Iowa football: Five Hawkeyes who should get a shot at the XFL
By Andrew Wade
There are a few former Iowa football players currently looking for work. Here are the five that could find a spot in the upstart XFL.
Every year the NFL Draft comes and I anxiously await for some of my favorite Iowa football players from the previous year to get drafted.
And they don’t.
And some of them don’t even get signed to a UDFA contract, which really confuses me. Then there are the guys that do get a shot but don’t last despite good performances in a limited amount of work. Guys like Matt VandeBerg, Akrum Wadley, LeShun Daniels come to mind specifically.
I won’t pretend to be better than NFL scouts, but I’m not sure what exactly they are looking for sometimes. But, in all honesty, it’s likely that there is just such a small margin of difference between a NFL caliber player and the next guy in that an ordinary fan can’t see it.
If that’s the case, it’s a good thing there is another startup football league coming to us after the disastrous attempt at football that was called the American Alliance of Football. The XFL was quite the experiment 20 years ago when it first debuted (and lasted just one season), but with a different approach and the backing of a WWE CEO Vince McMahon, I truly think this time it could buck the trend of failed football leagues.
The league starts next in February and just recently announced it’s an 8-team list of nicknames and locations (and they’re a bit ridiculous), and they are already looking for players to fill the league for the draft that will occur in October.
While there could be a number of guys that are currently on rosters that may be released here in the next week, here are the former Iowa football players currently awaiting a chance that would be great fits for the newly imagined XFL.