Iowa Hawkeyes place-kicker Drew Stevens (18) kicks off during a game between the Northwestern Wildcats and the Iowa Hawkeyes at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023. The Hawkeyes defeated the Wildcats 10-7. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)
IOWA CITY — Dan Orner has worked with a lot of kickers. Ten currently in the NFL and another 60 at Power Five college football programs, to be exact.
Many have “made excuses and pointed fingers” when things have not gone well. But when Iowa’s Drew Stevens experienced an adverse end to the 2023 season, that was not the case.
“He’s taken full accountability for everything,” said Orner, who has worked with Stevens as his private kicking coach for more than five years. “And he’s been really honest with, ‘Well, I need to be better here,’ versus kind of looking for excuses.”
It’s one of the many signs of Stevens’ mental growth as he prepares for his third season as a Hawkeye in 2024.
“What we’re seeing right now is a much more mature version of Drew,” Iowa special teams coordinator LeVar Woods said in April. “As it stands today, a much more humbled version of Drew. … He’s a different kid right now.“
That maturity is evident in “the way he thinks, the way he talks, the way he approaches his business,” Woods said.
That mental growth was partly out of necessity after Stevens, as Woods aptly described it, “got humbled very hard last year.”
Stevens had four consecutive games with at least one missed field goal and was 5-of-10 in the month of November as a whole.
It reached a low point when he went 1-of-3 against Nebraska. His two misses — one from 24 yards and one from 30 yards — were blocked. He also had two kickoffs that landed out of bounds before getting benched in favor of walk-on Marshall Meeder.
All signs pointed toward Stevens resuming first-team kicking duties in the postseason, but Iowa’s anemic offense did not give Stevens any opportunities for redemption in the Hawkeyes’ 26-0 loss to No. 2 Michigan and 35-0 loss to No. 21 Tennessee.
“I learned that you can’t get too down on yourself,” Stevens said. “Things are going to happen, and you got to bounce back.”
Orner is quick to give credit to Woods for his role in helping Stevens grow, noting that it is “really a rarity to have someone that creates structure and accountability around their kickers like LeVar has.”
“LeVar has really held him accountable for the NFL-caliber kicker that he is,” Orner said. “That is one of the best things about LeVar is that he realizes Drew’s potential, he realizes the success he’s had and he’s really held Drew accountable for what he’s capable of both on and off the field.”
But Woods is not the only one in the specialists’ room that has made a difference. As time passes, Stevens has a growing appreciation for what All-American punter Tory Taylor did to help.
“He was always that guy who made sure my mental state was in the right place,” Stevens said of Taylor, who now is in the NFL. “He never said anything detrimental.”
Taylor also went out of his way to defend Stevens when others did not take such a positive approach. It was especially apparent during the Nebraska game when Brian Ferentz was visibly angry with Stevens after one of the blocked field goals.
“A few people had a few choice words to say for Drew,” Taylor said a few days after the Nebraska game. “And I just kind of fired back and just said, ‘That’s not the way you treat someone. He’s not going out there and missing kicks on purpose.’ … My biggest thing was just trying to be there for Drew.”
Stevens’ second-year adversity followed fantastic first-year results.
He was 16-of-18 on field goal attempts as a freshman, with both misses coming from 40-plus yards out. His 54-yard field goal against Northwestern was the longest by a Hawkeye since 2015 (when Marshall Koehn made a 57-yarder).
“He had wild success right away,” Woods said. “I think that can fool a person very quickly. You see in pro sports all the time, a rookie comes in, sets the world on fire, and then all of a sudden the sophomore is not quite the same or their second season not the same.”
Stevens’ sophomore season had another strong start, leading to Lou Groza Award semifinalist recognition for the second consecutive year before things unraveled in November.
“As I mature and get older, I can say I hate having those little valleys and gullies, but I feel like they helped me out in the long run,” Stevens said.
Now as Stevens looks ahead to his third season of college football, Woods pointed to “getting better consistent ball contact” as an area of focus.
“The strength is there,” Woods said. “Again, looking at it like golf, he can smoke the ball. But you watch some of these guys that get in those long drive competitions, sometimes it’s straight, sometimes it’s left, sometimes it’s right, but they’re smoking the ball. Now we’re trying to get a guy to play in the fairway more consistently all the time.”
With that goal in mind, Orner and Stevens are “trying to really quiet his shoulders and his arms as he approaches the ball.” Doing so will “eliminate some variables,” Orner said.
“The other thing is working on his tempo to the ball,” Orner said. “Drew has been blessed with an absolute cannon of a leg, and it’s definitely a slippery slope sometimes when you get after it too much.”
One of Orner’s other clients, Joshua Karty, was a sixth-round pick in this year’s NFL Draft. The Charlotte-based kicking coach is confident Stevens is not far away
“That’s why we’re holding him to such a high standard,” Orner said. “We undoubtedly believe that he’s a draftable kicker.”
Stevens’ potential path to the NFL circles back to accuracy, though. The three kickers to be drafted — Alabama’s Will Reichard, the aforementioned Karty from Stanford and Arkansas’ Cam Little — all made 83 percent or more of their field goals in their final collegiate seasons.
“There were multiple guys at the combine this year that had massive legs, but really the only guys that got drafted were the guys that had the body of work. … The guys that were 60, 70 percent kickers were the guys that were undrafted free agents.”
As Stevens works to get back to the 80-90 percent range (like where he was in 2022) after hitting 69 percent of his field goals in 2023, there is plenty of optimism around him.
“It’ll be fun to watch with him because, again, he’s talented, he’s capable and the culture within the room I think is going to push him forward,” Woods said.
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2024-05-09 10:30:00
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