Iowa GM Tyler Barnes breaks down Signing Day Class of '26

While his job title and responsibilities have changed in the last year, Tyler Barnes is still deeply involved in every aspect of Iowa’s recruiting efforts in the Class of 2026. The Iowa general manager spoke with the media on Wednesday to break down the various players that have signed with Iowa and how they landed with the Hawkeyes.

TYLER BARNES: I appreciate everybody coming out today. It’s kind of crazy to think this is the 10th time I’ve been back, the 10th time I’ve sat up here in front of you guys and talked about our class.

A lot of it’s probably going to sound redundant and the same. That’s good. That’s how we like it. We like uneventful signing days. I was not on the phone until 3 a.m. this year like I was last year with one of our guys. Glad I was. Glad he’s here.

As coach mentioned, we brought in 22 guys today and as coach alluded to a little bit, it takes a village when we’re building a recruiting class. It’s two and a half, three years in the making.

When you get guys on campus, it’s not just our coaching staff, our recruiting staff that’s back here. We use our academic staff. We’re with admin working with him. It’s people all across the building and the community when we’re taking them around, so it really just isn’t — I know you get to hear from me and talk to me. I do have an idea next year, we’ve two of our recruiting staff members back here, Delayna Cotton and Rhett Smeins. Spaulding snuck out.

I want to do a panel, right, do like Coach, and I address everything for a little bit and then I’ll let you guys ask them all the questions. I’ll see if Matt will let us do that.

But in all seriousness, it does take a village, and I think my first full year where in a high school recruiting class I haven’t been hands-on in everything day-to-day. I’ve got an awesome, awesome recruiting staff, and Scott Southmayd, who’s back in his office, they handled so much more of it this year than has ever happened, and that’s mainly — my role has changed. There’s a lot of different things that I’ve taken on in this general manager role, which I love, without a doubt, but when it comes to some of the day-to-day granular stuff, that’s going to fall on Rhett, Delayna and Matt and Southy. But I do love it.

As Coach said, the new era of rev share and NIL and agents has been exhausting, but it’s fun. You still have to create those relationships, and ultimately that’s how you’re going to end up filling out your class.

Before it was just agents with portal guys. Now it’s agents with high school kids, and it’s a transactional world. There’s no doubt about it.

We still have — while we’ve adapted and adjusted in how we want to build this class, there’s still our core values that just aren’t going to move.

Money is definitely a part of it. At some point you’re going to have to have that conversation even with the high school kids and their parents. This is the first year where I think parents truly are knowledgeable about how this all works.

So it is part of it, but when we find a guy we want to offer and we feel good about him and his second question is, When can I talk to the GM, he wants to talk to me for one reason. It’s not to develop a relationship; he wants to know what the package is going to be.

It’s kind of made it easier to move away from guys, too. You can sift through who you really want to go after and who you want to get.

With that said, you know, the 22 guys we have coming in, we feel great about those guys. It’s another Midwest-heavy class, if you will. It typically always is going to be here. As Coach mentioned, a lot of multi-sport athletes. But when it comes down to character, what their household looks like, it’s a lot of the same of what we’ve had here in the past.

When you have 27 years of experience and 27 years of proof that this works, we’re going to keep doing it that way. I’d love to open it up for questions for you guys and kind of go from there.

Q. I’m curious what it’s like building synergy with Tim in terms of what he’s looking for in a quarterback, what you guys are finding and who you’re reaching out to. What did you find in the quarterback you signed today, and where you guys stand in terms of the quarterback room? Do you want to add to that through the portal, through possibly a late signing?

TYLER BARNES: Yeah, the first thing you knew with Tim is time. Like a lot of meeting time because Tim is going to talk a lot, which is one of his biggest strengths, and I’m not joking. I think he was with Tradon four and a half hours watching film in the offices. That’s why guys love Tim, because his passion, his energy. If you can’t notice it and feel it, we’re definitely on the wrong guy.

But we had a young man that was committed to us for a little bit over a year who de-committed in the summer, and we had some guys on the board we felt good about. Tim probably didn’t want to hear at the time, but my biggest thing was let’s be patient, let’s go into the season and let’s see some senior film on guys. There’s going to be guys that rise. There’s going to be guys that are at schools where maybe the season is not going well and there could be some coaching changes.

I’m glad we did. We watched six to eight guys we kind of honed in on that we really presented to Tim. I probably had Tradon as my top guy. He’s a bigger kid, 6’4″, 210 right now, really live arm, whippy arm, can really throw it. His stats, if you go back the last three years, are pretty gaudy. It’s kind of incredible.

Didn’t get a chance to meet the kid and talk to him, and that was a tough one, because Boise State at the time, they had their hooks into him pretty good, and we haven’t really recruited Utah. That was the last guy we actually went out to visit in Utah was Zach Wilson, another quarterback.

But the biggest thing was trying to build that relationship, and then once we got him here, just as Coach says, once we can get a kid here, especially a quarterback or an offensive player and you put him in front of Tim, you feel pretty good about your chances. The same can be said for Mark. When we got Mark here last year in the winter, I knew about two hours into that meeting with Tim, okay, we’re in a good spot, we’re going to get this done.

In terms of the quarterback room, right now we feel good with where it’s at. We’d love to get Tradon here early. He’s going to stay and play basketball this winter. I’m going to continue to poke him a little bit. I know Coach says we don’t push guys to come early. I’m going to keep trying to push that one and we’ll see what happens.

Unless there’s some type of movement in our room, we feel good about where we’re at and we plan to roll with the guys we’ve got in there.

Q. Got a nice cornerback out of Omaha. I know his brother plays for Nebraska. What are you getting in Darion? His senior film just has playmaker written all over that one. And when did you start honing in on him?

TYLER BARNES: I can’t wait for you guys to interview Darion because he’s going to definitely be one of the best interviews in the class. If anybody has already talked to him, energy is through the roof, and he’s just a great kid. Coach Woods has known that family for a long time, going back to Northwest Iowa, so we always knew about Darion, and thank God he’s a die-hard Hawkeye fan because I’m not sure we’re going to be able to sign Darion if he isn’t because you can see his senior film, this kid is pretty talented. He can run. He’s long. He’s a really smart kid. Again, the passion and energy he has is unmatched with anybody in this class. There’s no doubt about it.

But we’re excited to get him here. He’ll be one of the 14 guys that are here in January. I think last year when we played Nebraska here, I’m pretty sure, I could be wrong, you can fact check it with Darion, I’m pretty sure he sat in the Nebraska family section, because his brother is on the team, wearing Iowa stuff. That’s how much of an Iowa fan he is. I wouldn’t recommend that, but that’s who Darion is.

You’re not shocked because when you meet his brothers, his dad, his mom, you’re not shocked at what type of kid he is. Really excited about him. I know Phil is excited about him. It’ll be good to get him here and rolling in January.

Q. Curious with the offensive line, you’ve brought in the five of them, I believe they were all committed pretty early, but how did that process go in getting them? Did you expect to bring in that big of a class at offensive line, or did it just kind of happen?

TYLER BARNES: Yeah, we knew we were going to take four with the possibility of a fifth, but once we got them here, we felt good about the group.

Coach Barnett is unbelievable in the process. He is very targeted in his approach. He knows exactly who he wants. It’s taken a few years, obviously, for him to get that room where he wants it to be, and the last two years it’s been pretty danged good now.

George knows what he wants, and he’s going to go after it. There’s no fluff and no frills with George. He’s very straightforward and very honest.

The group as a whole, they’re a good group. I was telling Chad earlier, it’s funny, Gennings Dunker is our best recruiter in the building. There’s no doubt. I wish I could hire him right now. But anytime somebody is on campus, if at some point they’re with Dunk and he’s got a whole audience back there, Dunk just being Dunk. We had five different hosts for the five guys in June for their visit, and somehow both nights I think all five kids ended up with Dunk by himself somehow.

But he tells me every day, “I wish I had one more year to be around this O-line group.” You guys are going to have your hands full, but they’re a lot of fun, and man, they’re going to be good. And he’s correct.

These five, completely different personalities. But seeing how close that group has gotten just throughout the fall is pretty impressive. You have Colin Whitters who’s in town, you have Owen Linder who would come over by himself every once in a while for games. Same with Gene Riordan, and they’d go stay at Colin’s house after the games.

Those guys, you see groups get tight before signing day and before they get here, but this group is unlike any group I’ve seen. Like they are super, super tight. And you love the group.

You have size, you’ve got length in that entire group. Obviously, Carson was the first guy that committed to us in the spring of ’24. He’s the first guy that got it kicked off, that got it rolling, and he could go anywhere in the country if he wanted to.

But you love the versatility you’ve got in there, and it’s going to be fun to get those guys here, too. Just a fun group, and I’ll keep Dunk updated on how they’re doing for sure.

Q. I wanted to ask you about linebackers. Certainly the importance is there, but when you’re going with a cash secondary that you’re playing two at a time and you’ve now got, I think, 10 scholarship guys plus a walk-on who’s been playing a lot in Nolan DeLong, what’s the idea behind taking three this year? He’s had eight in the last three years and all of them are high-level guys. What’s the thought process behind taking those, and does that apply to special teams and other areas?

TYLER BARNES: For sure, it’s a good question, and actually by our budget, we’re still down a body in that room. I don’t think we’ll get there to fill it. I think we’ll roll with what we’ve got.

But a big part of it is special teams, and Coach Wallace will be the first to tell you, he walks around the building reminding everybody because when we have this budget set, everybody needs one more spot, right, and people are always like, well, take it from the linebackers, and Coach Wallace will be the first to walk around with our stats and how many reps everybody has played in games and show, hey, these guys are all playing the majority of special teams.

It got to the point this year, we kind of always budgeted to take three. That was always the plan. Lucky for us, we hit it on our first three, which typically doesn’t happen very often, and three guys you feel really good about, three guys that are pretty different in terms of who they are and their play style, and three guys that, in an ideal, we’d love to redshirt everybody. You guys know that. It would be great to redshirt the whole class. Kind of just depends on injury history and what happens there.

But for us, the special teams component is the biggest portion of it. Then, too, it’s a physical position. You’ve seen the last couple of games we had some issues in the secondary and we’re more base defense, and the more you can get guys that are versatile and that can do a little bit of everything, the better off you’re going to feel.

I think all three guys are going to stick at the linebacker spot. I’d be surprised if they moved. But again, three very different personalities, too.

You have Julian, who is a freak. He’s a freak show. He’s a big kid who’s had a great last two years at West High but kind of quiet demeanor, kind of quiet in nature. Then you have Kasen, who has way more personality than you think and probably looks like your prototype Big Ten linebacker, and then you’ve got Billy, who might be the second best interview behind Darion Jones, who’s a wildcard but such a good kid, and he looks like what we’ve brought in here in the past, the Christian Kirkseys, that they’re going to need a year to develop but you love the length. You love the way he plays, flies around, but he’s going to need the weight room a little bit.

But three guys we’re excited about, and I know Seth feels really good about them, and then guys it was well documented were trying to be poached by different schools around the country. Those guys had their pick of the litter, too, and all three guys stayed committed and stayed loyal to us. So it’s a good thing, obviously.

Q. You mentioned being a lot more businesslike with the recruiting nowadays. What do you look for in a kid, especially with this being more of a developmental program, that you can tell that kid is going to stick around for one, two, three, four years even though he might not play right off the start? How do you tell and project that far in advance that the kid is not going to go transfer out if he’s not playing for a few years?

TYLER BARNES: I don’t think you ever know for certain, especially in this day and age. It still comes down to, we’re going to talk to everybody we can in the school. We still rely on high school head coaches. A lot of places don’t. They’re going to say who’s your agent, I’ll talk to your agent, and you work through recruiting there. That is part of the process, but that’s way down the road for us.

Then you have to get them on campus. You’ve got to get a feel for who they are, what their family is like, the dynamic there. Again, the multi-sport thing is huge.

Chad just mentioned we have eight four-stars. I didn’t even know that. Again, we don’t recruit off of rankings and stars and all that, and that’s great. I’m glad we can celebrate it. I don’t get any type of raise or neither does our recruiting staff for that.

But you have to dig into who the kid is, and at some point you’re going to figure out if their values match ours. Now more than ever, you can figure out real quick if their values don’t match ours. If the money and the numbers are the most important thing, that’s not who we are.

We have a bunch of guys on this roster that if they wanted to hit the portal, they’re going to get paid a ton. Same with our staff members. There’s not a single person back there in the hallway that hasn’t been offered a job with more money or more prestige somewhere, but there’s a reason we all continue to stay here and don’t leave, and that’s true with our players, too.

A big part of it, too, is when we get guys here getting them around our players and letting our players feel it out, too, like hey, what did you think of this kid. Do you think he’s going to fit. Do you think he’s a guy you want inside your locker room every day. We take their feedback just as much as anybody else.

It’s continuing to be diligent, and call us old school, call us slow that we don’t offer too many people or are as quick as other schools, but for us, it’s a recipe and a formula that’s worked for us, and we’re obviously going to continue to stick with it as much as possible.

That’s the same in the portal, too. The portal has just expedited. It’s speed dating on steroids where you’ve got to do all that while you’re trying to figure out who it is, get your hooks into a kid. But you have to do it at a faster clip.

Q. I wanted to ask you about Julian Manson. He could easily play tight end for you guys —

TYLER BARNES: He could play a few spots for sure.

Q. A few spots, yes. How do you go about that process of figuring out your best is here or your best future is on the other side of the ball?

TYLER BARNES: One of my favorite camps I’ve ever been a part of, so Julian (Juju) came here going into his, I want to say, sophomore year. Had never played linebacker in his life, had never really gotten to a point where he had to be physical and strike somebody. Jason brings him in and is like, hey, let’s get him a helmet and we’re going to make him play linebacker.

I just remember laughing because when you meet Juju, especially young Juju, you don’t see that ferociousness or that violence that you see on film right now, and we stuck him in one-on-ones and we get to the end of camp and we’re pretty physical here. Part of our camp is can you match our physicality and can you be okay with it.

It shocked all of us when Juju was just striking guys, and we’re like, holy crap, like this kid has got a chance now. He still was a baby rain dear at that point, growing into his body. At that point that’s when Juju started playing defense and linebacker was the next year at West High.

Then you see his body grow, right; I promise you KB is probably just sitting there waiting, like come on, Juju, come on down, we’ll put your hand in the dirt. But until he proves he can’t do it, we’re not going to do that.

The same could be said for Jack Campbell. I’ve got it on record, his sophomore or junior year I thought Jack was going to be a D-end. I didn’t think he moved well enough. He hadn’t put it together running around on field, and then you saw his senior year, I was like, all right, this guy is a linebacker.

Trust me, there were conversations in the building about people wanting to move him to D-end, and I was like, Coach, this guy is like an All-American linebacker; what are we talking about. Thankfully we stuck him there.

You’ve just got to see how their bodies progress when they get here, and if he can’t do it at linebacker for some reason, I’m sure he’d be a heck of a D-end. But I know myself and I know Seth; we’re going to keep him at linebacker and see what he can do. It’s just part of the evolution. We’ll see what happens there.

Q. We saw one of your juniors walk on Senior Day. Do you have a sense of how many early entry departures you would have? I know you need to know the roster count, so how many portal openings would you say you would expect to have come January 2?

TYLER BARNES: In terms of early entrants, we’ll see. This is the time of year where they get a chance to sit down with their position coaches, Coach Ferentz, and if I need to get NFL feedback for them, I will reach out to 12, 13, 14 teams and just get an idea where they are grade-wise.

You never know until you really get the feedback. I know we have a couple underclassmen that could probably test the waters if they wanted to, and we’ve got no indication that they want to, so we think they’ll be back.

The portal, we have an idea what we want to do spots-wise, and you guys follow us closely enough that I think if I gave you guys 10 minutes as a group, you’d probably come up pretty close within perfect of what our needs are. But a big thing, too, is this is the time of year where all our starters, all the guys that have been played the last 12 games, they’re not going to do much the next 12 practices or so. They’ll be out there, but it’s more about getting the young guys rolling.

When you can see some of these young guys take steps, that’s going to alter maybe what we think we need. Chad, I mentioned to you earlier, even going into the Nebraska game, I think we had a couple spots earmarked at certain spots, and coming out of the Nebraska game, I was like, actually I think we’re going to be all right.

So you have to see young guys develop and guys take the next step. But we’ll see. You guys will be tracking it. You’ll see what’s going on with their offer-wise, and you’ll find out soon enough. Sorry, I can’t give away all the secrets.

Q. For you guys as a recruiting staff, how difficult is it to be able to put together a plan when again, you don’t know who’s going to end up entering the portal, whether guys you want to pursue, guys that end up leaving the team, what spots are going to be available, and with the new portal window that I wish they would just settle in because it seems like it just changes every single year. How do you approach making a game plan, sticking by it, and how quickly are you going to be able to adapt if a guy leaves unexpectedly or you get some traction with a guy that just ends up entering the portal? How are you as a staff collectively approaching this?

TYLER BARNES: Obviously it’s fluid no matter what it is, and that’s a big part of my job is going into every season I’ve got our scholarship chart and I’ve got a million different color codes for certain things, and there’s some that are flight risk on there, right. You hear from different guys on the team, you hear from people in the building, you can see their demeanor. It’s like, okay, this kid might not be here come January. So you’re building out your roster and your needs based on those. And you don’t want to lose anybody, but come this time of year, everybody talks in this building, and the players are great, but they’re horrible at keeping secrets.

At some point it’s going to get out and you’re going to have an idea, and then it’s just a matter of getting to this time of year where you have kind of those exit interview meetings.

The portal is different this year. One signing day is way too early. This is wild that it’s December 3rd and I’m talking to you guys about our high school class. But two, it’s unique because we have this whole month of December and the portal doesn’t open up for a month from today. There’s just a lot that could happen.

But you have to be fluid. That’s something I’m looking at every single week, and you’re talking to Phil and you’re talking to Tim and you’re talking to the position coaches, and you have to be open and honest with them, like hey, I think so-and-so, I’ve heard this, what kind of beat do you have on this kid who I think he might leave, and we talk about it throughout the year, and certainly after our last game we have a full staff discussion where we’re trying to plan for that.

For the most part, you have a good idea. There’s going to be a surprise or two every year. It just happens. But you’ve just got to be able to adapt and adjust quickly. There’s a couple of spots right now we don’t plan to take transfers at, but that could change in the next five to ten days because something could pop and we’re going to have to kind of rearrange our strategy, and that’s where Rhett does a great job helping my build our transfer board and kind of stacking that, and even spots we know we’re not going to take guys, you’ve still got some names on there just in case.

Q. I want to ask about Luke Brewer, someone highly recruited, reclassed. How did that recruitment unfold from your end?

TYLER BARNES: Yeah, it was an interesting one. I can’t remember if I was with Rhett or someone else, but during fall camp, I was like, Luke is an older kid for his grade. He’s already kind of done what he wants, and we weren’t going to take a tight end in this class. We were going to wait until ’27 because we had some guys we felt good about, including Luke, and I was like, maybe we should just call him and see if he wants to completely reclassify.

It was not more than two days later, he reached out to us. Somebody else had the same thought as us, a staff, and kind of got that rolling in his mind.

I think he took about two weeks to really fully make the decision on whether to reclassify, and I think we were probably in a good spot for Luke in the ’27 class. I think when he ultimately decided to reclassify, we were probably running third, maybe fourth in his recruitment. I’ll let you guys ask Luke. I don’t really know what to pinpoint that really pushed us ahead, but I know once we found that out, we were full steam ahead on Luke just trying to make sure he understood, we’re not recruiting anybody else in the ’26 class. We actually have no other ’26 tight end offers out. You’re the guy. We want you here.

Being a local kid, having a sister be here on the softball team I think certainly helps. He comes from an Iowa State family. He was kind of the oddball out. He was the one kid that was a Hawkeye fan for some reason, and glad he was.

But I think just getting him here, and obviously getting his teammate Eli Robbins will be here in January, committed, as well, and I think that kind of helped. Just getting him around Abdul, getting him around Tim and trying to get him here as much as possible, feel more and more comfortable.

If I told you that I thought we were leading for Luke three weeks before his commitment, I’d be lying to you. Like I’m pretty sure we were third at that point. I don’t know what switched it, but we’re glad we got him for sure. He’s a great kid, and he’s going to come in and do big things here.

He won’t be here until June since he’s reclassifying, but it’ll be good to get him here.

Q. I wanted to ask you about defensive line. You bring in two guys that are probably more developmental types, at least it’ll take a year or two before they can really have their full impact, but also you look and you say, you’re losing four starters plus a rotational guy. That seems to be one where you’re looking at, “okay, portal, what do you got to offer here.” How do you feel about the development of a couple of the classes that you’ve brought in, and is there a spot or two on that front that you feel like you need to supplement at worst or possibly grab starters from in there?

TYLER BARNES: I think realistically, I don’t think I’m giving up anything extravagant here, we’re probably going to look for one inside and one outside guy in the portal, realistically.

But we have a young class of guys that are redshirt freshmen right now you feel really good about. You have lose Epenesa which everybody knows about. While we may be younger next year on the D-line, there’s just guys you really like and guys that are promising.

Again, this next three weeks for those five guys, lose and those redshirt freshmen, are going to be huge. They’re either going to love KB or hate him because they’re going to get every rep in the world to see what they can do. They’ve had great falls and they’ve really pushed along their bodies physically to where they’re supposed to be at this point, but we see enough of them in fall camp that we felt good, hey, should we take two or three high school guys, we kind of had it slotted to take three, and we kind of went back and forth, back and forth.

But what we have in the room, again, it’s young and not a ton of experience, but there’s guys you really like in what we’ve seen. Obviously that’s going to be a position we’re going to look to hit the portal on for sure.

Again, I don’t know if it has to be an All-Star or a starter. We’ve just got to find the right guys.

KB likes to play an eight-man rotation as much as possible, so it’s going to be by committee just like it’s always been in that room.