ou won’t see any punters and kickers on the list of scholarship recruits that Iowa will sign next week, but with Ryan Donahue and Daniel Murray both being seniors next year, Kirk Ferentz and his staff are looking to the future.

Punter Jonny Mullings will come on board as a “grayshirt,’’ which means he won’t enroll in school until next January. And the Hawkeyes enticed place-kicker Mike Meyer to join them as a walk-on.

Both are pretty intriguing prospects.

Mullings is a 21-year-old former rugby player who grew up in England and now lives in Austra-lia. In between, he spent a year as a foreign exchange student in Ottumwa, where he wasn’t even eligible to play in varsity games but once launched an 85-yard punt in a JV game. He’s a big guy – 6-foot-4, 215 pounds – whose rugby style punts could really be effective in some of the windswept stadiums of the Big Ten.

Meyer, a senior at Dubuque Wahlert, also brings a tremendously strong leg. He kicked off 30 times last season and 28 of them went for touchbacks. He also was eight for nine on field goals with six of those coming from beyond 40 yards and one of them coming from 56 yards. He could actually have an immediate impact because neither Murray nor sophomore Trent Mossbrucker, who figures to eventually replace him as the Hawkeyes’ place-kicker, has an extremely strong leg. (Murray had just five touchbacks on 66 kickoffs last season and averaged 60.8 yards per kickoff.) It’s possible that Meyer could be used on kickoffs and long field goals next fall with Murray handling extra points and short-range field goals.

Tags: Daniel Murray, Iowa football, Jonny Mullings, Kirk Ferentz, Mike Meyer, Ryan Donahue, Trent Mossbrucker

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Hawkeyes Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.