Ignore the stars: Miami’s new WR commit is a ‘park-ball legend’ with a big-time resume
The list of colleges that didn’t want Landon Ibieta — or, worse yet, didn’t know about him — is far longer than the list of those who did. When the three-star wide receiver orally committed to the Miami Hurricanes on Sunday, he could count his scholarship offers on his two sturdy hands. Until February, he wasn’t even ranked in the 247Sports.com composite rankings. He is, by definition, unheralded and under-the-radar, but it wasn’t always this way.
“Landon Ibieta,” said Hutch Gonzales, Ibieta’s coach at Mandeville in Louisiana, “is a bit of a park-ball legend.”
A decade before he committed to Miami, Ibieta was just a 7-year-old tearing up Little League fields in the New Orleans metropolitan area. He was never the biggest or strongest kid and it didn’t matter. He had been playing football since he was 4 and his father, Chad Ibieta, was briefly a walk-on for coach Nick Saban and the LSU Tigers.
Landon Ibieta, Gonzales said, was the sort of player who would touch the ball 10 times in a game and score nine. Once he got to high school, it was mostly the same — his first ever touch on varsity, Gonzales said, was a 3-yard catch that Ibieta turned into an 80-yard touchdown. The Hurricanes, he thinks, are getting a steal.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lack of in-person recruiting meant Ibieta was still basically unknown at the start of 2021. He got a scholarship offer from the Tulane Green Wave in 2019 and one from the South Alabama Jaguars in 2020, and that was it. Even 33 catches for 714 yards and 14 touchdowns in 10 games as a junior weren’t enough to make college football coaches take notice.
“We’re kind of off to the side. My area is more like rich people, so they kind of take that as we’re soft over here,” said Ibieta, who was No. 2 on the Skippers’ depth chart behind Vanderbilt Commodores wide receiver Will Sheppard in 2019. “This year, it was more who you know, relationshipwise, because the coaches can’t get an eye for you, so they kind of had to take people’s word for it.”
Finally, everything changed with two days at Mills Pond Park in January. Ibieta traveled to Fort Lauderdale with the Louisiana Bootleggers for the two-day Battle Miami 7-on-7 tournament and Ibieta put on a show. He made 247Sports’ all-tournament team and drew comparison to Bootlegger legends such as Odell Beckham Jr., DeVonta Smith and Ja’Marr Chase. Highlights from Louisiana’s run circulated on Twitter and generated thousands of views on social media.
Rob Likens was one of those viewers. A few days later, the wide receivers coach reached out to Ibieta and told the 5-foot-11, 185-pound wideout he was exactly what the Hurricanes needed.
“I was catching a lot of contested balls and stuff,” Ibieta said. “He said that’s a thing they’ve been struggling with lately, so I can add that to the team.”
Less than five months later, Ibieta traveled back to South Florida for his first official visit and committed to Miami as the trip wrapped up. Still, his only other Power 5 offers are from the Virginia Cavaliers and Wake Forest Demon Deacons. The Hurricanes think they have found a gem, so they made sure to sew up his commitment this weekend.
Wide receiver Xavier Restrepo hosted Ibieta for the official visit, and he and quarterback Tyler Van Dyke took the senior out on Miami Beach. It struck him to hear that any conversation tended to come back to football. It sold him on “the change” he has heard Likens and coaches discuss.
“You can feel it around them,” Ibieta said “There’s so many things you could be doing, but they’re still talking about football.”
Inevitably, other coaches will start poking around on Ibieta now. When a team like the Hurricanes is so high on someone, other schools are bound to wonder if they’re missing something. Ibieta, though, said he’s locked in with Miami and even canceled a planned official visit to Wake Forest.
The Hurricanes are betting big on Ibieta’s track record — and his 4.45-second time in the 40-yard dash isn’t shabby, either. Ibieta, at every level, has been one of the best receivers on the field.
“Landon was never the biggest kid on the field, but he always could do things physically that other people could not do at that age and it has never stopped,” Gonzales said. “If you watch the way that he runs routes, he is able to put himself in defensive backs’ blind spots.”
Gonzales knows Ibieta’s type well, too. He was also a 6-foot, 185-pound wideout, and he played for the Division I-AA Southeastern Louisiana Lions and in the Canadian Football League.
“And he is as polished as I was when I was done playing,” Gonzales said of Ibieta. “And he’s only a high school kid. He’s just getting started.”
