How Chicagoland region has remained talent hotbed for Iowa football amid increased competition

IOWA CITY — Bobby Elliott went above and beyond on a personal level when he recruited Matt Bowen.

“If you ever need a date, I can help you,” Bowen recalled the Hayden Fry-era defensive coordinator saying. “I can get you a date.”

Elliott was not kidding either, which was welcome news for the Glen Ellyn, Ill., native.

Bowen’s high school had a tradition where students had to “have an original idea to ask a girl to prom,” and his desire to ask out his classmate Nicole was conveniently around when Elliott would be visiting his high school, too.

Elliott showed up to get Bowen out of class with flowers in hand, and they proceeded to Nicole’s English classroom.

“He walks in there and just asks for Nicole,” Bowen said. “The teacher’s kind of confused what’s going on, and he shows her his Rose Bowl ring. … Nicole comes out, and I’m standing there with the flowers. And Coach E says, ‘I’m Bobby Elliott, I’m the defensive coordinator at the University of Iowa. I’m here to ask you to prom for Matt.’”

About three decades later, Iowa’s “personal touch” in recruiting — albeit not necessarily to the same level as Bowen’s prom proposal — has been among the many factors that have helped the Hawkeyes maintain an advantage amid coast-to-coast recruiting competition in the broader Chicago area.

“We do get a lot of schools that come in, but it’s the ones that come in and really make an effort to understand the culture of the different high schools, the ones that take time to get to know the head coaches and build that type of relationship,” said Beau Desherow, the head coach at back-to-back-to-back state champion Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Ill. “It’s critical.”

Iowa’s 2025 recruiting class included five of the top 20 prospects in the state of Illinois, as ranked by 247 Sports. (The other schools with at least two signees ranked among the top 20 in the state were Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Missouri and Illinois.)

Iose Epenesa was from Edwardsville, Ill. — near St. Louis — but the other four highly-rated Hawkeye signees were within the broader Chicago metropolitan area.

Linebacker Burke Gautcher is from Sycamore, fellow linebacker is from Oswego, wide receiver Terrence Smith is from Aurora and defensive lineman Brad Fitzgibbon went to a high school in Chicago. While not as highly ranked, the Hawkeyes also landed defensive back Drew MacPherson and quarterback Ryan Fitzgerald from Loyola Academy.

Looking farther back, Iowa signed at least one of the 10 highest-rated recruits in the state of Illinois (as ranked by 247 Sports) in eight of the last nine classes. (The 2022 class was the one exception in the stretch from 2017-25.)

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Iowa assistant head coach/linebackers coach Seth Wallace — the Hawkeyes’ Chicagoland area recruiter — has earned rave reviews from high school coaches in the area.

“He’s an outstanding person, a great communicator, someone who understands people, too,” said Bowen, who now is on the football staff at IC Catholic Prep in Elmhurst. “Can talk to everybody. Develops relationships with the coaching staffs out here. I think he’s one of the best. … When he recruited K.J. Parker for us out of IC Catholic, the way he recruited K.J. is the way I would want him to recruit my own kid.”

Desherow — whose tenure on Loyola’s football staff began as an outside linebacker coach in 2004 — described Wallace as an “absolute straight shooter.” Bowen similarly said “there’s no window dressing” with Wallace.

“You know exactly where kids stand in the process when Iowa is recruiting them,” Desherow said. “That’s extremely beneficial. His communication not only to the players, but to the coaches — I can’t say enough good things about how well he does there.”

Wallace — an assistant coach at Iowa in a couple different roles on Kirk Ferentz’s staff since 2014 — also has benefited from having time to build trust in the region while many possible recruiting rivals have gone through coaching changes.

The only other Big Ten school to not experience at least one head coaching change since 2015 is Penn State. Thirteen of the 18 Big Ten schools have underwent head coaching changes since 2020.

“He’s been recruiting this area for a while now,” Desherow said of Wallace. “So he knows the landscape, he knows the coaches and he knows what type of players are looking to be Hawkeyes. He knows the type of kids that are going to fit in, type of kids that are going to excel and he does a really good job of recruiting to that profile.”

It helps, too, when many of the high school coaches that Wallace has built relationships with in his decade-plus as an Iowa assistant coach are still at their respective schools.

“There’s been a ton of stability in the Chicagoland area with high school coaches,” Wallace said earlier this month on The Gazette’s Hawk Off the Press podcast. “ … That’s easy to recruit to when you’re seeing the same name on the door when you walk into a head coach’s office, and he knows all about our program.”

Wallace added that Ferentz — now preparing for his 27th season at the helm — has “been around these head coaches and administrators” as well.

“They know exactly what they’re getting when they send a kid over to Iowa,” Wallace said.

Iowa’s strong track record of developing Chicago-area prospects makes recruiting there easier. That most recently includes 2023 first-round pick Lukas Van Ness, who hails from Barrington in the northwest suburbs.

Other notable examples in the Kirk Ferentz era include Villa Park’s Matt Roth in the early 2000s, Wheaton’s Tony Moeaki in the late 2000s and Johnsburg’s C.J. Fiedorowicz in the early 2010s. All of the aforementioned examples heard their name called in the first three rounds of the NFL draft.

“You don’t have to go in there and try to drum up names that guys are familiar with that have had success,” Wallace said. “Lukas Van Ness, most recently, being a first-round draft pick out of Barrington. You throw those names out to these kids, and they immediately know all about their story.”

Iowa football’s recruiting success in the Chicagoland region somewhat mirrors the University of Iowa’s success academically recruiting students from the area. A 2024 report from the university’s registrar office showed that 6,311 students were from the state of Illinois. That’s second only to the state of Iowa and more than twice as many students as all other border states combined.

That, in turn, produces a lot of Iowa graduates — and Hawkeye fans — who return to the Chicago area. Wallace has noticed it anecdotally with “so many Iowa flags hanging in academic classrooms” or Iowa license plate frames or bumper stickers.

“It makes it easier to go into a school and talk about a university that has accomplished so much,” Wallace said.

As for Bowen’s prom proposal, Nicole said yes. Perhaps more importantly for the Hawkeyes, it gave Elliott quite the tale to tell on the recruiting trail.

“He used that all the time in recruiting going forward,” Bowen said. “When I was playing in the NFL, like a Monday night game, ‘Do you see Matt Bowen on Monday night? Well, I got him a date to prom.’”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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