Tomorrow’s All-Americans Today
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Click here for the Offense.

The rules for this team: all players are second or third-year guys -- no incoming freshmen or JUCOs -- set to start for the first time this year, or otherwise to contribute heavily after a redshirt year or a season (or two) as a backup; in other words, their move into the lineup should be less like a patient adjustment period and more like shooting a cannon. No one on the team was feted with awards or freshman all-America notices, and none has more than five career starts; many have none. Because they weren’t instant impact beasts, you won’t find many of these guys near the top of the preseason position lists, but you should expect to be well-acquainted with all of them by this time next year.

If your team’s budding star was left off, it’s probably because we know too much about him already. And what’s the fun in that?

DE: Allen Bailey Miami
Burned a redshirt year on special teams and spot duty in an injury-racked linebacker corps, but moved down to replace Calais Campbell at end in the spring and allegedly left coaches’ eyeballs lying on the practice field. His strength coach called him "freakish as they come ... a big Willis McGahee," and if he helps Miami turn the ship around at all, expect at least one soft-focus-y feature on his obscure island upbringing, and killing alligators with shovels, etc.

Griffen: Bring on the hype, children. Bring it loud.
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DE: Everson Griffen  Southern Cal
It’s almost unfair to include him here, since Griffen was too hyped coming in to be "under the radar" and lived up to the ink by starting the first game against Idaho and eventually logging 5.5 sacks in a crowded rotation of ends. But he only started one more game the rest of the year, and if that performance (three sacks against Oregon State) is any indication -- or his multifaceted performance in spring practice -- his absence from all-America teams this summer is shortsighted.
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Honorable Mention: Carlos Dunlap Florida • Ben Martin Tennessee

DT: Torrey Davis Florida
Along with Dunlap, Justin Trattou and John Brown, Davis was one of the gems of Florida’s absurdly rich defensive line class last year, and though Trattou played the most of that quartet, Davis got on the field enough to drag down a couple quarterbacks (including Chad Henne in the bowl game) and has the higher ceiling. The only way he doesn’t break out if healthy is if fellow VHTs Brown, Trattou, Javier Estopinan or incoming Omar Hunter and/or Troy Epps also force their way onto the field. You can’t double team them all.

DT/DE: Eddie Jones Texas
Jones could have made this list last year as a redshirt freshman, based on his recruiting hype, but he limped through an injury and was lost in yet another of these impossibly stacked front line shuffles. He finished with 28 tackles, two sacks, but got a lot of attention in the process and should pass sometime-starter Aaron Lewis on the first team, cementing his nightmare status in the process.
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Honorable Mention: Al Woods LSU • Justin Trattou Florida • Dexter Larimore Ohio State

LB: Martez Wilson Illinois
Logged a couple sacks from defensive end as a true freshman, but plans to slide back to linebacker to take over J Leman’s "all over the field" role. Another "workout warrior" guy that Zook compared to Jevon Kearse.

LB: Chris Colasanti Penn State
The direct beneficiary of Sean Lee’s debilitating spring injury: his role starts a year earlier than expected, Colasanti is the heir apparent to the Posluszny-Connor-Lee line of deceptively fast, Caucasian linebacking terrors, and should not cede any ground to Lee if the latter returns for a sixth year in ‘09.

Kindle: Hanging on, biding his time.
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LB: Sergio Kindle Texas
Observant Texas fans like Peter Bean spent all last season wondering why the nation’s top incoming linebacker of 2006 couldn’t surpass just-okay Rashad Bobino as the starter in the middle, and after seeing him in person against Nebraska, I sympathize with their frustration. One play stood out, an overlooked burst of dominance that helped turned the game for the Longhorns: with Nebraska leading 17-3 late in the third and facing a 3rd-and-1, Kindle ran through a much bigger blocker like he wasn’t there in pursuit to the ball and leveled the runner behind the line of scrimmage. Texas got the ball back and scored 25 unanswered points. For the year, Kindle added another 37 tackles, three for loss, off the bench. He’s still listed as a backup by most accounts coming into the season, behind either Bobino or Jared Norton on the strongside, but it would be a major upset -- or else a total lack of judgment -- if Kindle finished there for the third year in a row. It’s now or never to shed the looming "bust" tag.
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Honorable Mention: Ross Homan Ohio State • Quan Sturdivant North Carolina • Chris Galippo Southern Cal • Luke Lambert Missouri

CB: A.J. Wallace Penn State
One of the top-rated corner prospects of ‘06 moved into the starting lineup opposite Justin King over the last four games last year and should ease the transition from King’s early departure. Wallace is a little bigger than King (6’1", 190) and if he’s not a weak link, the Lion defense probably won’t have one.

CB: Jordan Bernstine Iowa
Like Wallace, an elite prospect moving into the lineup for the first time, although Bernstine only sat one year at Iowa instead of two. Bernstine -- who we can say pretty definitively is not of Hebrew descent, despite the name -- is replacing Adam Shada, and should be an immediate upgrade, athletically.
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Honorable Mention: Domonique Franks Oklahoma • Deon Beasley Texas

S: Chad Jones LSU
Jones returned punts, picked off André Woodson and made one the biggest plays of the year by blitzing and stripping John Parker Wilson to set up the winning touchdown at Alabama, so he’s already known as much for his play as for his considerable hype. But unlike fellow freshman star Eric Berry at Tennessee, he didn’t start a game, so his ascension won’t really begin until he takes over for Craig Steltz at strong safety this fall.

S: Reshad Jones Georgia
Jones started a couple games last year as a redshirt freshman, and played enough to get some impressive photos onto Google Images, at least. Recruiting gurus set the bar high here: Georgia fans are already expecting Jones to contend for all-SEC in his first year as the full-time free safety. It’s a crowded field, with Berry, Chad Jones, Derek Pegues, Rashad Jackson, Major Wright, Emmanuel Cook, Curtis Taylor and his own teammate, C.J. Byrd, but not necessarily unrealistic.
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Honorable Mention: Chykie Brown Texas • Mike McNeil Auburn • Stevie Brown Michigan

A too-soon look at next fall, sans the inevitable injuries, suspensions and other pratfalls of the long offseason.
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What’s Changed. The defense was awash last year with "senior leadership," at both ends, both corners and two of the three linebacker spots, and generally played like a veteran group is supposed to: the Hawkeyes were 18th nationally in points allowed, and even removing the meager three points allowed bottom-dwellers Northern Illinois and Syracuse in the first two games only allowed a respectable 22.4 per game to Big Ten offenses, including holding Illinois to six (thank you, illegal formation) and somehow winning an overtime game against Michigan State despite a 5-for-15 passing day by Jake Christensen (see below). I watched all of the upset over Illinois, and in that game, at least, the Hawks were disciplined, aggressive and completely intolerant of the Illini option.

The least you should know about Iowa...

2007 Record • Past Five Years

2007: 6-6 (4-4 Big Ten, T-4th) 2003-07: 39-23 (23-17 Big Ten)

Five-Year Recruiting Rankings*-

2004-08: 38 • 11 • 40 • 28 • 53

Returning Starters, Roughly

13 (8 Offense, 5 Defense)

Best Player

Mitch King is extremely productive for an interior lineman, with a linebacker-like 114 tackles in two years and 26.5 tackles for loss. King has started almost every game the last three years, was the Hawkeyes’ only first-team all-Big Ten pick by the coaches in ‘07 and is the key to a much younger supporting cast holding up in any serious way against the run.

Cultural Studies Department

For a bit of nonsense with The Last of the Mohicans in 1826. For no apparent reason, a judge and a newspaper editor who changed his paper’s name to the "Burlington Hawkeye" successfully lobbied to apply the nickname to Iowa in the 1840s. From the book and newspaper (which still exists) were spawned a Marvel comics character, an affable yet iconically cynical movie/TV doctor, an ethanol company, a software company, a line of all-terrain vehicle and a NASA spacecraft, among other things. So who says James Fenimore Cooper isn’t relevant?

- - - * According to Rivals.

Of course, the same group allowed 38 to Indiana, 31 to Purdue and 28 to Western Michigan in ugly losses, and it gets significantly younger -- five of the six vacant positions are expected to be filled by sophomores, with another sophomore (Brett Greenwood) returning at free safety and a pair of young ‘uns, Lance Tillison and Tyler Sash, supposedly pushing senior Harold Dalton at strong safety. The new guys have done nothing, but the vibes are not all bad, talent wise. Both new ends (Adrian Clayborn and converted tight end Christian Ballard) and corner Jordan Bernstine were all four star prospects. The linebackers should definitely miss active and impressively-named Mike Klinkenborg and Mike Humpalm and Clayborn and Ballard are only likely to hold the line for Bryan Mattison and Kenny Iwebema, but Bernstine was Rivals’ No. 3 incoming corner last year, which should be a clear upgrade by the end of the year over outgoing, three-year target Adam Shada.

What’s the Same. One thing you can say about Jake Christensen: the kid knows how to throw a ball a ball out of bounds. He was only intercepted six times, fewest in the Big Ten, against a relatively impressive 17 touchdowns. When one can achieve a nearly 3:1 TD:INT ratio and still finish last among regular starters in the conference in pass efficiency, he’s reaching entirely new levels of every-down frustration. Christensen only completed 53 percent of his passes, last in the Big Ten, for about 6.1 per attempt, also last.

No Jake is an island.
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To be fair, he didn’t have a lot of choices -- not only were his best receivers, Andy Brodell and tight end Tony Moeaki, injured most of the year, and the leftovers mediocre at best, but Christensen was lumbering for his life on a near-constant basis. Last we checked, Iowa’s offensive line was the pride of the team, but it hit rock-bottom last year by allowing a league-worst 46 sacks, mostly in some pretty ugly clusters: Iowa State had four, Wisconsin had four, Indiana (!) had eight, Penn State had five, Purdue had five, Northwestern had six, Western Michigan had four and even lame duck Minnesota managed three. Hawkeye partisans may recognize their team’s record in those games: 2-6. And when the sack totals are that high, the actual number of "pressure" situations, when most turnovers and other bad decisions go down, is much higher. On the rare occasions they protected Christensen, he didn’t always play well -- certainly not against Michigan State, or against Illinois, when the offense scored only ten -- but he didn’t make terrible mistakes that cost the game. Even if most sacks are really the quarterback's fault, the buck for the lowest-gaining, lowest-scoring offense in the conference has to stop up front.

Obviously, this group cannot possibly be worse. Five starters return, technically, plus two part-time starters, but concluding from highly scientific examination of the school’s own spring depth chart and the two-deep in Athlon, the only secure position on the line is that of senior right guard Seth Olsen; sophomore Brian Bulaga seems likely at one tackle or the other. The other positions are all apparently in the air. As they say: in this context, when you have eight linemen, you really have none.

Not to Jinx Them or Anything... As far as I can tell, no Hawkeye was arrested in the month of June, a tremendous achievement given the team’s well-chronicled, 1.000 per-month average in arrests since April 2007. In the fifteen months hence, 16 different Hawkeyes (nearly one in five of available scholarship players) were hit with charges of varying seriousness. Disregarding three boys-will-be-boys arrests for underage drinking, we have: Ryan Bain (disorderly conduct*); straight hustlin’ ballas Domonique Douglas (credit card fraud, public intoxication) and Anthony Bowman (credit card fraud), Dana Brown (domestic assault); James Cleveland (illegal prescription drugs), Ben Evans (drunken driving); Cedric Everson (second-degree sexual abuse); Bradley Fletcher (drunken driving); Clint Huntrods (public intoxication); Arvell Nelson (marijuana, drug tax stamp violation (? -- see here)); Abe Satterfield (second and third-degree sexual abuse); and Lance Tillison (drunken driving). That looks like the final tally -- for now. The incident involving Everson and Satterfield started making the rounds along with a mildly incriminating hip hop video in October, but they were just arrested in late May, so the "Days Without a New Legal Embarrassment" calendar is not that far along.

The overall thinning of the roster goes well beyond legal attrition, though: of the 67 players Iowa signed from 2005-07, twenty-one weren’t listed on the spring roster -- almost one in three -- and only five of that number were part of the team’s mini-spree. The 2005 class, in particular, is notorious in its nearly crime-free disappointment. That year’s haul, off the unlikely back-to-back-to-back co-conference championship seasons from 2002-05, was the eleventh-best in the country according to Rivals, the only nationally competitive class Iowa has signed in decades. Very little has gone right since, on or off the field. Entering year four, a little less than half of the ‘05 recruits (11 of 23) remain on the roster; only about half of those are on the official two-deep, and only three are listed as starters (four if you count guard Dan Doering, who the school lists as either/or to start against ‘06 signee Julian Vandervelde). If you were wondering what happened here after 2004, "four out of twenty-four" is a pretty good shorthand.

Your next starting tailback, if it comes to that.
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Overly Optimistic Increasingly Desperate Post-Spring Chatter. Even if he was still a walk-on, even if he was still pigmentally-challenged, Iowa’s running back situation wouldn’t seem to be in such dire straits if the starter at the end of the spring wasn’t actually named "Paki O’Meara." Yes, he sounds like a particularly racist St. Patrick’s Day mascot, but it’s not a joke: at least until a couple moderately-touted freshmen get to campus, there’s nowhere else to turn. Presumptive favorite Jevon Pugh left the team in April to go back to Florida; sometimes-mentioned candidate Shonn Greene has not returned to the team from a year in academic purgatory and would-be JUCO messiah Nate Guillory "had no idea what he was doing" in his first practices, according to Kirk Ferentz, especially when it comes to blocking. So, uh, Paki it is.

Even Iowans who survived the great running back massacre of 2004 can’t feign optimism about this. The presumably objective "Hawkmania" section of the Quad City Times made no attempt to sugarcoat the cold, hard truth in April:

It looks as if the starter for now might be Paki O’Meara.

Contain your enthusiasm.
[...]
The sophomore walk-on from Cedar Rapids Washington, who never has carried the ball in a college game, received this ringing endorsement from Ferentz: "If we have to go with him in the fall, we will.’’

A few seconds later he piled on even more praise: "Obviously, we’re hoping we’ll be able to supplement him with other players in the fall.’’
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To which the somewhat less objective Black Heart, Gold Pants responded, understandably:

Our horror cup overfloweth.
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Jake Christensen supplied by far the most diplomatic assessment of an O’Meara-led backfield:

"Paki is more of a power guy. He's a good leader, a real strong player who is good at pass protection and catching the ball out of the backfield."
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I.e., he’s exactly what you’d expect: an undersized, back-up fullback best suited to special teams.

Not helping matters was the offensive line, whose status remained on ‘shuffle’ thanks to shoulder injuries to Olsen and Bulaga and various ailments to fellow starting candidates Dace Richardson, Rob Bruggeman and Rafael Eubanks, all of whom missed the competition.

Iowa on You Tube. Glory days! Fry! Shembechler! It’s a nailbiter in 1985 as No. 1 Iowa trails No. 2 Michigan, 10-9, with seconds to go, called by, well, guess who:

Gotta love Hayden Fry, the Father Abraham of modern college football. That team was the best he ever coached at Iowa -- it was the second of his three Rose Bowl trips -- but alas, the glory of the top spot wouldn’t last.

See Also: The famous University of Iowa Scottish Highlanders in their hey day. ... The campus prepares for the flooding earlier this month, to little effect. ... Tim Dwight in the second leg of the 1999 NCAA 4X400 Relays. ... And Hayden Fry’s own mini-Mike Gundy moment.

Best-Case: Four of the first five games are at home, all of them likely wins: Maine, Florida International, Iowa State and Northwestern. The toss-up in that first month is an intriguing trip to Pittsburgh, a real rubber match for both teams’ prospects. A 5-0 start is not at all out of the question before back-to-back road games at Michigan State and Indiana, where the Hawkeyes should be looking for a split to earn bowl eligibility before the toughest stretch of the year, against Wisconsin, Illinois and Penn State. Two of those (Wisconsin and PSU) are in Iowa City, but all three are probable losses before a chance to finish strong against Purdue and Minnesota. The defense should be fine -- not great in the vein of the Hodge-Greenway-Sanders units, but good enough if the line improves and the skill guys stay healthy to plug away at eight wins and one of the league’s middle tier bowls (Alamo, Champs Sports, Insight).

Men, if you’ve got one more of those inexplicable ten-win seasons in you, now might be the right time to break that out.
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Worst-Case: Ferentz’s teams are just 3-3 against Iowa State since 2002 and seem to consistently play down to the Cyclones; back-to-back disappointments against ISU and Pitt could set a very bad standard entering the Big Ten schedule. If Iowa happens to drop two of three against Northwestern, Michigan State and Indiana, the season becomes a real nightmare on the order of the 2-6 conference finish in 2006; even at 3-5, another losing record will certainly lure Torch ‘n Pitchforks ‘R Us to the lot down the road from the Ferenzt estate.

Non-Binding Forecast: The Lukewarm Seat or Bust. I have to apply here what I usually refer to as the "Purdue Rule," based on the unusually high expectations for the Boilermakers’ Michigan-and-Ohio State-free schedule in 2005: when the best thing you have to say about a team is which other, better teams it doesn’t play, that is not a team worth endorsing. Iowa misses the Wolverines and Buckeyes for the second year in a row; like last year, this anomaly (especially as it relates to rebuilding Michigan) is to be ignored completely. As I say, five games look like toss-ups, and the Pitt-Northwestern-Michigan State-Indiana stretch will define the direction of the season -- assuming they win the three before that, and lose the three after that, a 2-2 split there and another split against Purdue and Minnesota at the end leaves another unsatisfying, 6-6 collection of meh.<p>

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* Ryan Bain's charge was originally listed (inaccurately) as "drunken driving," per the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The correct charge was disorderly conduct.