Six months ago, some weren’t sure whether there would even be a 2020 college football season, so having the chance to play at all was a relief for Center Grove graduates Parker Ferguson and Jován Swann.
Being able to cap it off with a free trip to Hawaii is just gravy.
Ferguson, who just finished up his senior season as an offensive tackle at Air Force, and Swann, a defensive lineman who played this past fall as a graduate transfer at Indiana after four years at Stanford, were both selected to play in the Hula Bowl, which will take place Sunday in Honolulu.
The former teammates quickly reached out to one another after finding out the other was going to be playing in the game.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Swann said. “When I saw his name pop up before mine, I got excited about the opportunity even more so.”
The game will simultaneously serve as the official end to both players’ collegiate playing days and the beginning of the path to a possible pro career.
Though Ferguson was not at liberty to discuss his potential NFL future due to Air Force Academy restrictions, the 6-foot-5, 315-pounder did note that he’ll be playing guard in Hawaii in an effort to showcase his versatility for pro scouts.
After the game, he says, he plans to slim down to about 310 pounds to maximize his quickness and athleticism going forward, but he says he “won’t be making any huge body changes.”
The 6-2, 280-pound Swann plans to spend the coming weeks in Nashville, Tennessee training with another former Trojan, Jordan Luallen, in preparation for his workouts for NFL scouts.
He’s not sure what the short-term future, including the run-up to the NFL draft three months from now, will bring, but he plans to be ready no matter what.
“I’m just going about it with the philosophy to train like a first-rounder and expect to go undrafted, because it’s unpredictable,” Swann said.
Swann had a quiet season statistically in his lone year in Bloomington, but he helped the Hoosiers to a historic campaign that saw the team beat Penn State and Wisconsin and spend much of the fall ranked in the top 10 nationally.
He thoroughly cherished every moment of it, especially after the Big Ten postponed the start of its season and some wondered whether the league would have any games at all.
“Not many people get the opportunity to play 30 minutes from home after playing four years on the West Coast, a four and a half hour flight away,” Swann said. “It was a big change for me. To go from coordinating one or two games that I would have my family come out to, as opposed to this year, where they were able to attend every home game and all of the away games that were allowing fans. That just made my final year in college amazing.”
Likewise, Ferguson took nothing for granted in what he knew would be his final season in Colorado Springs. He’s set to graduate in May, and he’s already got a job lined up with the United States Space Force if his football ambitions don’t pan out.
Air Force played just six games this season, with the slate shortened in part because of a COVID-19 outbreak on the team; Ferguson was one of the players who team that tested positive, though he wound up being asymptomatic.
“It was weird,” he said of the season, “because you want to be totally dedicated to a team, an opponent, and in the back of your mind you’re like, ‘We might not even get to play them,’ you know? So it was challenging from that perspective.
“But I would also say it was just fun to at least play some games. … I was super grateful for every game; every time just running on the field, I really concentrating on enjoying it because you didn’t know how many more moments like that you would have.”
Swann, who is working on a master’s degree in strategic management at the Kelley School of Business, could have opted to return to IU next fall; the NCAA essentially gave all athletes a free pass in terms of eligibility in 2020 because of how the pandemic affected so many teams’ seaasons. But he says he never really gave a sixth year serious consideration, in part because he felt that any attention he paid to such a fallback plan would blur his focus on the present.
“I didn’t want to get to slacking off at all, and I wanted to stay focused on the next task at hand or the next team we were playing, just giving it my all and being the best team player,” Swann said. “I know that if I were to focus on, ‘Oh, coming back is an option’ … I don’t think I would have had as much fun this year if I would have had that mindset of knowing I could come back as opposed to giving it my all.”
This week, Swann and Ferguson will be giving it their all for the final time as college players. Like many college seniors, they’ll be trying to make an impression on potential future employers. But they’re also enjoying the opportunity to catch up with one another in a far more comfortable climate than the ones they’ve been living in so far this winter.
“It should be a cool thing, you know, kind of a little Center Grove reunion on the island,” Ferguson said.
