Four months and counting: The Albany Great Danes are coming to Kinnick Stadium

Exactly four months ago today, Iowa played Missouri in the Music City Bowl.

Exactly four months from today, the Hawkeyes will start their 2025 football season at home, against the Albany Great Danes.

That’s not a joke. Iowa is playing the Albany Great Danes. In football. In a game that counts.

Four months ago, the Hawkeyes’ 2024 season didn’t end well. Forget about it. Iowa’s losing streak will end at one game. The Hawkeyes will prevail against the Albany Great Danes. It is written.

For a sports columnist in Eastern Iowa, the Albany Great Danes playing football at Iowa is a rare gift. It’s one to be opened slowly, and savored as spring turns into summer as the annual bombardment of buildup for a Hawkeyes football season glazes these pages and so many others around the state.

There’s so much to be said about the all-important, seven-times-per-year spectacle of game day at Kinnick Stadium spending one of those precious dates on a game against … the Albany Great Danes?

That will discussed from time to time here over the next four months. It’s a game that is very concerning for one main reasons. Namely, it won’t leave us with a lot of time to concern ourselves with Iowa’s Sept. 13 home game against the Massachusetts Minutemen.

OK, let’s put all that aside and discuss something that barely got any attention, last week’s NFL draft.

Given how tight ends have increasingly become more important as pass-catchers at the pro and college levels, you can’t limit the term “skill positions” to just quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers. So to say running back Kaleb Johnson was the first skill position player from Iowa to be taken in the first 100 picks of an NFL draft in the last 16 years is incorrect.

Four Hawkeye tight ends were Top 100 picks in that time. T.J. Hockenson and Noah Fant, in fact, were 2019 first-rounders.

Crazy as it now seems, Iowa tight end George Kittle lasted until the fifth round and 146th pick in 2017. Monday, Kittle signed a 4-year, $76 million contract extension with the San Francisco 49ers.

Four years, $76M. Not bad. But it’s good to have a side hustle, and Kittle has plenty of commercial endorsements to supplement his income.

How can you not like Kittle unless you’re a rival defensive player?

With his long blond hair, shaggy beard, multiple tattoos and thunderously vocal, high-spirited personality that draws attention to himself, Kittle is anything but the typical Iowa football export. Yet, he’s far and away the most-prominent former Hawkeye in the NFL.

Regarding Johnson, when the Pittsburgh Steelers took him at No. 83 last Friday, he became the highest draftee of any Hawkeye running back, quarterback or wide receiver since running back Shonn Greene went 65th in 2009.

As you probably know, Iowa has won a lot of games. It has just one losing Big Ten record in the last 12 years. Michigan, Penn State and Wisconsin can’t say that.

Yet, the Hawkeyes having a running back who was a second-team AP All-America in Johnson would have been the program’s version of Halley’s Comet were it not for its lack of All-Americas at quarterback and wide receiver.

No Iowa quarterback has been taken in the first 100 picks of an NFL draft since Chuck Long in 1986. No Iowa wide receiver has gone higher than 157th (Ihmir Smith-Marsette, 2021) in Kirk Ferentz’s 25 years as coach.

Looking ahead, of course, is always the way to go. At Iowa, the best quarterback always is the next quarterback.

People are excited about the man the Hawkeyes have at QB1 for the start of the 2025 season, Mark Gronowski. They should be. He’s good. Two national titles as the starting quarterback at South Dakota State says enough, but even better is this:

In 2023, Gronowski passed for 265 yards and three touchdowns and rushed for 50 yards on five carries in South Dakota State’s 59-0 victory in an FCS national semifinal.

The opponent? None other than the Albany Great Danes, who had a surprising and unusual great run that year before tumbling back to 4-8 last season.

Gronowski knows how to beat the Albany Great Danes. He’ll do it again four months from today. It is written.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com