SO LONG, FAREWELL: 2017 Football Commit Eno Benjamin De-Commits from Iowa Hawkeyes|Iowa Hot Topics|Team BattleGround|College BattleGround

People were waiting for recruits to start de-commiting this season, and the first is a doozy.

Well, it’s finally happened. Iowa has lost the first of what many fans are anticipating to be a long list of 2017 commitments. And this one could be the one that hurts the most, as it’s Wylie running back Eno Benjamin, the man that was responsible for helping to bring many Texas commits to the university.

On Twitter, Benjamin unpinned the tweet that he was committed to the University of Iowa and replaced it with a short note stating that he was completely reopening his commitment.

As stated above, many fans have been anticipating de-commitments due to the lackluster product that Iowa has been putting on the field so far this season. However, it appears as though this isn’t the reason for Benjamin’s departure. It had been rumored that he had been taking visits to other schools (Arizona State and Mizzou, to be specific) in the past month, which is against Iowa Football policy. After a recruit commits to Iowa, Ferentz and Co. have a rule (or a policy, whatever it doesn’t even matter because it’s a stupid policy in my own opinion) that commitments are no longer permitted to take visits to other schools. Well, Benjamin did this, and it appears as though they basically told him to walk.

In an interview with Tyler Devine of AllHawkeyes.com, Benjamin had this to say:

“I took visits,” Benjamin said in a text message on Sunday. “The coaches weren’t happy and couldn’t get over it. So they thought it would be best to part ways. That’s all there is to it.”

This is not going to be something that Iowa fans will be happy about if it’s a completely factual story. Of course, there are always two sides to every story, so it’ll be interesting to see if Ferentz makes any comments about this situation on Tuesday. There’s already some speculation as whether or not what Benjamin said is completely true because this past week, when asked about the visit policy, Ferentz had this to say.

I don’t think you can enforce it. You can have policies. It’s kind of like some of the things in our building, I tease our coaches sometimes, there’s policies and then there’s rules. Policies are policies. You can break policies. There’s no penalty. But rules are rules. The rules don’t forbid that, so there’s no — but we can have policies.

The biggest question will be whether or not this move by Benjamin will lead to more fallout for #Swarm17. He helped recruit many players to Iowa, and after seeing his de-commitment, it’ll be interesting to see who does and does not decide to follow suit. Fellow commit and Wylie East teammate Chevin Calloway has also been rumored to be looking around.

We’ll take a more in-depth look at this situation and what it could mean for Iowa recruiting later this week, with more opinions.