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Hundreds of Hawkeye fans packed the Iowa Speedway Newton Club Thursday to hear from Iowa coaches and officials during the annual spring I-Club Banquet.
The marquee name this year was football head coach Kirk Ferentz, who wrapped up his part of the program shortly before Hawkeye defensive lineman Adrian Clayborn was selected by the Tampa Bay Bucs in the 2011 NFL draft. Early in his speech, Ferentz indicated he hoped Clayborn would be drafted in the first round. True to form, Clayborn became the first Hawkeye to join the NFL in 2011. Ferentz said he believed 10 to 12 former Hawkeyes could find themselves in an NFL camp this summer.
“We’re excited for these guys, certainly,” he said.
The flip side of graduating a lot of talented players means that the 2011 Hawk squad will be a younger group.
“If you look at our team right now, obviously we graduated a lot of experience,” Ferentz said. “We have a group of seniors that’s not near as big as last year’s class and yet we can count a good contribution from everybody in that class.”
Ferentz sees 2011 shaping up a little like 2008, recalling how younger players like Ricky Stanzi stepped up at that time.
“You think about guys like Stanzi and Pat Angerer in ‘08, basically in the month of September they were on the second team,” he said. “They were second team in the spring, entered that season as back-ups and ended up emerging in a pretty prominent role once we got the season going — and went on to have great careers. I think we’ll see some stories like that.”
Ferentz touched on a handful of other topics.
On the tough regular season ending loss to Minnesota: “We didn’t compete at anywhere near the level that you have to to be competitive in our conference. ... We certainly didn’t deserve to win that game.”
On the team rebounding to win the Insight Bowl: “When game time came around, the guys really competed well as a team so that was really gratifying.”
On recovering from having 13 players hospitalized with the muscle condition:
"A lot of credit goes out to the people who were involved and the way they've worked through this. I think everybody has shown a lot of character. They've worked hard, and now we've just finished up a spring practice about a week and a half ago and I think we've made progress."
On narrow loss margin in all five losses last season:
"If we can do a better job getting over the top int eh close games, obviously that's going to help us a lot."
On the Big Ten conference addition and reconfiguration:
"I think all of us in the conference are excited about Nebraska joining the league. It's going to be, I think, a real plus for the whole league and then certainly on a more local basis it makes a lot of sense for all of us. ... We're having Wisconsin drop off our schedule for a couple years. That's a little unusual. We'll pick up Nebraska and they'll become an annual rival game.