A healthy Eli Green is eager to bolster Iowa State's deep wide receivers room

Editor’s note: First in a 9-part series looking at the Iowa State football team ahead of the season opener on Aug. 23.

AMES — Eli Green’s accustomed to being the guy.

Not a guy.

Certainly not an afterthought — a mere promising piece tucked within Iowa State’s highly skilled but mostly unproven wide receivers room.

But now the former North Dakota State standout’s good with that latter scenario.

Why?

“We have a super-talented room,” said Green, who battled a shoulder injury all of last season and eventually had offseason surgery to repair it. “I’m super-excited about this year because we’ve got a lot of talent coming out of our room.”

And into it.

The Cyclones needed to adopt a wide-ranging approach to replacing the prodigious production current Houston Texans Jayden Higgins and Jaylin Noel piled up, so they attracted Chase Sowell (East Carolina) and Xavier Townsend (UCF) from the transfer portal to augment a room of returners that includes Green, Dominic Overby and Brett Eskildsen, among many others.

Sowell stands 6-foot-4 and averaged 20 yards per catch last season for the Pirates, so he’ll naturally be compared to the long and lean Higgins. Townsend — who played youth football with ISU quarterback Rocco Becht in Florida — shares several attributes with Noel.

So that duo will be expected to do a lot this season as the Cyclones seek to once again contend for a Big 12 title. But there won’t be a heavy weight on their shoulders given how high the staff is on the receivers room as a whole.

“I’m excited for all these guys,” said ISU receivers coach Noah Pauley, who previously mentored Green with the Bison. “I feel like we have a group of guys (who) we can probably rotate more than we did last year to keep guys a little more fresh.”

Translation: The Cyclones don’t necessarily need a pair of 1,000-yard receivers like they enjoyed last season with Higgins and Noel. That’s because so many players showed flashes last season, including Green, Eskildsen and Overby. Add in Carson Brown — who made two key catches in a 20-0 win over Houston last season — and it’s clear Becht will enter the Aug. 23 season-opener against Kansas State in Dublin, Ireland, with a panoply of weapons at his disposal.

“I feel great,” said Becht, an honorable mention All-Big 12 selection last season. “Honestly, a lot of people don’t notice this, but we have a lot more depth than we did last year in the receiver room — a lot more maturity, a lot more experience, and that’s what we need this season. There’s not gonna be one guy that we’re planning for, preparing for, to throw the ball to.

“We have so much talent at each position out there, as x, z and f — it’s honestly gonna help me in my preparation and progressing through the reads and finding someone to throw to. I won’t just be picking out somebody to throw to, which is gonna be awesome for me this season.”

That’s not to say Becht wasn’t deeply appreciative of Higgins’ and Noel’s game-changing prowess, which made them the focal points of the passing game for obvious reasons. Becht’s simply convinced Sowell and his old friend Townsend — along with Green, Eskildsen, Overby and a finally-healthy Daniel Jackson — all bring unique skill sets that will allow him to target the entire field.

“I think we have the possibility to be a really good room with five or six guys that can come in and have a big impact on the game,” Sowell said.

Maybe even more.

Higgins and Noel accounted for 66 percent of Becht’s yards, 68 percent of his touchdown passes and 60 percent of his completions last season. The depth of this season’s receivers room will allow him to split his cumulative passing numbers into many smaller increments, which in turn will pepper opposing defenses with more challenges on a play-by-play basis.

And Green — who averaged 19.3 yards per catch while compiling nearly 900 receiving yards for North Dakota State in 2023 — fully expects to be a big part of that diversified equation.

“I’m in, like, a candy land now,” he said. “It feels great to be healthy again.”

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