Locked On Hawkeyes - Daily Podcast On Iowa Hawkeyes Football & Basketball - Jordan Oladokun decommits from Iowa | Will Iowa allow seniors to play another season? | What could football look like next year

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Recent commitment Jordan Oladokun decommits from the Hawks. We break down that decision and what it means for the recruiting class going forward before diving head first into statements made by Gary Barta that shed some light on the decisions that are having to be made inside the University of Iowa Athletic Program. Will Iowa allow spring sport seniors to return and will we have football next year? We break it all down on today's episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I thank God I was born on the good arms of the Midwest, and not on the battlefields of the U.S. It's a time of panic, and it's intercepted! It's picked off right away! Intercepted by Marty Hooker! Pick six! Eight seconds into the game! Buffen sets up deep in the pocket, goes down the field for Smith!

Oh! He's got it! Smith! Touchdown. 85 yards. High on. Touchdown, 10. Taking a shot in the end zone.

It is caught. No offense. Touchdown. That's either one or you have it. Go ahead and three. Yes. Two-point lead for the Hawkeyes! Welcome back to a beautiful Monday morning episode of the Locked On Hawkeyes podcast, your daily podcast covering your Iowa Hawkeyes on the Locked On Sports Network.

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$10 off your first order at BiltBar.com. On today's episode, we are going to be breaking down some news in the recruiting world. Unfortunately, Iowa did have a player decommit over the last couple of days. We want to talk about that and how it impacts the Hawks going forward and kind of what it means. And then we're going to really be diving into some of the coronavirus stuff and what Gary Barta talked about with some of the implications with coronavirus, specifically talking about the spring athletes that are allowed to technically come back next year.

And then also talking about football season and what that could look like with this pandemic going on. So we're going to be covering all those topics on today's show of the Lockdown Hawkeyes podcast. And if you are tuning in for the first time and you do like what you hear today, make sure to like, review, and give us that five-star review. And subscribe wherever you downloaded this podcast at, whether that is Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or the brand new Himalaya Podcast app. And make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

We always have some great stuff we're coming out with on those social media mediums. And if you haven't been tuning in, make sure you check out our TBT Tuesdays. We are interviewing a new player from the Iowa United every single Tuesday until we go through the entire roster. Absolutely fantastic time to get to know some of these guys who are going to be competing to represent the state of Iowa in the TBT tournament, the $2 million winner-take-all tournament. Tomorrow we have former South Dakota State three-time Summit League Player of the Year, Mike Dahm, who is on the Iowa United.

He's going to be joining the show tomorrow, so make sure to check that out as well. But let's jump into the news. So, like I said, we had a decommitment. A little bit unexpected considering the commitment happened not too long ago. And when I say that, we had Jordan Oladukun. Let me try that over again. Jordan Oladukun, a 5'11", 185-pound cornerback out of Tampa, Florida, goes to Gaither High School, the 844th-ranked cornerback in the nation,

currently holds 22 offers. he actually committed to the Hawks a few weeks ago and then just decommitted this past Friday a little bit unexpected from the Iowa Hawkeye community having that happen so quickly we've seen you know decommitments happen in the past when recruits don't really like Iowa's visitation policy for other schools Iowa definitely operates kind of old school in the sense of if you make a commitment, stand by your commitment. If you're not ready to make a commitment, don't make a commitment. And so typically we don't see a ton of players decommit, especially not so soon. But a couple things I wanted to touch on that. He did make a note on Twitter, and I had some interesting thoughts on it first and then he clarified some things, but he said, after talking to my parents, I've

decided that I will be decommitting from the University of Iowa and opening my recruitment back up. I'll not be speeding my recruitment up for anyone. And that last line really got to me. I was curious if he felt like Iowa pressured him into committing. And if that was the case, that was definitely kind of took me aback a bit because Iowa is not a school that typically tries to pressure recruits, at least from everything I've talked about with the recruits that I've had on the show before. They really appreciated Iowa's honesty throughout the entire recruiting process and the fact that Iowa basically said, if you don't want to play here, don't come here. We want you to be here if you want to be a Hawkeye

and you're ready to work for it. They operated under the cloak of transparency and honesty. I was a little concerned about that. But then he did clarify a few minutes after that, he did make a note on his Twitter account saying that Iowa did not force him to commit. So that made me feel a little bit better. I think it's more in relation to the fact that now that he has decommitted, do schools want him to commit right away? He wants to take his time. I'm assuming

he wants to spend a little bit more time and actually get to go see the schools. It sounds like he actually didn't. He did have an official visit set up with Iowa, didn't get a chance to actually go, obviously with the coronavirus pandemic. And that is something that Iowa typically doesn't do. They don't typically allow recruits to commit without having seen the campus. They want commits to not only like the coaches and like the players, but they want to like the campus and enjoy their time at Iowa. If they're not enjoying their time at the university, they're not going to enjoy their time on the football team either.

So I thought that was really interesting. For me, when a player decommits, I think obviously there's still a chance that Iowa gets him. Obviously there's something he loved about Iowa enough to commit initially. So there's always a chance that he does end up going back to Iowa as a commitment. But we typically don't see that with decommitments from Iowa. Typically when a player decommits, they're kind of off the radar. They go to find another program. And I actually thought, kind of interesting article I

read on 24-7 Sports. If you aren't following those guys, they do a great job with some of the recruiting news and staying up to date on that. But I thought 24-7 Sports, Sean Bach, I want to make sure, yeah, Sean Bach did a great job of breaking down some of the decommits in the class of Iowa. Posted it a couple days ago, so make sure to check that out. But really, when you look at that, you notice that there's not a lot of players who, there's no players really in the last couple of years that have decommitted and went back to Iowa. So I find that very interesting. Unlikely that he does end up going to Iowa. And that'll be interesting to see how that impacts recruiting. We've seen a lot of guys commit in the last couple weeks. I don't expect that to impact

their decisions necessarily, but there is a guy that Iowa is recruiting pretty heavy out of Gaither, out of Tampa, Florida, you know, same high school as Jordan. Ricky Parks, a three-star running back, four-star by some outlets, a top 400 prospect. He is a running back that Iowa is pretty high on, and he is listed as, you know, prediction of going to Iowa. And I know players don't go to the same schools as each other all the time. I do think there is a little bit that plays into that, though.

If you know someone who is going to the school or you know someone who's had an experience with that school, you obviously want to lean on that person. So there's always a chance that could have an impact on that. But if not, it would be a huge gift for Iowa to still land Ricky Parks, a 5'10", 192-pound running back out of Tampa, Florida. Top 400 prospect. Would be a really good recruiting grab.

But again, could be interesting to see how that works out with Jordan decommitting from the Hawks at this time. And then kind of going forward, like I said, there's still a couple other guys that we could see Iowa land in the next couple weeks. Thomas Fedone is a guy that Iowa is really high on. A Nebraska fan who lives in Iowa, but obviously Iowa has a better program for tight ends. That is not something you can really argue. You honestly can't argue anyone has a better tight end program than Iowa outside of potentially Notre Dame, which we'll get to. We're going to break down some of the tight end view discussions on a later episode this week, but that's a guy to watch out for as well.

And then Skyler Bell, the receiver out of Taft. I've talked about him quite a bit, but he is committing in the next week or so. Likely going to be Iowa is kind of what I'm guessing, so we'll be talking about him as well. But that will do it for our recruiting news. I'm going to take a quick break, and then we're going to jump into the discussion about Gary Barta's comments on scholarships for next year for the spring athletes.

And also, are we going to have football next year? And what are some of the implications of having football versus not having football versus what are some of the scenarios that are being discussed as of right now? So we're going to be talking about that on segments two and three of the Lockdown Hawkeyes podcast. And just a reminder that today's episode is brought to you by the great folks at Built Bar. Built Bar is the best tasting protein bar on the market. I don't like to tell people about things

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breaking down some of the information that Gary Barta talked about over the last couple days. It sounds like there's just a lot of communication going on to try to figure out how to handle, um, what is happening with the coronavirus. A lot of scenarios being played out. Uh, I would say almost similar to the NFL draft where, you know, GMs go through, you know, hundreds and hundreds of different variations of mock drafts to see what players could be

available for them at what picks. So they know kind of how to, how to run their draft board. I would say similar things happening across the NCAA, running across a couple different simulations to try to figure out when can they reasonably get sports back on track? What are sports going to look like for college athletics over the next year, two, three years? How do they handle some of the unique situations that happened with sports being shut down so abruptly, the Big Ten tournament not being played, the NCAA tournament not being played. How do folks handle that from a school perspective?

So first, we're going to touch on the scholarship piece. As we've talked about before, the NCAA decided to allow spring athletes the ability to return for another year if they were seniors. So if you were a senior this year, your season got canceled, you were allowed to return for another season at your university. And the NCAA left it up to the universities about how they handle that, whether they allow that to happen, and whether they allow those students to return on their most likely a partial scholarship. Iowa has not made a decision yet. I think that's the first thing we need to make sure we are articulating is that Iowa has not made a decision on how to handle these spring athletes. It sounds like Gary Barta said there's about 25 to 35 athletes that

are kind of impacted by this. That's a decent chunk of athletes. And it sounds like that could also not just, you know, providing those partial scholarships for those athletes, but the travel expenses associated with having larger rosters, um, because of these unique times could cost the university of Iowa up to $500,000 by allowing those students come back and covering their partial scholarships. So that is something to keep in mind as we continue our discussion over the next 15 minutes about some of the coronavirus pandemic stuff is the cost is significant to be able to provide the transportation, provide the room, the food, the scholarship costs for these players. One school in the Big Ten who

already has made a decision is Wisconsin. And Wisconsin has decided to basically say, so long, good luck, have a nice day to their seniors. While that might be the logical choice from a revenue standpoint, spring sports don't typically bring in a ton of money. Typically your big money makers are going to be football and basketball, especially in the Big Ten, especially at a school like Wisconsin. You know, they're not, you know, football and basketball are really the big things there. So spring sports are likely in the red, I would say most of the time or close to the red, not really bringing in a ton of revenue.

So having to front that price tag might be logically not the best decision. However, personally, I disagree with that mantra. These kids, these young adults, I should say, chose to go to your university to represent your university. They still are student-athletes. They're still going to school. They represented your school well. And to just say, sorry, your senior season got canceled and you know what?

It just costs too much money. We're just not going to cover it. To me, that's a little bit ridiculous, especially a school like Wisconsin, for how much they charge for out-of-state tuition. I mean, a lot of Big Ten schools do charge a lot for out-of-state tuition. And I know $500,000 is not any small chunk of change. And I know these schools are having to also consider price cuts across the board,

and I'll talk about that in a second. But I think at the end of the day, you need to do what's best by these student-athlet athletes and the fact they've given their all to your school and just to say uh sorry we weren't expecting this pandemic and uh good luck have a nice day i think that's a little bit ridiculous i hope iowa doesn't take that path i know gary barda is evaluating all options though at this point um and right now he's trying to work with his staff to see where can they cut budget at? Where can they cut five, 10, 15% off of their budget? And that number is very variable at this point because we don't know how long this pandemic

is going to last. We don't know how long it's going to be until we get sports back. Now, if we're able to play a full college football season and football is able to start up September, uh, you know, in the middle of September or earlier part of September when Iowa takes on Northern Iowa, great. Iowa's probably in a good spot, especially as a well-funded athletic program. They're probably in a good spot to be able to handle spring athletes and be able to reduce the amount of reductions that are made in the budget. But if not, football is the big moneymaker. And then followed by basketball and wrestling, any impact of that is going to really hurt the school.

We've already seen Iowa make some potentially financially motivated decisions. They're not playing in a basketball tournament over Thanksgiving out of the state. They're hosting one at their home court, which I think, again, is – I think there's more to the story than just financial motivations, but definitely an opportunity to save some travel costs by not having to fly the team out to another state and house them in a hotel and all that stuff. So interesting stuff. Nonetheless, coming up on segment number three after a quick break, we're going to keep our discussion going on those salary or on the budget

reductions and kind of what football could look like next season. We are back for segment number three, our final segment of the Locked On Hawkeyes podcast. And just a quick reminder that today's episode is brought to you by the great folks at Built Bar. Use promo code LOCKEDON to get $10 off your first order at BuiltBar.com. And like I said, before we took a quick break, I wanted to continue our discussion on the Gary Barta conversation and kind of what some of the notes he made about the coronavirus pandemic. And it sounds like, like I said, first and foremost, they're trying to evaluate everything.

They're asking all the programs to figure out where could they potentially eliminate 5%, 10%, 15% of their budget. He did say they're not going to impact any current student's financial aid. So any student currently on a scholarship is not going to have a reduction in their scholarship. I think that's a good first step. Like I said, I do think they should offer students the opportunity to come back and play their senior season. If that means they don't cover the scholarship, all right. I can kind of understand that. I would like to see them cover that scholarship, though, too.

But again, they already got this past year, free education or partially covered education, I should say. So I can see kind of an argument both ways. But what could football look like next year? He made an interesting point, Gary Barta did, that I really kind of clung on to. And he basically said, you know, people talk about having football games without fans in the stadium. And he made a good point of if we can't have fans in the stadium, that probably means we can't have people on campus anyways. So that means that there's a bigger issue here than just getting, you know, people back in the stadium. We need to first focus on can we get people back on the campus? And if we can do that, we likely can also

look at other measures to have football games. And so to me, it makes it seem like, you know, it's kind of, they both kind of go together. If you can have people back on campus, you can have football games. If you can have football games, you can have people back on campus. They're not, you know, they are mutually inclusive of each other. They both need to kind of happen together. One or the other can't really happen without the other simply because it doesn't make a ton of logical sense. He did say a lot can change. A lot can change over the next 120 days until we get our first football game. As of right now, obviously a lot of America is opening back up. We'll see how this impacts the curves. I know it's been a kind of a touchy subject across the board. I'm not an epidemiologist, so I'm not going

to go into that and kind of what that means, but it is going to be very interesting to see how the numbers are impacted over the next month, month and a half. And if we do get a little bit more access to mass testing, we're not going to have access to a vaccine anytime soon vaccines take years to develop, you have to go through a lot of different regulations. I know the government has already pushed through a few things to try to get things out quicker, not necessarily with a vaccine, but at least with studies that are being done. But mass testing would be a huge next step. And the reason why this is important, yes, we're not able to stop the spread of the vaccine from that standpoint. We're not able to say, all right, Fred's got it, but we have vaccines for

everyone else, so no one else is going to get it. This is more or less, if you can test the entire population, it allows you to determine who needs to be quarantined sooner. So you can stop the spread as much as possible, kind of limit that curve from going up again. It also allows you to see who actually has been impacted by this. There's reports that people have been infected with coronavirus as early as December and January in Europe and in the United States. So that to me is an incredibly interesting topic of we don't actually know when this specifically hit the US. We don't know specifically how many people have actually been impacted. There's a lot of people that are asymptomatic who don't have symptoms at all.

There's a lot of people who do get sick and there's a decent, there's a chunk of people who get very, very seriously ill. So the mass testing would allow us to understand just how big this is, how many people have actually had this, and allow us to potentially look at reopening. I think at a certain point, kind of like what's happening now, is it the best decision to reopen? I'll leave that up to you all.

Personally, I think it's definitely economically motivated in the sense that organizations are really struggling. Businesses are dying because of this. And people would rather be able to expose themselves to the potential risk of coronavirus to be able to save their business. And you know what? I don't blame them. That would be tough. Times are very tough. People need to be making money. People need to have jobs. So I totally get it. I think the same thing goes for the NCAA. Not Iowa necessarily, but the NCAA is a greedy, greedy institution. And already they actually cut nearly $400 million from the wealth distribution that goes out to all the schools because of this pandemic happening. That's a huge cut on schools' budgets.

And we're going to see that if Iowa cannot play football games, that's going to be a huge cut on their potential budget for the next calendar year. So some of that stuff is going to be potentially motivating to these schools to try to get their product back on the field as quickly as possible. I think from a fan's perspective, obviously that's what I want to see. I'm not super encouraged about the opportunity that's going to happen right away. But as we saw with the UFC fight, just any freaking sport at this point is good for fans. Fans just want to have something to watch, something to get their minds off of things,

to take their minds off of what's happening in the world today. And sports are a great outlet almost all the time, especially though, during a pandemic, if we could see, you know, college football happening, I think that'd be a huge morale booster for everyone out there. But again, it kind of depends on what happens over the next, you know, 60 to 120 days. How great is the mass testing? Again, I don't foresee, I don't foresee schools playing in empty stadiums. I think that would actually be kind of tough. Like Gary Barger said, if you can go to campus, you can probably figure out a way to at least have a semi-packed stadium.

I think there's definitely going to be some new rules in place for how many fans you can pack in a stadium, kind of what the protocols are. It's going to be interesting to see how Iowa handles that and how other schools do handle that as well. I know airlines, for example, are cutting out the middle seats. So people can have a little bit more distance between one another. So that definitely could impact obviously the ability to get the product back in the field, but also the financials that

could go into that. I know Iowa has also reached out to season ticket holders, talk a little bit about the financials behind if, you know, if a season were to be canceled, if a season were to be changed a little bit. So it sounds like they're doing as much as they can right now, trying to do their due diligence to understand exactly what could happen, what would happen, and how to prepare for that. That way they're not caught off guard. And obviously once those things are decided, once those things come out, we're going to be covering all that right here on the Locked on Hawkeyes podcast.

I personally do hope there is football. I'm excited for the college football season. I think Iowa has a great opportunity ahead of them, a difficult schedule, but a great team. Iowa basketball team has a fantastic opportunity, and so does the wrestling team as well. So lots of really great opportunities here. The women's basketball team too. Just man, Iowa sports right now is really hitting its stride, and it's unfortunate that

it could be impacted by this right now. But enough of the coronavirus talk. I'm sure you get enough of that on your day-to-day life. Just wanted to let you kind of into my insight about how this could impact sports going forward and kind of what Gary Barta said and how that impacts my thoughts of what could actually happen going forward. So thank you all for tuning in to today's episode of the Locked on Hawkeyes podcast. As always, I really appreciate you all tuning in.

If you did like today's episode or like our other episodes Hawkeyes podcast. As always, I really appreciate you all tuning in. If you did like today's episode or like our other episodes that we had, make sure to give us that five-star review and hit that subscribe button so you can continue to download these podcasts almost daily. We have a podcast Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Occasionally, I might skip a Thursday

depending on kind of what content is out there for the show and depending on what's happening in the Iowa Hawkeye world. But you definitely get an episode every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. And our Tuesday episodes are our TBT interviews, our TBT Tuesdays, where we are interviewing a member of the Iowa United each week. Last week was Nicholas Bayer. The week before that was Deontay Garrett.

And this upcoming week, we have Mike Dahm tomorrow, former three-time Summit League player of the year, currently playing pro basketball overseas. Fantastic interview. I think you're going to absolutely enjoy that, so make sure to tune into that episode as well. I hope you all had a safe weekend, a very fun and safe weekend if the weather was decent wherever you were at.

And again, thank you all for tuning in. Have a fantastic Monday, Hawkeye Nation. And go Hawks.