WEST HARRISON, Ind. — Ivan Pace Jr. always seems to have a mischievous look on his face as if he knows something you don’t. A perpetually raised eyebrow, like The Rock just before he asks if you smell what he’s cooking.

It’s actually a fitting parallel for the way he plays on the football field. The fourth-year senior linebacker, who transferred to Cincinnati from nearby rival Miami, Ohio, this offseason, is tough to nail down at first glance. He’s listed accurately at 235 pounds and graciously at 6-foot, a human sledgehammer with broad shoulders and thick thighs. At the collegiate level, he’s too small to be a prototypical rush end, too slow to be a safety and maybe a little too much of both to be a linebacker.

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“I played some fullback in high school,” he said, which makes the most sense.

Yet when the ball is snapped, there’s Pace, constantly in the mix, registering tackles, making plays. Underestimate him at your own peril. He knows something you don’t.

“There’s not a whole lot I’ve had in the past that I would say he’s comparable to,” head coach Luke Fickell said recently. “And we haven’t even had the good fortune of seeing everything. When we actually start to go to some live situations, I think his game will go up another level.”

Pace has been debunking expectations since his days at Colerain High School playing alongside a number of current Bearcats teammates including safety Ja’Von Hicks, defensive lineman Eric Phillips and younger brother Deshawn Pace. Despite Colerain’s history of success and local notoriety, Pace Jr. was only a two-star recruit, drawing scholarship offers from Miami, Ohio, Toledo and a number of Division II programs and what he described as a “half offer” from the Bearcats.

“I don’t know why I was so underrated. I have no idea. That’s what I was trying to figure out when I was playing in high school too, bro,” said Pace. “I think all of us Colerain guys were, for real. All of us were underrated.”

He has a point, considering Hicks and Deshawn Pace were mid-level three-star prospects who have developed into all-conference starters for the Bearcats. Phillips and second-year defensive lineman Dontay Corleone had similarly average ratings and are expected to be valuable contributors this season. Pace Jr.’s measurables in particular made him easy to overlook, at least until he arrived at Miami, Ohio, and had an immediate impact. As a true freshman in 2019, he led the RedHawks with seven sacks, including an NCAA record six in one game against Akron, helping propel them to a MAC championship.

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The RedHawks were limited to just three games in 2020 due to COVID-19, but Pace led the MAC with 125 tackles last season, which was 10th in the country overall, earning first-team All-MAC honors and Pro Football Focus’ MAC Defensive Player of the Year honors. He entered the transfer portal in late December and announced in early January he was making the quick trip down Colerain Avenue to play with his brother at Cincinnati.

“It’s great being back with Deshawn,” Pace said. “I remember playing football together in high school like it was yesterday. It’s nice.”

The brothers always talked about playing together in college, but Ivan knew Deshawn was too talented to join him at Miami, Ohio. And if he was being honest, Ivan thought he was too talented to be there himself, a belief that was validated when he entered the portal and received offers from the likes of LSU, Miami, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas State. But as much as he enjoyed toying with his mom for a couple of weeks, Ivan knew he wanted to stay home.

“Mom was excited, she started crying (when I told her). I was talking about going somewhere else at first but I was just joking around to see how she would react,” he said. “It’s nice that our mom and dad can just go to one game now instead of having to split up and go to two different places.”

Nothing was promised to Pace at Cincinnati. Whether it’s highly touted freshmen or incoming transfers, Fickell and his staff are strict about buying into the culture and establishing trust before getting on the field, regardless of star ratings or past production. Not that it was an issue for Pace, who always has had to work for it, jersey number included. He wanted to wear No. 0 for the Bearcats, the same number he wore for the RedHawks but was instead given No. 17 for spring practice.

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“They said I had to earn No. 0. I think Coach Fickell wants everyone to earn everything, and that’s a good thing. I like that about him,” Pace said. “I’ve always been a hard worker. It doesn’t matter what it is. If they wanted me to run long-distance track, I’d try my best.”

Instead, Pace worked with the second-team at weakside linebacker during spring ball and dedicated himself in the weight room during the summer, squatting 585 pounds for four reps at SQUATFEST. And when the players officially reported for preseason practice in early August, Fickell broke the news: he had earned No. 0.

“He’s done an unbelievable job of embracing who we are and what we do and how we do it, and he’s going to have a heck of a year,” Fickell said.

The signs are already there. Third-year linebacker Jaheim Thomas, a former four-star prospect out of local Princeton High School, has had a phenomenal offseason and is a breakout candidate for the defense. Yet Pace has still done well enough to split first-team reps with Thomas in preseason camp. The two have different strengths and skill sets, with Thomas an athletic specimen at 6-4 and 245 pounds, but the friendly competition at weakside linebacker should elevate the defense as a whole.

“For us in particular, we’re so good at those (linebacker) positions because you have more than one guy who can play,” Fickell said. “And we’ll find other ways to get those guys on the field. You’ve got Ivan, who is doing a great job, and Jaheim, who is doing a great job. I think it’s going to give us a heck of a one-two punch.”

The staff has even experimented with ways to get both on the field at the same time, bringing Thomas down toward the line of scrimmage as more of a rush end in certain situations.

“Me and my boy Ivan, we go way back. We played against each other in high school and we actually played little league together in like fourth, fifth grade,” Thomas said. “Pushing each other, it’s just going to make us both better. We help each other. Having a guy like Ivan who has a lot of experience is great for both of us.”

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The Pace brothers cut disparate figures as well, with Ivan squat and brawny and Deshawn rangy and clinical. The same goes for their personalities. Ivan is quiet on the field, offering only that puckish gaze and swears that his fellow Colerain products are the same.

“We don’t really talk trash. Nah,” he said. “We don’t wanna play no games.”

(Informed of this, Deshawn responded: “I don’t know man, I talk trash all the time.”)

But despite what might distinguish them in appearance and temperament, they share the same instinctive, playmaking tendencies that made Deshawn the Bearcats’ breakout star of last season and landed both of them on the Bronko Nagurski Trophy preseason watch list for 2022. Take in enough Cincinnati practice snaps, and you’ll begin to notice a stout No. 0 as a fixture at the end of plays — emerging from a tackle pile, scuttling a pass attempt, punching the ball loose from an unsuspecting carrier.

It becomes hard to seem out of place when you’re always there.

“I got good instincts in the box,” Pace said. “I can just see stuff, I don’t know.”

He flashed as much in the first official practice of preseason, when he darted in front of a shallow crossing route, intercepting quarterback Ben Bryant.

“I saw the crosser coming and knew I was going to bait him, gonna let him go (in front of me), but then I immediately came downhill on him,” Pace said.

He read the play, anticipated the throw, made the interception and then raced the opposite direction for a pick-six. Moving faster than one might expect, too.

“Yeah, sneaky fast,” he added.

Not that he needed to. His look said it all.

(Top photo: Courtesy of Cincinnati Bearcats Athletics)