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Former offensive lineman to
be recognized at Iowa-Penn State game Saturday
Oct. 7, 2021 6:00 am, Updated: Oct. 7, 2021 6:01 pm
IOWA CITY — When Iowa football head coach
Kirk Ferentz looked out the window of his office Tuesday, he saw a familiar
sight: Marshal Yanda’s truck “Old Blue.”
Yanda, a former Hawkeye lineman, has been spending a lot more of
the fall months in Eastern Iowa the last two years after retiring from the NFL
at the end of the 2019 season.
Yanda, who grew up in Anamosa and spent 13 seasons with the
Baltimore Ravens, “for sure” misses playing in the NFL. He still is getting
used to not thinking about which defensive linemen he’ll be going up against in
the following season.
“I miss the competitiveness in the air,” Yanda said. “You can’t
get that anywhere else.”
He knew it was time to retire, though, after having back-to-back
healthy seasons in 2018 and 2019.
“I was due to get hurt if I played one more year,” Yanda said. “I
never made it more than three years without having a major injury in the NFL.”
In 2020, he spent his Sundays in front of thousands of acres of
farmland instead of thousands of shouting fans.
“I’ve helped my dad harvest the crops,” Yanda said. “Which was
great spending time with my dad and being on the farm.”
Yanda wasn’t exactly a stranger to Iowa during his professional
career, spending offseasons working out in Iowa City with Ferentz’s teams.
More than a decade since
first seeing “Old Blue” in Iowa City, Ferentz still gets emotional thinking
about his former offensive lineman.
As he talked about current
Hawkeye Zach VanValkenburg, he
got teary-eyed looking back at Yanda and his work ethic.
“Good football player,
yeah, but there's a reason the Ravens basically made him their franchise
player,” Ferentz said. “They weren't going to let him leave that building
because they understood what he did to the locker room. There's so much value
in that, besides running 40-yard dashes, all that other stuff.”
Iowa will recognize Yanda
as the newest member of the America Needs Farmers Wall of Honor at Saturday’s
game against No. 4 Penn State.
“For Marshal to be honored
this weekend is really special, so deserving,” Ferentz said. “What
a great list of awardees on that wall, too.”
The award goes to a former Iowa player who showed the “tenacity, work ethic and character” of
a farmer.
“People always talked about how I had that farm strength, that
natural strength, that core strength,” Yanda said. “That definitely came from
the farm.”
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