Physical Iowa back with proven burst, but the portal changes the picture
In the 2025 season, Patterson gave Iowa a compact, hard-running option at 5-foot-10, 210 pounds, rushing for 161 yards on 28 carries before a right-ankle tweak knocked him out of the Rutgers game; across his Iowa career, he showed a reliable 2024 step forward with 309 rushing yards and 2 TDs, plus enough juice to average 5.8 yards per carry in 2025. His best traits are contact balance, downhill urgency, and enough explosiveness to hit creases quickly, but the biggest differentiator now is roster status: he entered the transfer portal in January 2026, so any team gets a veteran back with game reps, not a settled Hawkeye centerpiece.
