First: If anyone else here has been closing watching the National League playoffs, I have found no genealogical connection thus far between Kooper Ebel and Dodgers third-base coach Dino Ebel.
Second: Wow. Things are going well.
Takeaways, at the football season’s halfway point:
Iowa State Is the Big 12 Favorite
It’s helpful, sometimes, to zoom out and remember where Iowa State came from. Three years ago, when Oklahoma and Texas announced they were leaving for the SEC, there was legitimate fear of the Big 12 folding. Baylor, TCU, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma State were a clear package in whom the Pac-12 should have had interest. West Virginia and Kansas had natural appeal to the ACC. Iowa State and Kansas State stood on shaky ground, the kind of ground now occupied by Washington State and Oregon State. Iowa State’s athletic department was producing competitive teams—we were grateful the realignment wave hadn’t come a decade sooner—but we feared an AAC future, and indeed, ESPN tried to push the Big 12 and AAC to that reality. It wasn’t football or basketball which saved Iowa State. It was Bob Bowlsby, the Big 12’s athletic directors, and the Big 12’s presidents. Iowa State got a little lucky. But the fear, three years ago, was that Iowa State would be competing with Kansas State and Memphis for top mid-major status. Today, Iowa State leads the Big 12, which is probably the third-best football conference in America.
We shouldn’t be hanging any banners over this. We’re six games into a twelve-game season, and relegation into some pseudo-mid-major status is still a long-term risk. But it’s ok to appreciate where Iowa State is, to take a second and enjoy the moment. Iowa State is 6–0. Depending which rating system you consult, Iowa State is either the best or the second-best team in the Big 12. No matter which objective source you ask, Iowa State is the Big 12 favorite. Iowa State’s somewhere around 40% likely to win the Big 12. Iowa State’s roughly 60% likely to make the playoff. Iowa State’s one of the twenty best teams in the country, if not one of the fifteen best. Times are good in Ames. Is there more work to do? Yes. Do we want more? Always. But enjoy this moment for the historic thing it is.
Coaching Travels
Iowa State’s now won seven straight regular season road games, a streak which includes wins at BYU, Kansas State, Iowa, and now West Virginia. Winning on the road with any consistency is a college football feat. Few teams do it. It’s logistical and psychological and strategic and half a dozen other things. It takes a lot to win on the road. And while we shouldn’t act like seven games is an eternity—we all remember the trip to Ohio—a big part of winning on the road is knowing you can win on the road. Iowa State has executed on and off the field on these last seven regular season road trips. The only road loss in the stretch came in the Liberty Bowl at Memphis, which wasn’t really a road game.
The on-field execution is the bigger deal, but the off-field execution is exciting because it points towards a competent program. We’ve never thought of things as incompetent within Matt Campbell’s kingdom, but when you envision well-oiled college football machines, you usually think of programs with a lot of money. Iowa State’s not hurting for resources, but Iowa State is not Georgia. Matt Campbell’s is a program right now in which everyone is doing their job. That indicates Campbell’s doing the CEO part of his job well.
To get back to the on-field execution: Jon Heacock is special. Taylor Mouser commands a sneakily efficient offense. Iowa State’s not an especially explosive team, and yet it’s never been out of a game, even facing a big deficit against Iowa and dealing with early struggles against Baylor, West Virginia, and to some extent Houston. Linebackers keep going down, and more keep taking their place, and they’re prepared and composed and aggressive, just like the batch they replaced. Surely, the supply isn’t endless, but Next Man Up continues to work in that position group, and knock on wood, but every other corner of the locker room’s been pretty healthy.
Iowa State ranks 15th in the Big 12 on the 247Sports Talent Composite, a system which serves as our best measurement of each FBS program’s speed and size and strength. The attributes the composite measures are the things you really need to win a national championship (unless you can get an extra year of Covid eligibility for the bulk of your offensive line). In the Big 12, the only program with less speed, size, and strength than Iowa State is BYU. Kansas State, the third Big 12 contender, is also in the bottom quartile when it comes to talent.
What this demonstrates is that the Big 12 is a coach’s league. Winning in the Big 12 comes down to the quality of the head coach. This might change—maybe TCU or Colorado or Texas Tech flexes its recruiting to some new level and pulls away from the pack—but most likely, for the next decade or so, winning the Big 12 will be about coaching. In an ideal universe, sure, Iowa State will turn its execution and preparedness and aggression into better recruiting hauls, but even if they never do, you can go a long way by getting the right players into the right culture at the right program. You can’t win a national championship without spectacular athletes, or at least you couldn’t in the four-team playoff era, but what Iowa State has can take Iowa State a long way. The same thing has made Kansas State a perennial conference contender, and it has BYU playing high-quality football so far this fall.
Rocco Becht Has Star Potential
Brock Purdy isn’t going to happen again. Brock Purdy isn’t going to happen again. Brock Purdy isn’t going to happen again. We must remind ourselves that Brock Purdy isn’t going to happen again.
But Rocco Becht might end up being just as good of a college QB?
Six games into Purdy’s sophomore season, he’d thrown for eleven touchdowns, three interceptions, 9.0 yards per attempt, and a 70% completion percentage.
Six games into Becht’s sophomore season, he’s thrown for ten touchdowns, three interceptions, 9.1 yards per attempt, and a 66% completion percentage.
Schedules are different, and Purdy’s offensive scheme had him throwing the ball more often than Becht, but if you put a quarterback into Brock Purdy’s old habitat and give him stats like Purdy’s, comparisons are going to be made. Becht’s on track right now to get peripheral Heisman talk next preseason. That kind of thing goes a long way for a program’s branding. It goes a long way towards generating attention, a valuable currency in college football. We don’t need Rocco Becht to be as good as Brock Purdy was, and we certainly don’t need him to be as good as Brock Purdy is now. But if Becht can keep pace with Purdy’s development and Iowa State can keep winning games, Becht can become as well-known as someone like Will Howard was last year. That does things for Iowa State, provided they can keep Becht in Ames for another season or two.
The Schedule Is Still Backloaded
The Big 12 favorite status isn’t a lie. It’s not only tied to everybody’s current record. Looking at everybody’s remaining games, Iowa State has the best chance to win this conference, and the >50% chance of a playoff berth is probably real. (We’re curious about those first CFP Rankings, but we aren’t seeing any indications which suggest Iowa State would be ranked significantly far from eighth right now, which is where our model would expect them to be.)
Relatedly, the Utah game is looking more manageable than it did a month ago. Rising’s out for the season (new injury—leg, in addition to the finger), and the Ute defense hasn’t played any better than the Cyclones’ so far. The win in Provo last fall is only one data point, but it’s an encouraging one when it comes to performing at altitude. Meanwhile, Kansas is dangerous but 1–5, Cincinnati is fine but not any better than UCF, UCF can’t be taken lightly but has more athleticism than it has cohesion, and the Texas Tech game’s in Ames right after a rivalry week for the Red Raiders and a week off for ISU.
At the moment, Movelor, our model’s rating system, has Iowa State favored by 15.5, 12, 11, 16, 2.5, and 3, with those last two the Utah and K-State games. The margin for error increases as games get further away, but we have Iowa State finishing the regular season 12–0 in 27% of simulations, 11–1 in another 34%, and 10–2 (the worst regular season record at which they could conceivably make the playoff) 24% of the time. Iowa State is 85% likely to finish the regular season 10–2 or better. If Iowa State can finish 11–1, they have an 86% playoff chance. Take care of business against UCF on Saturday and those numbers will probably grow.
The rest of the season, then, is four take–care–of–business games followed by (most likely) four big tests, beginning with a trip to Salt Lake City and finishing with a playoff debut. That’s quite a fourth quarter and overtime if the Cyclones can keep earning those opportunities.
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The preseason AP polls are out for both men’s and women’s basketball, and the Cyclones are fifth on the men’s side and eighth among the women. Kenpom, our favorite men’s basketball rating system, has ISU seventh, projected for somewhere around a 22–9 regular season record, a 13–7 conference mark, and a top-four finish in the Big 12. Plenty more to come on both those teams, but nobody’s sleeping on either of them nationally.
Adding to the basketball excitement, Killyan Toure commited on Saturday, completing Iowa State’s 2025 class. Toure’s a bit more of an unknown than the three earlier commits, a Frenchman with some semi-pro experience who’s playing at Brewster Academy in New Hampshire. Conveniently, Iowa State’s basketball recruiting is in a place where their interest in Toure is encouraging in and of itself. Context points towards Toure being pretty good.
The men’s class is ranked second by the 247Sports Composite. This is nowhere near as big a deal as it would be in football—recruiting rankings are less accurate in basketball, and transfers are more prevalent—but it’s better to be ranked second than third.
