Iowa Football Signing Day: 'You just deal with it'

IOWA CITY — At some point during the final 24 hours of the recruiting race, the Iowa coaching staff found out it was losing its running back.

Florida prep Karan Higdon was set to sign with the Hawkeyes. Still, there was some shakiness, as there always seems to be in college football recruiting. Michigan had shown some interest. Higdon flew to Ann Arbor for a quickie one-day visit last weekend. He texted HawkeyeReport.com on Tuesday night that he would decide at 8 a.m. Wednesday. So, at this point for the Iowa coaches, the shakiness went hyperspeed into fully investigating their next option.

Higdon had his news conference and was decked out in the blue and gold and the block 'M.' Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh said during his news conference Wednesday that, yeah, he went after other school's prospects. 'That's kind of the way the pickle squirted this year,' Harbaugh said.

And so — bing, bam, boom — Iowa signed running back Eric Graham. The 5-9, 195-pounder is from Prattville, Ala., and rushed for more than 4,300 yards and 60 TDs in his junior and senior seasons for Autauga Academy, a known commodity in the recruiting world (recently producing Alabama tight end O.J. Howard), but still, Graham's senior class had just 39 students.

Graham visited Iowa in late January. Iowa recruiting coordinator Seth Wallace visited Prattville and had an in-home visit with the family last week. There were a lot of phone calls. Iowa did its due diligence and this wasn't tossing a dart at a map.

Autauga Academy head coach Mike Sims told HawkeyeReport.com that Iowa offered last night. Graham was on no one's recruiting radar. When Iowa tweeted that it had a national letter of intent from Graham and that he was part of the 2015 signing class, he didn't have a Rivals.com profile.

'It takes time. Life is all about timing,' Graham told the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser. 'My coach said, 'Just be patient and let me send all of these films out for you. I just need to you bear down with me and hold on.' That's what I did. I've been patient, I held on and waited for a good opportunity. That's what I got.'

That in a nutshell is how Iowa found its running back for the 2015 recruiting class.

During his news conference Wednesday, Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz barely flinched at all of this. Iowa has had crushing recruiting losses and likely will have them again and again.

'You just deal with it. If you could draw the script, you'd rather find out [sooner rather than later],' Ferentz said. 'In a perfect world you'd rather find out. If it's going to be 'no,' you'd rather find out sooner than later, but the world is not perfect, and you deal with it.'

Interest in Graham was slow because he didn't receive a qualifying ACT score until December, Sims told HawkeyeReport. There was interest from Notre Dame, Kentucky, Mississippi State and Toledo.

You can bemoan the fact that, yes, Iowa lost the running back it wanted, but the mechanism set in motion did land it a back who was adequately scouted and vetted in a short period of time.

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'We were a little concerned about our running back depth, and you just never know how things are going to go in recruiting,' Ferentz said. 'We tried to exhaust every avenue we could and we looked at as many players as we could the past month after getting back from the bowl game, and Eric is a guy we came across late in the process.'

The Hawkeyes signed 21 players on Wednesday, including nine Iowans (state championship QBs Drew Cook and Ryan Boyle), four Texans and one running back (Graham).

There is a legacy flavor to this class. Cook's dad, Marv, was an all-American tight end for the Hawkeyes. Defensive end Brady Reiff is the brother of former all-Big Ten offensive tackle Riley Reiff. Defensive end Anthony Nelson's dad, Jeff, played D-line at Iowa in the 1980s.

Offensive line was a big deal for this class. Industry standard for scholarship O-linemen on rosters is around 15. Going into spring practice, which starts March 25, Iowa has 12. The Hawkeyes signed five Wednesday, including four-star center James Daniels, brother of current Iowa RB LeShun Daniels.

The other four come from the northwest quadrant of Iowa — Jacob Newborg (West Lyon), Landan and Levi Paulsen (Woodbury Central) and Brett Waechter (Hartley-Melvin-Sanborn).

'In our feeling we had to fortify that group a little bit, and we like the five guys that we've got,' Ferentz said.

The foursome from Texas was ranked in the Dallas Morning News top 100 recruits in the Dallas area. Wide receiver Jerminic Smith was the top Hawkeye on this list at No. 71. Ferentz said Iowa invested heavily in Texas this recruiting period, with assistants Bobby Kennedy and LeVar Woods doing a lot of the legwork. Look for Texas to become a frequent Iowa recruiting ground, he said. The state's growth and appetite for football makes it too a tantalizing target.

Ferentz qualified a question on quarterbacks Boyle and Cook with 'we'll see how it plays out once they get here on campus,' but the intent right now is for them to begin their careers as quarterbacks.

'In a perfect world, you don't want two in the same class, but they're players we felt so highly of that we were determined to get them in this class if we could do it,' Ferentz said.

l Comments: (319) 398-8256; marc.morehouse@thegazette.com