Jeremy Hecklinski threw 50 touchdown passes as a high school senior. Coming into tonight, in three years of college football, he had thrown one. He grew up in Marietta, Georgia, and played at Walton High School. As a senior he went 201 of 309 for 3,835 yards and 50 touchdowns against six interceptions, and took Walton to the Georgia 7A state championship game. He was the Georgia player of the year. He played in the All-American Bowl, which is the big high school all star game. 247Sports rated him the 25th best quarterback in the country in his class. He signed with Wake Forest. Then he played three snaps. That was it. One game, against North Carolina, three snaps, and that was his freshman year. So he transferred to Iowa. Where he walked into a quarterback room that already had Mark Gronowski from South Dakota State and Hank Brown from Auburn. He was third. In 2025 he got into two games. He threw one pass at Wisconsin, for two yards. He threw one pass against Minnesota, for six yards, and ran one in for the first touchdown of his college career. That was the whole season. Two throws. This year he had been into three games in relief and thrown for 208 yards. His career high in a game was 76. Then Hank Brown got hurt. So tonight, on the road at Washington, in front of a crowd that had no particular reason to know his name, Jeremy Hecklinski made the first start of his college career. He went 14 of 19 for 202 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions. Iowa beat the Washington Huskies 41 to 18. He is 5 foot 11 and 201 pounds and he comes from quarterbacks. His father Randy played the position at Bowling Green. His uncle Jeff played it at Illinois and Western Illinois and then spent more than 20 years as a college assistant coach. Here is the part worth sitting with. At 18 he was the best high school quarterback in the state of Georgia, a state that produces them by the dozen. Then he went to college and for three years threw almost nothing at all. Two passes one season. A 76 yard afternoon was the biggest day he had ever had. He is 22 now. Tonight he threw for nearly as many yards as he had thrown for in his entire college career before it, and he threw three touchdown passes after throwing one in three years. One of them went to Reece Vander Zee, who caught both Iowa touchdowns to beat Michigan two weeks ago. Hank Brown will get healthy. None of this says Jeremy Hecklinski is the starter now. But he waited four years for one night, and when it came he did not miss.