Insatiable work ethic, family support helped Iowa’s Joe Evans when ‘odds were against him’

IOWA CITY — The Monday before Iowa football’s 2020 game against Wisconsin had a couple pleasant surprises for Joe Evans.

“I had a moped, and it was winter, and my mom didn’t have school,” Evans said, describing the first surprise. “So she’s like, ‘Hey, do you want the car for today?’ And I was like, ‘That’d be great. I don’t have to drive my moped around.’”

The second was a little more consequential for the Iowa defensive end. It happened during a special teams portion of practice. The first-teamers were working on kickoffs as Evans watched from the sidelines.

“All of a sudden, I catch Coach (Kirk) Ferentz out of the corner of my eye,” Evans said. “He is looking at me and walking straight toward me. So I’m like, ‘Did I do something wrong? … What is going on here?’“

But Evans was not doing anything wrong. In fact, it was quite the contrary. After first casually asking Evans about how he was doing and his parents were doing, Ferentz broke the big news.

“I just wanted to let you know we put you on a full-ride scholarship today,” Evans said, remembering the conversation.

That moment and many others since then have been a product of the sixth-year senior’s insatiable work ethic.

“I don't know if I would have predicted his career would have been this successful, but it's a real tribute to him,” Ferentz said Tuesday. “He’s worked extremely hard. … He’s totally invested.”

Evans arrived at Iowa in 2018 as a walk-on linebacker in the same recruiting class as three-star linebacker prospects such as Dillon Doyle, Jayden McDonald and Logan Klemp.

“When you go walk on, you’re rolling the dice,” said Bruce Vertanen, Evans’ high school coach. “I’ve probably had 50-plus players walk on in Division I programs, and I think about three or four of them have worked their way in the lineup. So the odds were against him, but this is a guy that I would never bet against.”

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Vertanen, the since-retired head coach at Ames, could be so confident because of the “absolute unparalleled work ethic” he saw from Evans over the previous four years.

“Let’s say that you had a day off in the weight room, he would go find some other place to lift,” Vertanen said. “No one is going to stop him from working. ... He’ll always find some other way to make himself better.”

The hard work in high school did not translate to a litany of college scholarship offers like what some of Evans’ Iowa teammates experienced. He played quarterback and linebacker in high school, but it was clear “he wasn’t going to play quarterback in college.”

“It’s tough, even for college coaches in recruiting, when you’re recruiting a kid who hasn’t played the position they think he might play,” Vertanen said. “They’re looking at him at quarterback, and they’re saying, ‘Could he be an outside linebacker? Could he be a defensive end? Could he be a fullback? Could he be a tight end?’ It’s hard to project that.”

Evans did not appear in any games as a true freshman linebacker in 2018. He moved to the defensive line during 2019 spring practices and appeared in eight games in the following fall.

It was never more than 20 defensive snaps in a game, per Pro Football Focus, but it was playing time for a redshirt freshman walk-on, nonetheless.

His snap count more than doubled in the 2020 season — the year when Iowa gave him a scholarship — as he played in all eight games of the COVID-19-condensed campaign.

Then Evans’ game reached another level in 2021. He tied eventual NFL first-round draft pick Lukas Van Ness for the team lead with seven sacks in his first full season as a scholarship player.

Evans moved into a starting role in 2022 and again shared the team lead in sacks with 6.5.

“I try not to reflect as much just because I really don’t want to get down that path of kind of getting in my feelings,” Evans said. “It has been quite the journey for me. But for me, I still got one more year left, and I’m just trying to put all my focus into that right now.”

Evans is in a leadership role as he enjoys his final year as a Hawkeye.

He was voted as one of the team’s four captains in each of the first two weeks of the season (along with quarterback Cade McNamara, tight end Luke Lachey and linebacker Jay Higgins).

“Probably would have been a captain last year except you have guys like (Jack) Campbell,” Ferentz said. “We had such a good group of guys last year at the senior end.”

The nod as captain “meant the world to me,” Evans said.

“That was one of my goals when I came back for my sixth year,” Evans said. “Being selected by your teammates to go out and lead the team on the field is something that I cherish and something that I don’t take lightly.”

Evans has been the one in the middle of pregame huddles firing up his teammates since last year.

“I don’t, obviously, think about it all week,” Evans said. “It’s kind of one of those things that comes to me — like what I think the team needs to hear on that given week.”

A “classic” was before Iowa’s game at Illinois last year. Iowa ended up suffering a 9-6 loss, but “a lot of guys liked that speech.”

“Before the Illinois game, we went and watched the movie ‘Smile,’” Evans said, referencing the 2022 horror movie. “So I kind of threw something in with the movie there — like something about doing it with a smile on your face.”

As Evans prepares for his last game at Iowa State on Saturday — a couple-mile drive from where he went to high school — he anticipated figuring out what he will say on Friday.

“We have some down time in the hotel, so I’ll give it about 30 minutes of thought,” Evans said.

Coach Evans?

When Evans’ football playing career ends, it might not necessarily be the end of his time around the sport.

“I didn’t really know if I’d ever want to be a coach, but coming back for the sixth year and being able to help (the younger guys) through things — it’s kind of making me think, ‘Oh, maybe I could get into this coaching thing a little bit,’” Evans said. “Maybe high school, or maybe when I have kids, coach youth football or something like that.”

Ames High’s Vertanen “absolutely” can picture Evans coaching.

“There’s a driven, unparalleled work ethic side of him, and then with that, he’s a very kind, caring person,” Vertanen said. “Which is also an attribute that a coach has to have — to make connections with people.”

Family support

Evans is quick to credit his family — whether it be its sacrifices for him or its belief in him — for his success at Iowa.

“They’ve done so much for me,” Evans said. “When I first got recruited here, being a walk-on, I remember my dad and my mom pulling me into his office and just saying, ‘Don’t worry about money. We’re going to help you out as much as possible.’ They believed in me, and they believed that I could eventually make it out on the field.”

Their belief, Evans said, was “everything that I needed.”

If Evans is having a “tough day or anything like that,” his first calls are “instantly” to his dad and then his mom.

“If I still need to talk, I’ll call my brother,” Evans said. “They’ve always been there for me in difficult situations, and they’ve really been able to help me get through these years.”

His parents moved from Ames to the Iowa City area in 2019 to be closer to Evans and his siblings. Evans goes “over there all the time” and has dinner with them every Thursday.

“It’s the greatest thing ever,” Evans said. “I’m so happy they made the move.”

As for that December day in 2020 when Evans found out he was on scholarship, he was “trying so hard not to have a smile on my face” when his mother picked him up about an hour after his conversation with Ferentz.

It did not take long on the short drive to the Evans family’s house — where he could tell his parents the happy news at the same time — for her to realize something was up. But Evans played it off as just having a “good practice.”

Then Evans told "the best parents in the world“ the news at their home, and he never saw his mother “so excited.”

"My mom starts crying, I start crying and then my dad starts crying,“ said Evans, who rarely is one to shed tears. ”It was definitely a moment I’ll never forget.“

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com