The football recruiting season came to an end for Iowa and Iowa State on Wednesday with national signing day. After a banner 2005 recruiting class the Hawkeyes signed 18 players and the emphasis was linebackers and defensive backs.
Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz says the finished in the top ten in the recruiting rankings last February, but didn’t finish in the top ten in the rankings in the fall. Ferentz says he prefers to be in the top ten in the fall.
He signed two quarterbacks out of Ohio, Arvell Nelson and Rick Stanzi. He says they’ve had strong feelings for Arvell since last summer and he says Stanzi had a nice senior year and they were impressed with him. Ferentz says both players are great leaders that moved their team and have strong upsides as quarterbacks.
This current class is spread out and the Hawks signed a player from every Big Ten state with the exception of Wisconsin and Iowa. Ferentz says five years ago was a tougher challenge as they struggled to get into the upper division of the league. Now he says they’ve had success and that has helped.
Iowa State coach Dan McCarney inked a large class of 30 players. McCarney says speed, athletic ability and talent to be able to play different positions stand out when he talks about this class. Iowa State’s class does not have many big-time recruits but McCarney says it’s about the time of players they will become and not what their ranking is right now.
McCarneys rattled off several of his players that have gone on to be successful after getting little interest from the experts who ranked recruits. One example is Nick Leaders, this year’s most valuable player, so McCarney says he could “care less about rankings and ratings.”
McCarney says rankings mean nothing to him on the recruiting trail. He says he cares about his evaluations of character, talent, ability, integrity, those kind of things.