How A Family’s Leap Of Faith Helped Lead Hank Brown To Iowa

Tucked high in the upper rungs of Michigan Stadium, Eric Brown clasped his hands near his mouth, almost as if to warm them on a cool fall afternoon. His wife, Lesley, stood to his right with the same pose – equally nervous, hands held equally tight, heart palpitations running equally high. The Browns are deeply religious people. Sundays are spent at All Christ Church Nashville before plopping on the couch to watch NFL games or bouncing between any of their five children’s athletic events. They believe firmly in Christ. God has a path for all, they might tell you. Consider their prayers answered. As Hank Brown’s eyes slid from center to left and the shotgun snap hit his hands, Eric and Lesley’s son cocked back the arm that was once deemed not good enough to carry Auburn back to relevancy and rifled a pass to the front left pylon of the end zone below his parents. Toe-tapping with the grace of Baryshnikov, wide receiver Reece Vander Zee perfectly matched his massive mitts to the back-shoulder throw, held on through contact from a Michigan defender and secured the grab through the ground. Iowa 20, Michigan 19. “I just ran as fast as I could to the end zone to celebrate with him,” Hank Brown told me. “I guess at the time, I didn’t really. I mean, I knew the game was over, but people from the sidelines started running and just tackling us. It was just a crazy, crazy experience.” You know the jokes by now. That Iowa football’s best offense might actually be its punter. That the Hawkeyes’ defense might often outscore those charged with, well, scoring points. That, in a college football world of wide-open schemes and downfield passing, head coach Kirk Ferentz might prefer the anti-passing approach of pre-World War II legends like Knute Rockne and Pop Warner. That was before Brown. Iowa marches into Saturday’s home date with No. 5 Ohio State at 4-0 for the first time since 2021. Their quarterback — a one-time SEC castoff and COVID recruit who won a quarterback competition this preseason — is completing nearly 70% of his passes and adds an element the Iowa offense has definitively lacked for the better part of a decade. Of course, this wasn’t always the plan. “He kind of became Hugh [Freeze’s] fall guy to a certain degree,” Brown’s high school coach and Super Bowl champion quarterback Trent Dilfer told me. “I love Hugh. Hugh’s a friend, but I thought that he got a raw deal there. “He very easily could have been the starting quarterback at Auburn doing this, too.” ‘They Know His Name’ There’s an angst all mothers know. It starts in kindergarten, dropping backpacks into a locker in a room surrounded by unicorns and rainbows. It perpetuates into middle school, where pre-pubescence and hormones bring out the worst in us. It prolongs into high school, where cliques run rampant and maturity is marked by one’s ability to avoid trouble and make grades. Is my kid going to make any friends? These scattered thoughts percolated in Lesley Brown’s mind as she sat in the bleachers for Lipscomb Academy’s final scrimmage in the fall of 2020. “As a mom, you’re like, ‘Did we make the right decision moving five kids down here?’” Lesley told me. Hank grew up in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Illinois, the same town where Lesley and Eric met years earlier as high school classmates; where Eric was Wheaton College men’s soccer’s all-time leading goalscorer; where Hank — a scrawny late-bloomer and the second-eldest of four boys and a daughter — learned the game. But as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the country and high school football in Illinois was canceled, Hank was suddenly without a team. Parents and students at Wheaton Warrenville South filed a class-action lawsuit against the Illinois High School Association over the cancellation of fall sports. Those involved even gathered outside the Chicago home of Gov. JB Pritzker to voice concerns that their children would lose scholarship opportunities and that their mental health would be affected. Eric proposed a more dramatic solution: What if the family moved to Tennessee? “We left a town where Les and I both were raised. We lived there. We went to college there. We were raising our kids there. We kind of always kid around like we knew everyone and everything,” he said. “So we moved to this town, Nashville, where we knew no one and nothing.” As the Browns ruminated on the move and looked into schools for their kids, an old college soccer teammate who lived in the area called up Eric and asked if he’d considered Lipscomb Academy. He’d heard of it but didn’t know details — not least that Dilfer had been named its head football coach. Eric and Dilfer connected in the days that followed. A short conversation turned into an hour, and an hour turned into two. Eric loved what he heard. Dilfer loved the idea of a talented signal-caller joining his ranks. The only problem? Lipscomb had an entrenched starter, and Hank would have to play JV football his junior year. “I would have never thought Hank Brown would be the starting quarterback at the University of Iowa when I first met him as a fifth grader,” quipped Greg Holcomb, Brown’s longtime private trainer. “He’d throw a football and be like, ‘Oh yeah, he’ll be all right.’ He’s really done a great job just putting himself around the right people.” “As a quarterback, you want to play young, and you want to play early,” Brown told me. “But, at the same time, you don’t want to play before you’re ready. I was a late-bloomer. I didn’t fully develop even really until I got to college, and he knew that I’d be ready by my senior year to be able to go out there and execute.” Brown was never supposed to have a starring role in Lipscomb’s final scrimmage of the fall. But the program’s starting quarterback picked up an illness before kickoff that shelved him. As did a classmate also battling for the backup quarterback job. That led to Brown. With the poise and precision he’s since flashed in Iowa City, he tossed three touchdowns and nearly 300 yards on the night against a solid Father Ryan squad. The student section — still not all too familiar with the new kid from the Chicago suburbs — started chanting his name. A mother’s fears were swiftly swept away. “I’m just crying,” Lesley conceded. “Not because he played well, [but] because I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, they know him. They know his name.’” ‘The Guy You Want In The Locker Room’ Hank’s junior year on the JV team at Lipscomb Academy didn’t dissuade recruiters. By spring, he’d cemented himself as the starter for the coming fall, and those coaches who flocked to the school to see his high-profile teammates were suddenly interested in the talented signal-caller by way of Chicago who’d yet to take a truly meaningful snap in Nashville. A six-inch growth spurt helped the equation. As did Dilfer’s tutelage. A three-star recruit, Brown owned around a dozen offers by season’s end. He settled on Liberty and Freeze, drawn in by the coach’s previous work with quarterbacks and the program’s emphasis on faith. That is until Freeze was hired by Auburn in late November. “I took the Auburn job just a few weeks away from signing day, and was debating what to do in the quarterback room — which was not in good shape when I took the job here,” Freeze told me. “Not that you’re depending upon a high school freshman to come in and be the savior, but looking at the options … we all had this sneaking suspicion, whether or not Hank Brown ends up being the guy at Auburn, he is the guy you want in the locker room.” Brown eventually followed Freeze to Auburn, where he was thrust into that aforementioned unsettled quarterback situation. The program hadn’t totally bottomed out under previous head coach Gus Malzahn, but cracks had begun to form. Freeze, a quarterback whisperer since his days at Ole Miss, had a fixation on finding a dynamic signal-caller to run the offense that had given Nick Saban fits before Freeze was thrust out of the SEC under the cloud of scandal. Brown had his moments at Auburn. He completed 7-of-9 passes for 132 yards in the Tigers’ 2023 Music City Bowl appearance. But after a 2024 campaign in which starter Payton Thorne was largely ineffective and Brown was granted limited opportunities, Freeze and his staff decided to dip into the portal for a quarterback ahead of the 2025 season. “I tried like heck,” Freeze said. “I did not want to lose him.” How that was communicated depends on who you ask. Freeze says he made it clear he intended to keep Brown, even if the program brought in another quarterback to compete for the starting job. Eric said he felt there were mixed signals sent between what Freeze said and what Auburn’s general manager shared. The Tigers eventually signed former five-star Oklahoma signee Jackson Arnold as the heir apparent to inherit the starting job from the departed Thorne. By that time, Brown had already called Freeze to tell him he’d decided to enter the transfer portal and seek a starting chance elsewhere. “I’m super close with those coaches at Auburn — even still talk to some of them — but, at the end of the day, it’s part of the sport, especially the past few years, how much it’s changed,” Brown said. “It was a hard conversation, but they understood to an extent what the situation was, but we were also obviously bummed.” Iowa offensive coordinator Tim Lester and Eric Brown hadn’t spoken in 15 or 20 years. That’s life for high school acquaintances. Lester attended Wheaton Warrenville South in the mid-1990s with Brown’s parents, while he credits Hank’s uncle, Jeff — a prolific college quarterback in his own right at Wheaton College — as the reason he wanted to play the position himself. Lester kept enough tabs in his hometown to know about Eric’s son; enough to give Eric a shout when Hank entered the transfer portal; enough that he had already watched Hank’s film out of curiosity. “The first time we talked, I don’t know if we talked about Hank for like a half-hour into the conversation,” Lester joked. The former Western Michigan head coach was also clued into those in Brown’s Auburn orbit. Thorne’s grandfather coached Lester in high school, while his father, Jeff, served as Lester’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2022. That comfort prompted a swift recruiting process. Brown took in a basketball game in Iowa City on his lone visit after entering the portal. He was committed to the Hawkeyes within five days in December 2024. “Knowing the family and knowing the town that we come from, being a part of this type of culture, I felt strongly [about Brown],” Lester told me. “But they had to feel strongly about wanting to be a part of it.” ‘Nobody Is Surprised’ There’s a blurriness to the immediate aftermath of last week’s win over Michigan. Brown said he raced around the field celebrating with teammates. Eric and Lesley, leaping into the heavens, hugged any willing stranger donning Hawkeyes gear around them in the furthest corners of Michigan Stadium. Back home, youngest brother, Brooks — a prolific 2028 quarterback recruit in his own right — and his high school buddies celebrated in the living room, racing around shirtless, screaming at the top of his lungs. A friend donning a No. 9 Hawkeyes jersey flashed it for the cell phone camera. “Hank Brown is the greatest quarterback!!” they boisterously proclaimed. Dilfer thought back to two signs that hang in his office at Lipscomb Academy that read: “The edge of uncomfortable is where you find greatness,” and “Do hard things because they equal great things.” Brown spent hours in that room during high school. On Sundays after church, he’d whip over to school to comb through the offense with Dilfer and pick his brain on quarterbacking. “This is nothing new,” Dilfer said. “Nobody who knows Hank is surprised. Not one human. Not one teammate. Not his parents. Not his friends. Not his mentors. Nobody is surprised.” That’s paying off in spades for Iowa — where Brown was only officially named the starter over Wake Forest import Jeremy Hecklinski ahead of the Michigan game. Lester said Brown has been more confident in his arm talent in recent months. A few minor tweaks around footwork and throwing motion during bowl practices last fall did wonders. “The only way to get better is to go through hard s—,” Lester said. “That’s the only way. There’s no easy path to being good at anything. He’s (Hank) been through hard.” Even on The Plains last week, they celebrated. Lesley received texts from parents they’d come to know during Hank’s time at Auburn after Iowa’s upset win. In the waning moments before the Tigers kicked off against Vanderbilt that afternoon, Brown’s final pass at Michigan played on the big screen. The whole stadium cheered.