The Iowa football team signed added 24 new faces to the program in yesterday’s early signing period. Here are Kirk’s reactions to this huge day.
For the most part, yesterday went as expected given the current landscape of verbal commitments for the Iowa football team, and that’s a good thing. No big flips away from the Hawks, and a few last second switches to the Hawks made for a fun day for Iowa football fans.
The Hawkeyes managed to snag twenty scholarship players and add another four walk-on to an already strong roster that just received word that junior quarterback Nate Stanley will be returning for his senior season. Needless to say, head coach Kirk Ferentz was pretty pleased with 2019 early signees.
Here was one of his opening remarks about the new Hawkeyes from his media conference yesterday.
"Really pleased with the group. I know every year there’s an article that kind of pokes fun about how excited coaches are about the guys they sign, and I would just say this: you probably shouldn’t offer a scholarship up if you’re not excited about that prospect, and it’s certainly a big day in every prospect’s career, too, to earn and achieve a scholarship to a Big Ten university. It’s tough to do."
He went on to discuss just how impressive this group of young men was saying this:
"We have 19 captains out of the 20, 17 multi-sport players, 19 guys played in playoffs, 10 participated in state championships and four of them were on state championship teams. I think that’s great. Ten of the 20 received academic honors and accolades."
Here is what else we learned about the class of 2019 yesterday.