Epenesa ready for reunion
Iowa defensive end has family in Southern California, is happy to be in Holiday Bowl.
Iowa defensive end is looking forward to playing in front of family at Holiday Bowl against USC.
SAN DIEGO — A.J. Epenesa has two jobs this week in the Holiday Bowl.
For the Iowa football team against USC, the Hawkeyes hope to see the explosive and disruptive play at defensive end that has made the junior a potential top-10 pick in the 2020 NFL draft.
For Epenesa’s family, he is the ticket broker. They need lots of them.
Epenesa estimated Monday there would be at least 40 family members from Southern California and Nevada who want to see him play at SDCCU Stadium in what might be his final college football game. So far, he said he has 19 tickets in hand, procured from the Iowa staff and his teammates.
Some in the family didn’t wait and already purchased tickets. “Some might just tailgate and hang out outside. It’ll be fun,” Epenesa said.
There wasn’t a happier Hawkeye in the room in Iowa City on Dec. 8 when bowl matchups were announced. Epenesa has never lived anywhere other than the Midwest, but the Holiday Bowl is like a homecoming.
“I’m at a loss for words,” Epenesa said after a practice. “It’s something I’ve wanted ever since my freshman year. My cousin [Jacob Tuioti-Mariner, now with the Atlanta Falcons] played at UCLA for two of the years while I was here, and I was dying to play UCLA.
“It never happened, and now we get to come here and play a Pac-12 team.”
If A.J.’s father, Eppy Epenesa, followed the path of A.J.’s aunts and uncles, the younger Epenesa might have starred at USC, UCLA or another Pac-12 school. The rest of the family settled in Southern California, including Oceanside, where a tight-knit Samoan community nurtured the life and career of Pro Football Hall of Famer Junior Seau, who also starred at USC.
But Eppy Epenesa chose the frigid winter climes of the Midwest to pursue college football as a defensive tackle. His landing spot was tiny Iowa Wesleyan, an NAIA football school in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, which in the 2010 census counted 0.3% Pacific Islanders among its population of 8,600.
“I think back then if you asked him what Iowa was, he wouldn’t even have known,” A.J. Epenesa said. “He was kind of living in the moment.”
From there, Eppy Epenesa got a tryout at the University of Iowa and eventually lettered for one season in 1997. In A.J.’s childhood, Iowa football was a source of pride in the household, as were all Samoans who excelled at the pro and college level.
A.J. idolized Seau, in particular. Born in 1998, the boy saw the latter years of the linebacker’s career. Just as clearly, he remembers hearing about Seau’s suicide in 2012 and seeing video of the player’s friends paddling out on surfboards into the water in front of Seau’s Oceanside home.
“I was telling people on the way here that I’d like to go by that house someday,” Epenesa said.
“For Polynesian kids,” he said, “Seau and Troy Polamalu were the mark of success in the Samoan culture. Those guys were amazing, and they were such great people.”
Like Seau, Epenesa has dealt with outrageously high expectations. He entered Edwardsville High in Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, already enormous at about 6 feet 3 and 230 pounds. In Epenesa’s prep career, he became a five-star recruit for football, set state records in the discus and grew to be 6-6 and 280.
Heading into this season as a junior at Iowa, Epenesa was being touted as a top-10 NFL draft pick in 2020. Last spring, Mel Kiper had him in his top five. His agility and athleticism have been compared to Nick Bosa, the No. 2 pick by San Francisco in the 2019 draft.
But with opponents resorting to double- and tripleteams, Epenesa got off to a slow start, with only three tackles for a loss in the first seven games. That sent him tumbling down the charts.
Then Epenesa found another gear. In Iowa’s threegame winning streak to end the regular season — against Minnesota, Illinois and Nebraska — he notched 91⁄2 tackles for loss and 41⁄2 sacks. Now he’s back in the draftniks’ good graces, though Epenesa has not officially declared for the draft.
He said he is awaiting evaluations from the NFL.
“Technically, I’m not happy,” Epenesa said of the year. “I wanted more out of the season . ... It happened later than I wanted it to, but the end product is better than it was at the beginning.”