As if Andy Stensrud doesn’t have enough to live up to.

As a high school senior in Lake Mills, Stensrud has built up a reputation as a talented athlete with double-pronged ability. On the basketball court, the 6-8, 245-pound Stensrud attracted the attention of Iowa State Head Coach Tim Floyd — as a sophomore.

At the time, Andy committed to Iowa State, thanks to the sharp eyes of Steve Krafcisin, assistant basketball coach, and some sharp maneuvering by the rest of the coaching staff.

“We really liked what we saw,” Tim Floyd said, “and we started the unofficial recruiting process.”

As a tight end on the football field, he caught 89 passes for 1,471 yards and 16 touchdowns in his career. His pigskin prowess made him a top prospect for Iowa State, who signed him last week to play football here in the fall.

“He’s got great growth potential: He’s 6-8, 252 pounds right now,” Head Football Coach Dan McCarney said. “He just scored a school-record 41 points last weekend [in basketball]. In football, he’s got real, real soft hands, excellent hands for catching the ball.”

Coach Floyd agreed: “He had the best set of hands I’d ever seen on a 15-year-old guy, like he had grips on them. I thought he moved well for a guy his size.”

Because Andy would like to try his hands (and feet) at both sports, he faced a slight catch-22 with NCAA rules. Coach Dan McCarney explained that had Stensrud accepted a basketball scholarship and fulfilled his original commitment, he could not have played football for two years.

By taking the football scholarship, though, Andy can (and plans to) walk on the basketball team, all the while majoring in something to do with agriculture.

“We knew all along that he was a Division I football player,” McCarney said, “and Tim [Floyd] knew all along that he was a Division I basketball player. After we had him in summer camp last year, there was no question in our minds that we wanted him here.”

All of this, and Andy hasn’t even graduated from high school yet.

But all of the promise that Coaches McCarney and Floyd have seen in Stensrud doesn’t demonstrate the full extent of the high expectations for this young man. That’s because the Stensrud name has been around awhile at Iowa State.

Andy himself was born in Ames — he said he’s been a Cyclone fan “ever since birth” — and both of his parents went to school here. So did his uncle, and two of his aunts played basketball for ISU.

And thanks to his father and uncle, the name Stensrud was practically synonymous, at one time, with “punishing defensive football.”

In the mid-70s, Andy’s uncle, Maynard, and father, Mike, made up part of the wall of defense of Iowa State’s football team. While the two defensive tackles are not twins — Maynard is just a year older than Mike — their accomplishments at ISU are almost mirror images of each other.

Not only did they clean up on the football field against a team that was ranked in the AP Top 25 several times during their tenure, but they also racked up numerous awards while in Cyclone country.

In different years, both Maynard and Mike won the Al and Dean Knudson Award, which honors the most outstanding defensive player, and they made First-team All-Conference.

They both won Big Eight Player-of-the-Week in separate years — Maynard in November of 1976 and Mike in November of 1977.

Mike also nabbed All-American honors in 1978 and led the Cyclones to back-to-back bowl berths in 1977 (Peach Bowl) and 1978 (Hall of Fame Bowl).

One year that both brothers played, 1976, was statistically the finest season in Iowa State football history, and Maynard was one of the team captains.

Though shunned by the bowl selection committees, Iowa State led the Big Eight in total offense and finished second nationally with 439.6 yards per game. (That was the year in which Dexter Green, a Cyclone tailback, set all of the rushing records that Troy Davis broke last season.)

Then Head Coach Earle Bruce said at the time that his defense was ranked fourth in the nation. With three 4-7 seasons behind him, Bruce pulled out an 8-3 record in 1976. He even boasted an honor of his own: He was awarded Big Eight Coach of the Year after a much maligned pre-season.

Maynard and “little” brother Mike were considered strong candidates to be the best brother combination that season in college football.

“I was at the University of Iowa and coached against Mike Stensrud,” McCarney said. “He was one of the best players in college football at the time.”

Mike said that there was never any sort of brotherly competition between them: The important thing was to mangle their opponents. “It was a matter of working together and trying to put together a good defense,” he said.

Mike even went on to play in the National Football League; he was drafted by the Houston Oilers in 1979, where he played for seven years.

For his son Andy, the road to Iowa State was pretty well paved. Not that there was any pressure to attend his parents’ alma mater; on the contrary, Mike said that he told his son “to look hard at what he wanted to do academically.”

Since Andy is interested in agriculture, he looked at schools with good ag programs: Iowa State, Minnesota and Nebraska, mainly. He also “kinda” checked out Iowa, though he said that “I found out I didn’t like them, but then, I’ve never liked them.”

Andy said that academics is his “No. 1” concern. But of course, it didn’t hurt that Ames feels like a second home, especially since his family used to move back here for the first couple of off-seasons while his dad played in Houston.

He passed on the prestige of a powerhouse like Nebraska and banked on an up-and-comer because of the coaches. “I just thought that their coach, Tom Osborne, is getting up there in age,” Andy said. “Coach McCarney and Coach Floyd are relatively young and enthusiastic.

“Nothing against Nebraska, but a lotta coaches won’t put a lotta time into their players; they let their assistants do it, but not McCarney and Floyd. They’re behind their players 100 percent.”

Andy has first-hand knowledge of the support Iowa State’s coaches give their players. He said that he’s had contact with McCarney since last year, with Floyd since his sophomore year, and with former Head Basketball Coach Johnny Orr since his freshman year.

“I’ve watched and learned how their systems work,” Andy said.

It’s pretty obvious that Andy does not plan on riding the coattails of his father and uncle.

First of all, Andy plays on the offense, while Mike and Maynard were trying to flatten the offense.

Also, Andy is still determined to play basketball; he said that he wants to stick to his original commitment.

“I don’t want to be in my dad’s shadow,” Andy said. “He’s a great father, but I want to make a name for myself. I don’t want to be treated differently because he’s my father; I want to be treated like everyone else.”

And that equal treatment includes getting used to 8 a.m. lectures and Friday night parties just like everyone else. Andy wants to make sure that he doesn’t get overwhelmed the moment he steps on campus.

He said his goals are “to improve everyday and do my best out there. I’d like to get in as soon as I can. I haven’t really experienced college yet; I don’t want to get buried with both basketball and football.”

That might mean redshirting his freshman year, though McCarney and Andy’s father Mike both said the decision is entirely up to Andy, who wants “to get in and learn the system and earn a starting position,” he said.

“It’s not even in cement whether he would start with us in the fall or whether he’d start with us for spring football,” McCarney said.

Whenever Stensrud gets started with both sports, coaches are smiling about what Andy can do for them and Iowa State athletics in general.

“We’re thrilled to have him,” Floyd said. “We think he’s really got a chance to do great things for both teams.”

Andy’s success at Iowa State might also clear the way for some more Stensruds.

He has two younger brothers, one of whom, Kevin, 13, is nicknamed “Snow Plow.” Floyd exaggerated that the young man is already “as big as Cato.

“He’s gonna move some people,” Floyd said, “either off the line or out of the lane, whatever sport he plays.”

And as for the Stensruds before him, Iowa State would be glad to be his home.