Michigan State punting to Kaden Wetjen was a self-induced kick in the head

IOWA CITY — Of course, you pass the credit around.

If Drew Stevens doesn’t make his umpteenth clutch field goal, Saturday’s football game at Kinnick Stadium goes to overtime. If Mark Gronowski doesn’t suddenly locate his passing mojo on Iowa’s final possession, Stevens doesn’t get to make a dance-off 44-yard field goal in the Hawkeyes’ 20-17 win over Michigan State.

If Iowa’s defense doesn’t get the Spartans off the field quickly twice in the final 3:45, the offense can’t provide heroics. If the whole team doesn’t keep battling, they fall to 6-5 and the narrative of this season forever changes for the worse.

OK, but let’s discuss Kaden Wetjen.

At Iowa, there has been Tim Dwight, who was so good as a combination receiver/kick returner that he got 32 Heisman Trophy votes in 1997, five for first-place.

There has been Cooper DeJean, who before making an instant household name for himself in Philadelphia as an Eagles defensive back, returned a punt 70 yards for a touchdown against Michigan State in 2023 and had Iowa’s most-famous touchdown/not-a-touchdown of all-time three weeks later.

Dwight and DeJean. Immense talents, NFL players, Hawkeye legends, the whole 100 yards. But as a pure return man with the ability to destroy an opponent, Wetjen is second to no one who came before him here.

The Wizard from Williamsburg had five kick-returns for touchdowns over the last two seasons before Saturday. In this game, he had a 45-yard punt return that was a mere appetizer for the 62-yarder he took to the house in the first quarter to give Iowa its only points in the game’s first 48 minutes.

Later, with his team down 17-10 with under three minutes left on a day offense looked like a foreign language to the Hawkeyes, Wetjen caught a punt at the Iowa 18 and brought it back 40 yards to the MSU 42.

The play seemed to transform his entire team’s state of mind from hangdog to junkyard dog. Gronowski ran for 16 yards. Kamari Moulton ran for 12. Gronowski threw a 13-yard touchdown pass to Jacob Gill with 1:29 left for the tie.

The fans, who booed the offense and play-calls in the third and fourth quarters, became loud believers. Iowa’s defense quickly forced a punt that Wetjen couldn’t return with :41 left. Gronowski clicked on three straight throws, the last one a beautiful 29-yard pass-and-catch to Reece Vander Zee. Stevens then made the field goal.

Not long before, the Hawkeyes’ win probability was about the same number as a typical Iowa January wind chill. Then Wetjen was off and running on another 40-yard dash with a punt return.

“Thank God he's on our team today because we would have been in trouble for sure,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said.

From Williamsburg to Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs to walking on at Iowa to currently holding the best career punt return average in Big Ten history with 17.5 yards.

“Honestly,” Iowa special teams coach LeVar Woods said, “he should have had three touchdowns today. That’s the truth. And he’ll see it when he watches it on tape”

Woods was anything but critical, though. He knew he’d have been spending a sad Saturday night at home were it not for No. 21.

“Obviously, he's got 10 other players busting their butt for him, and you can see that these guys love him,” Woods said. “They care about him, they work hard for him.

“But man, he is really dynamic. He's something. Something else.”

Asked if he was surprised Michigan State kept kicking to him, Wetjen replied, “Uh, yeah.” It wasn’t a question that required contemplation.

Gronowski said it best. “If you’re kicking it to him,” he said, “you’ve got problems.”

“We went in planning on punting to him,” Spartans Coach Jonathan Smith said, “but placement matters, and obviously coverage matters. With the one he returned (for a score), it wasn’t like we didn’t have chances to get him on the ground.”

It wasn’t the soundest strategy in the sport’s annals. You intentionally walk Shohei Ohtani four times in one World Series game if you can, and the Toronto Blue Jays did. You kick away from Wetjen if you have the capacity to watch his game film.

“First off, he’s incredibly gifted physically,” Woods said. “And he’s fearless. He’s a little bit crazy-fearless at times. But I also say this: He’s put in a lot of time. People think ‘Oh, he’s just really good.’ That’s not how it works.

“He watches film, he studies, he pays attention, he's always looking for little intricacies to get better. And the best part is there's still more that he can get better at.

“But he’s got it. He finally has a belief in himself. When you see a guy do that and you see him take off, man, it's fun to watch.”

Said Ferentz: “Kaden Wetjen just single-handedly kept us in the game tonight in a lot of ways, just with his returns. I don’t know if I’ve ever been around a player like that, that electric, that much juice.”

As a team, the Hawkeyes snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. But it was Wetjen who gave them the jaws of life.

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