Inductees

Ed Podolak – Football

Ed Podolak was born on a small farm near Atlantic, in Southwest Iowa on September 1, 1947. His father, Joe had just returned from his four years fighting in the Philippines when he married Dorothy Pont, a country school teacher. Neither parent had any history in sporting activities, so it was the influence of some very good high school coaches that paved the way for Ed to become a professional athlete. Early childhood was filled with farming chores, 4H and the county fair. But by the time Ed started into junior high, all sports had become his passion.

Joe and Dorothy saw to it that he could compete in baseball in the summer, football in the fall, and basketball in the winter, even if it meant missing out on the rigors of the family farm. The Atlantic High School sports programs were good ones and the football team went undefeated in Ed’s junior and senior seasons, as Ed quarterbacked them to conference titles each year. The Trojan basketball team made it to two state tournament appearances, with Ed playing forward. When the college scouts came calling, Ed decided to play for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes. It was a tough decision as Iowa State had hired Ed’s high school coach, Howard Justice, to coach the quarterbacks at ISU. But in the end, Ed followed his dream, which had always been to be a Hawkeye.

Freshmen were not eligible to play, so it was tough to sit for a year, but Ed won the starting quarterback job as a sophomore and was named “Offensive Player of the Week” in his first college start against Arizona. After starting at quarterback for two and a half years for the Hawkeyes, he moved to tailback, five games into his senior season, because of an injury to the starting tailback. He set a Hawkeye rushing record of 286 yards in his second start.

After his senior season, Ed was drafted as a quarterback in Canada and as a running back by the Kansas City Chiefs. Again a tough decision since he had only played five games as a running back and Heisman Trophy winner, Mike Garrett, was the starting tailback for Kansas City. But Ed decided to take the challenge to win the tailback spot for the chiefs. The next year, Mike Garrett was traded to the San Diego Chargers and Ed became the starting tailback.

When Ed retired nine years later, he held Chiefs career records for most rushing yards, most pass receptions by a running back and was the team’s leading punt returner. Coach Hank Stram used Ed in all facets of his game plan, and that led to a record setting day, when Ed amassed a total of 350 yards in a playoff game against Miami, on Christmas Day, 1971. This is still an NFL playoff record.

After his 1978 retirement, Ed went to work broadcasting NFL games for NBC and then joined the first broadcast crew as ESPN went on the air, joining Hall Fame broadcaster Jim Simpson. Next, the University of Iowa came calling for Ed to be the color analyst for the Iowa Hawkeyes. In what Podolak describes as “a magical career”, he just completed his thirty second year as the Hawkeye color man, and now works for the Learfield Network, which originated in Jefferson City, Missouri. Learfield owns the broadcast rights to over fifty Division I sports programs. Besides broadcasting the Hawkeye football games, Ed continues to be active in real estate development and charity projects. Ed has developed two resort condo hotels in Costa Rica and is in the process of developing a new thirty-six unit resort condo hotel at Flamingo Beach, Costa Rica. Ed’s chosen charity is Variety Children’s Charities of Iowa.

Podolak has two daughters, Emily and Laura, who have successful business careers in Northern California. Emily is a landscape architect, in Healdsburg, California and Laura is an executive with the PAC 12 TV Network in San Francisco.

Ed is also a member of the Kansas City Chiefs Hall of Fame and the Iowa Sports Hall of Fame.