Pads weighing down on his shoulders, his cleats rooted in the grass beneath him, Deontae Craig’s eyes peered over his broad facemask and locked onto the ball carrier before him. It was his first tackle football game, but he wasn’t afraid. He loved the art of tackling. And finally, his parents couldn’t get him in trouble for doing it around the house. Now it was allowed.

When Craig’s father, Deon, first told him he was taking him out to a football practice, Craig was reluctant. He didn’t want to play football. One Oklahoma drill later, he dropped down into the car and looked right to Deon.

“Dad, are we going back tomorrow?” he asked.

Family gatherings turned into backyard tackling games among the cousins, permitted by Craig’s parents until a cousin quit, injured and in tears — a frequent result. On the football field, though, there were no rules. No timeouts for crying cousins. He could tackle anyone as hard as he could.

Hit him. Pop up. Hit him again. Play after play. Just 7 years old, Craig didn’t quite understand what he was doing, but after each play, he rejoiced a little in hearing his name boom out from the loudspeakers.

“Deontae Craig with the tackle.” He must have been doing something right.

Craig had totaled 25 tackles by the end of that very first football game. More importantly, it was then that he found his love for football — a love that’s carried him across the country.

Now a 6-foot-3, 266-pound senior at the University of Iowa, Craig’s number 45 stands out and above the others on the field, towering over quarterbacks and running backs. His pads perfectly fit — or are maybe even too small — on his broad shoulders, his cleats now planted into the turf of Duke Slater Field at Kinnick Stadium. But he’s never lost the same look in his eyes from 15 years ago.

Craig uses his weight to tackle with force, dragging his opponents down and never missing an opportunity to toss a smaller guy around like an unwanted toy. His ability to stay patient, make a read, and chase down the ball carrier in the backfield has been a process of development across his football career.

From Fort Wayne, Indiana, Craig spent his high school years an hour and a half west at Culver Academies, a college preparatory boarding school that includes Culver Military Academy, to play basketball, his first love, before football.

Craig and his father often traveled down to Indianapolis for AAU basketball tournaments; throughout his youth, Craig played for former Indiana Pacer George Hill’s program. And his team’s assistant coach was Mark Galloway, the head basketball coach at Culver Academies.

Galloway encouraged Deon to bring Craig over to Culver to connect with his son, Trey, and see the school’s campus. Craig and Trey developed a close friendship, and when Craig got home, he knew he wanted to return to Culver for school.

“It really was a no-brainer,” Deon said. “Man, that school, it was really off the chain. Man, it’s a really, really good school. I recommend any young kid [go there]. It was hard … to leave the house and live on their own, but the outcome of it was really, really good, man.”

Never quite a prominent scorer, Craig’s athletic IQ and physical force put him in the right positions to make the necessary plays, and it made him an impactful player in any area of the court. A four-year varsity basketball player, Craig won a state championship in his sophomore year, a massive feat in one of the country’s biggest basketball states.

And while Trey Galloway is now a starting guard on a nationally-ranked Indiana Hoosiers basketball team, Craig’s potential on the football field grew clearer and clearer at Culver, overtaking basketball and quickly paving a path of his own toward college athletics.

“We had a great team that year, and he was so productive … and playing at a very high level,” Culver head coach Andrew Dorrel said. “He was our leading tackler. He had double-digit sacks, double-digit tackles for loss, playing against really good competition. And then that’s when the recruiting started happening.”

But the military structure always took priority.

Up at 7 a.m. Ready the room for inspection. March to breakfast in uniform. Class from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Football practice. Dinner. Military activities. Study tables for two hours. Bed. Repeat.

“Culver is hard,” Dorrel said. “It’s hard for young people to learn to manage.”

But it’s also produced some of the greatest American athletic minds — Bud Adams, founder of the Houston Oilers, co-founder of the AFL, and former owner of Tennessee Titans; George Steinbrenner, principal owner of the Yankees across seven World Series championships; and Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers credited for moving baseball to the West Coast.

In Craig, it produced the qualities necessary to make him a Division I football player.

“He learned that he could do something hard; he learned how to structure his time; he learned how to be uncomfortable,” Dorrel said. “He learned how to reach out to teachers for support when he needed to. And he’s got such a big personality and smile that people just gravitated toward him, so he learned to be a leader.”

Craig earned all-state honors as a junior, finishing his career with school records in career tackles, career and season sacks, and season and career tackles for loss.

A 247Sports Composite four-star football recruit in the class of 2020, Craig ranked 373rd in the country, 20th in weak-side defensive ends, and third in Indiana. He gathered offers from the biggest names in college football, from Georgia Tech and Michigan to Notre Dame and Ohio State — and of course, his hometown school of Indiana.

Growing up just three hours north of Bloomington, the Hoosiers have a soft spot in Craig’s heart, even as they’ve succeeded this season with a 7-0 start.

“While getting recruited, I had a really good relationship with Coach [Tom] Allen, and I think a lot of success you’re seeing now stems from a little bit of the belief that he poured into that program,” Craig said. “You’ve got to take your hats off to them. They went through it, built up the right way, and their success is paying off.”

So after a visit to Tennessee on April 12 of 2019, Craig made the trip next to Indiana on June 7. But two weeks later, he came to Iowa City, and the relationship he solidified with defensive line coach Kelvin Bell turned him from Hoosier to Hawkeye.

“I just remember a lot of honesty,” Craig said of the process with Bell. “He did a great job of not invading my space. He gave me my own space and let me think about making my own decisions. And he stayed persistent throughout the whole thing and stayed consistent as well, which is a big thing for me. And I definitely landed where I was supposed to.”

Joining the team in 2020, the hunter became the hunted as Craig’s teammates tested his loving relationship with hitting his opponents. In stark contrast to his first tackle football game, his first practice in pads included his welcome-to-college-football moment when fullback Turner Pallissard popped Craig under the chin in a drill, sending him and his helmet flying backward.

“I was like, ‘This is what I’m doing now,’” Craig said. “‘I gotta figure it out or I’m going to get killed.’”

Craig redshirted that season and made steady jumps across the next two, both learning from and playing alongside the likes of current Green Bay Packer Lukas Van Ness and Pittsburgh Steeler Logan Lee. He did whatever possible to contribute, from the defensive line to punt and kickoff formations.

In 2021, Craig played 12 of 14 games, finishing the season with 14 tackles. In 2022, he played in all 13 games and more than doubled that finish with 31 tackles, earning the Coaches Appreciation Award for defense and special teams.

Still, Craig attributes his growth first and foremost to Bell, a relationship that has only strengthened across his development.

“He does a great job [with our] freshman class,” Craig said. “[He’s] leading meetings, having guys ask the right questions, having guys step out of their comfort zone and get up in front of the older guys to try to figure out plays on the board.” 

Because Craig joined fellow linemen Yahya Black and Ethan Hurkett in first playing for Iowa during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bell had much more time to connect with them and give them a head start in the process over Zoom.

“[I have] just the utmost trust in those guys because they’re going to do it the right way,” Bell said. “They understand if they play for themselves, they play for each other. They’re not playing for their own individual accolades. And I think that’s what makes that group so, so special.”

But Craig always stood out to Bell, from the first day at Culver Academies to playing special teams at Iowa. He took Craig under his guidance, advising him to find one aspect of his life he can improve each day.

“I just, I can’t say enough about him,” Bell said. “Craig’s always been very self-aware. He’s always been very conscientious and communicates extremely well … But, man, I’m just looking forward to a big year for him.”

Craig started at defensive end in all 14 of the Hawkeyes’ games in 2023 — amassing 54 tackles, five tackles for losses of 25 yards in total, three sacks for losses of 22 yards in total and seven quarterback pressures on his way to an honorable-mention All-Big Ten selection by the conference’s media.

More importantly, though, Craig again won the Coaches Appreciation Award for defense, was named to the Player Council, and earned the UI Center for Inclusive Academic Excellence Student Leadership Award.

Craig embodies the ideal of a “student-athlete.”

“We are just so proud of him, man, because he takes his academics and that side of his career — he takes it personally,” Deon said. “It’s just like he does on the football field. It’s the same way … He goes hard, and he plays hard, tries to be one of the best out there. That’s the same way he does in the classroom. That’s the same way.”

Last year, Craig did an internship with the Big Ten Network and worked the Big Ten Basketball Tournament in Chicago. He attended the Black Student Athlete Summit in Los Angeles, and he coaches elementary-school-aged flag football in Iowa City.

“[He does] a lot of things that, out from underneath the helmet, don’t get a lot of publicity,” Bell said. “And I think that’s going to serve him well once he finally hangs the cleats up. Hopefully, that won’t be for a while.”

It certainly didn’t end after his breakout season last year, as Craig was a preseason third-team All-Big Ten selection and again named to the Player Council. Starting at defensive end once more, Craig is a vital piece in Iowa’s strong pass rush that has limited offenses from explosive plays in the air.

Craig has 20 tackles thus far this season, including one for a loss and one sack as well as a high of five tackles against pass-heavy Washington.

His motivation in the classroom and at work parallels that on the gridiron, a student of the game constantly hunting for an aspect of his skillset he needs to patch up.

“I think a lot of it is just a lot of intense, detailed film study,” Craig said. “It’s tough, but the preparation is still the same. You’ve got to put in the time, got to put in the work, because nothing of it is ever easy.”

Through his football journey, from a small mass of padding and polycarbonate in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to an NFL hopeful playing for a top defense in the nation before 70,000 fans, Craig doesn’t view much of a difference. It’s still the same game, the same love for tackling he first found, and the same little lack of concern for his impact.

“Sometimes it’s just like, ‘Wow, I really did that,’ [but] I don’t even have time to think about it because I’ve just got to get back to the huddle,” Craig said. “But if it’s at the end of a quarter, end of the half, or something, then I could be like, ‘OK, that was really cool.’”

Craig still likes a little celebration, forcefully pumping his fist forward to the end zone after a sack like Tiger Woods following a big putt. But then it’s always with his teammates.

“What we do is hard,” Craig said. “[My teammates] always taught me to just really appreciate everything that’s going on around you. We live a great life, especially us up here … We get to play in front of the best fans in the country. There’s nothing to pout about. There’s nothing to be sad about. I try to wear a smile every day.”