As college football goes ‘away from playing big and physical,’ Iowa, Wisconsin embrace fullback tradition

IOWA CITY — Monte Pottebaum was in for quite the surprise on the first day of fall camp in 2019.

“I was going to go to the linebacker room and then the linebacker coach, Seth Wallace, came out and he wanted to talk to me in his office,” Pottebaum said. “He was like, ‘Hey, we’re moving you to fullback.’ So that’s really all there was to it.”

Pottebaum did “not really” have any say in the matter, but “I also didn’t really care.”

“I just wanted to do whatever to help the team,” Pottebaum said.

Now in his fourth year at fullback, Pottebaum has contributed at a position where fewer and fewer players are contributing at the Power Five level.

Iowa is one of three Big Ten schools to have used a fullback on at least 100 plays this season, according to a Gazette analysis of Pro Football Focus data.

“It seems like college football is getting away from playing big and physical,” Iowa quarterback Spencer Petras said. “There’s a personnel aspect of that, too.”

The other six Big Ten West teams combined have three fullbacks listed although players officially at running back or tight end also may handle fullback duties. Iowa has five fullbacks listed on its roster.

“That’s five guys you have to either recruit or take from the linebacker room,” Petras said. “Maybe some teams aren’t willing to do that, but we certainly are.”

Iowa running backs coach Ladell Betts said on The Gazette's Hawk Off the Press podcast in August that fullbacks are a "lost art."

As high schools increasingly move away from fullbacks, the Hawkeyes will often convert players from other positions rather than recruiting someone as a fullback.

"I don't think it's really a position that we go out and necessarily recruit and really look for," Betts said. "It's more so a body type that we may have in the building or someone we've identified at another position."

Fullback usage is even less prevalent in some other conferences. The only team to use a fullback in the Big 12 is Kansas State, which has done so for 53 plays.

The Pac-12 has two teams which have used a fullback on 100-plus plays, but neither of them can match Pottebaum’s 185 snaps at Iowa this season.

“People who use them right, they realize that it still works,” Pottebaum said. “It also adds a little bit of a physical edge for an offense, and so that’s what I’ve tried to bring to the offense for my career here.”

Petras said Pottebaum has been a “very helpful” part of the Hawkeyes’ offense, and not just because of the typical fullback duties — “creating gaps in the run game and taking linebackers and hitting them hard.”

“A guy that you don’t mind having the ball in his hands at fullback is really nice because it makes defenses stay honest,” Petras said.

The Hawkeyes will be going up against one of the few other teams to also prominently feature a fullback — Wisconsin.

Paul Chryst, the former Wisconsin head coach fired earlier this season, said in July at Big Ten Media Days the program has been “lucky that way” to continue to have quality fullbacks.

"You can want to go to it, but if you don’t have one, it doesn’t do you any good,“ Chryst said about two months before his ouster. ”We’ve been fortunate. … Why we’ve been able to keep that going is because we’ve had good players.”

While Chryst is gone, the fullback tradition has continued so far under interim coach Jim Leonhard. The Badgers have used fullbacks on 164 snaps this season.

“It’s old-school football,” Pottebaum said. “It’s pretty exciting for me as a fullback.”

Wisconsin has used two different fullbacks in 2022.

Jackson Acker, while officially listed as a running back, has played almost exclusively at fullback this year. The redshirt freshman from nearby Verona, Wis., was a running back as a recruit.

Riley Nowakowski, like Pottebaum, arrived on campus as a linebacker before eventually making the move to fullback.

There do not seem to be any fullback group chats yet for the few remaining players at the position in the Big Ten.

“It’s not like I’ve gotten their number or anything,” Pottebaum said.

Pottebaum has paid attention this year to what his counterparts at Wisconsin have done, though.

“They played a lot of our similar opponents before we did, so when I was scouting, I might see a lot of Wisconsin offense on there,” Pottebaum said. “I just really like the way they play football.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com