You better knock him down and keep kim down if you’re going to keep him off the field,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said after the definitive win over the Terrapins.

Whether it be Higgins and Nick Jackson in each of the last two seasons, the Jack Campbell-Seth Benson duo in the previous two seasons or other recent pairings, the Hawkeyes have not necessarily needed to use their linebacker depth in games.

Higgins played 758 of the team’s 850 defensive snaps last season, and Jackson played 689 snaps, per Pro Football Focus.

The year before? Higgins took 985 of 999 snaps, and Jackson took 884 snaps. Back in 2022, Campbell was on the field for 873 of Iowa’s 903 defensive snaps, and Benson was not far behind him with 827 snaps.

But for as reliant as the Hawkeyes have been on their first-team linebackers in recent years, assistant head coach and linebackers coach Seth Wallace is not necessarily locked in to that division of labor again in 2025.

“As much as you’d like to have Jack Campbell out there for every snap or Josey Jewell or Jay Higgins or Seth Benson — those were all situations where that’s how it played out — I do think you have to be very open-minded,” Wallace said on The Gazette’s Hawk Off the Press podcast. “Especially when you’ve got a handful of candidates that have positioned themselves to go into the summer and then go into fall camp battling for those positions.”

That open-mindedness could still lead to two or three linebackers taking the bulk of opportunities, as Iowa has done in recent years. But it is not a guarantee with more than 10 weeks before the start of the 2025 season.

“If it looks clear that there’s two or three guys, then that’s the direction you go in,” Wallace said. “But if there’s four or five guys that have positioned themselves to make a case for a rotation, you certainly have to be open to that as well.”

Wallace’s openness to a different style of rotation comes as his position room has substantially less experience than in past seasons. Higgins, Jackson and first-team Leo linebacker Kyler Fisher all were in their final seasons of eligibility in 2024.

All other Iowa linebackers combined to take 34 defensive snaps in 2023 and 173 defensive snaps in 2024, again per PFF, although some of them had more pronounced roles on special teams.

“Any time you transition from one year to the next, there’s a restart,” Wallace said. “... You’ve got a checklist of things, and the checklist is a little bit bigger when you do lose guys to graduation or to eligibility in Nick’s case. You have to move on. So there’s a handful of boxes that in years past may have been checked and aren’t checked right now.”

This transition is not quite like when Campbell and Benson passed the metaphorical baton to Higgins and Jackson from 2022 to 2023 either. Higgins had 213 defensive snaps in the previous season (in part because of Jestin Jacobs’ season-ending injury), and Jackson arrived at Iowa in 2023 with 33 career starts from his previous four seasons at Virginia.

Wallace noted that Iowa has “a handful of names that I think have to be thrown in there as candidates and guys that will take the field for us in the ‘25 season at the linebacker position.”

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Iowa’s 2025 pre-spring depth chart listed Jaden Harrell as the first-team middle linebacker and Karson Sharar as the first-team weakside linebacker. Cedar Rapids native Jaxon Rexroth was the first-team Leo linebacker. The second-teamers were Jayden Montgomery at middle linebacker, Landyn Van Kekerix at weakside linebacker and Derek Weisskopf at Leo.

But before reading too much into a depth chart from March, Kirk Ferentz already preemptively apologized after Iowa’s open spring practice for potentially not having a summer depth chart “because all it does is get parents mad.”

“Nobody knows the answers,” Ferentz said in April. “I tell our guys every year it doesn’t really matter until we start playing.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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