Iowa football: Fant and Hockenson creating easy sell for tight end recruits

The Iowa football team has been pretty good at producing quality NFL tight ends, but it wasn’t until this year that media realized it, and it’s paying off.

With the emergence of George Kittle with the San Francisco 49ers and not one but two tight ends being named All-Americans in the same season, the Iowa football team has been placed firmly in the conversation for tight end university.

Some schools may disagree (like Michigan), but let’s be honest, their weak attempts at pretending are laughable at best.

For context, if you haven’t seen the original tweet, here it is.

https://twitter.com/Coach_Gattis/status/1092127485041487872

That’s by design of course. You don’t want to be comparing yourself to a school within your conference, especially one that is much better than you at the thing you claim to be good at.

Fortunately, almost nobody bought that, and in fact, it’s quite the opposite. With this past season in the rearview mirror, it’s becoming more and more evident just how big of an impact it has had on the Iowa football program when it comes to recruiting.

The 2019 class of Iowa football players contains three great tight end prospects, and the class of 2020 has a few fantastic tight end prospects on the radar for the Hawks.

It’s something that 2020 quarterback commit Deuce Hogan has been selling to his potential future teammates as well such as three-star tight end Elijah Yelverton, who holds an offer from the Iowa football program.

"Absolutely, I talk with Elijah once every week once every two weeks, just trying to give him some food for thought, stay at the top of his mind.From his perspective, as cool as it is to get caught up in all of the clout, something has to separate one school from another. Everyone is going to have huge stadiums, everyone is going to have cool jerseys, but to say you have two first-round tight ends this year……If he’s trying to play in the league, this could be the next step. If you’re trying to get to the next level, Iowa has the perfect tunnel."

As of today, the Iowa football team currently has seven offers out to tight end prospects in the class of 2020 with four-star tight end Theo Johnson at the top of the list (in terms of rankings).

We won’t officially know until the early signing period in December, but it certainly sounds like the Iowa football team has quite an easy sales pitch when it comes to tight ends.