It's Gone On for Way Too Long

This one's going to be bittersweet...or even sour.

I just got through flipping channels this afternoon and finding out that Iowa State blew a 35-14 halftime lead against Kansas State and...lost to the Wildcats, 38-35, on a fourth-quarter field goal by Jack Candele.

Last week, the Cyclones lost to Oklahoma State, 35-31...after enjoying a 24-14 halftime lead against the ranked Cowboys.

Paul Rhoads' club, here in 2015 alone, also coughed up games against Iowa and TCU despite having halftime or first-quarter leads. In addition, it lost to Toledo in overtime. (Never mind that the Horned Frogs have been in the Top 25 of both the Associated Press poll and the USA Today poll all season long, the Rockets have been in both polls much of this 2015 season, and the Hawkeyes jumped into both polls at midseason and have been rocketing up both surveys ever since.)

Speaking of Hawkeyes...I checked out the Purdue-Iowa game today. The Hawks won it, 40-20, and are still undefeated. What's more, they'll play Ohio State (if not Michigan State or even Michigan) in this season's Big Ten championship game on 12-5-2015 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, IN.

Kirk Ferentz' club has turned things around from 2014 because, among many other things, he, his staff, and their players learned the value of conditioning. 

Better conditioning has helped the Hawkeyes (now 11-0) play the whole doggone game, not just the first two or three periods. (And Ferentz dialing up a few wrinkles he might not have thought of in 2014 hasn't been too bad, either.) 

If football were a two-quarter or three-quarter game, ISU would be bowl eligible right now (if that were to happen, it'd be a first since 2012, when the team finished 6-7).

Instead, it's 3-8, with a date against West Virginia remaining. 

Football ISN'T a two-or-three-quarter sport. And the Cardinal and Gold have, coming into today's action, won just 44.4% of their games...and that's dating back to 1895, when Iowa State got into the football business. 

Football mediocrity at Iowa State isn't a recent thing at all.

It's gone on for decades.

Tiresome decades. 

The best the Cyclones have done was share just two conference championships...and those happened in 1911 and 1912, when the 'Clones and Nebraska's Cornhuskers each went 2-0-1 in 1911 (2-0 apiece the next year) in the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association (the forerunner of today's Big 12 Conference). Then in 2004, I-State and Colorado, both 4-4 in conference play, split the Big 12's North Division title...but the Buffaloes, on a tiebreaker, ended up facing Oklahoma in the league's title game. (The Sooners crushed the Buffs, 42-3.)  

Think about all the outright MVIAA/Big 6/Big 7/Big 8/Big 12 football championships the men from Ames missed out on. Think about all the winning seasons left on the field.

*In 1938, ISU (then known as Iowa State College; it didn't become Iowa State University until the 1959-60 academic year) was rolling along, winning its first seven games of the year and about to get its first all-to-itself Big 6 championship ever

...but on 11-12-1938, the Cyclones traveled to Manhattan, KS (site of this afternoon's game) and played the Wildcats to a 13-13 tie. A week later, the Sooners snapped up the league title by shutting the 'Clones out, 10-0, at Clyde Williams Field in Ames, IA.

*1944 was the next year the Iowa Staters posted a winning season. It could've been a championship season, too...except Oklahoma came to Ames on 11-4-1944. 

And the Sooners stunned Mike Michalske's team, 12-7. 

State came within inches of upending the team from Norman.  

*The 1959 team was the first of two ISU clubs to post identical 7-3-0 marks.

This one could've been the first in team history to win eight games...if Dwight Nichols, Tom Watkins, and Co. could've found two more touchdowns to beat Kansas on Halloween. 

*1961 could've been I-State's third straight winning campaign...but Clay Stapleton's team got clobbered at Colorado, 34-0, on 11-25-1961. [The club's next winning season was 1965, when Iowa State came home 5-4-1. The next winning season after that was 1971...the year the Cyclones (then coached by Johnny Majors) went bowling for the first time ever, thanks to a mark of 8-3-0. A Sun Bowl loss to Louisiana State turned Iowa State's ledger to 8-4-0.]

*1976 was Earle Bruce's fourth year in Ames; he'd replaced Majors so that Johnny could head up Pittsburgh's Panthers. After three straight 4-7-0 records, Bruce got ISU back to 8-3-0. 

Even so, Iowa State could've joined Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Colorado in the Big 8 throne room. In fact, Iowa State would've replaced O-State as a league trichampion...if the Cowboys hadn't beaten the Cyclones, 42-21, yesterday in 1976.  

That failure in Stillwater prevented bowl committees from inviting ISU to a taste of postseason action that year.

*The 2000 Cyclones were the first in club annals to win a bowl game (37-29 over Pittsburgh in the Insight Bowl).

Dan McCarney's sixth season at ISU yielded eight other wins for the only current Big 12 member without an outright league football title. 

Nonetheless, if the Sage Rosenfels-Ennis Haywood-Chris Anthony-Marc Timmons-led team had a victory over Nebraska or Texas A&M or K-State, the Cyclones would've been able to claim at least a share of the top of the Big 12 North.

*Rhoads' first Cyclone team- the 2009 edition- could've come into its own Insight Bowl date with a winning record.

But Iowa State couldn't handle Missouri (the Tigers won, 34-24). Nevertheless, at the Insight Bowl, the 'Clones beat Minnesota, 14-13. 

You know how far down ISU football has come since this son of Cecil Rhoads, one of the most famous high school football coaches in Iowa history, got his first NCAA head assignment?

Paul's first game as ISU head football coach resulted in a 34-17 win over North Dakota State.

Five years later, those same Bison came back to Jack Trice Stadium in Ames, IA, and socked it to the 'Clones, 34-14.

And Iowa State led the defending Division 1-AA (okay, FCS) champs for much of the first half. 

It all comes down to conditioning. If Paul Rhoads and his assistant coaches can't find a way to get their athletes better conditioned so that the Cyclones don't continue to blow halftime leads (and, instead, can learn to put teams away when they've got those clubs on the ropes), athletic director Jamie Pollard and his bosses will have to find a staff whose members CAN AND WILL stress conditioning. 

Way I see it, maybe it's time to completely reconstruct Iowa State University football.

Yeah. I know. I'm just a football fan.

Still, I do know this: Something's wrong when the same college football program that stank when your great-grandparents were of college age, was mediocre when your grandparents could've enrolled at a university or college, couldn't win consistently when it was (or could've been) your folks' turn to attend Dear Old U, and still wasn't good enough for SportsCenter during your own college years (unless these, right now, are your college years) can't cut it today. 

#After the 1978 season, University of Iowa officials decided to rebuild their school's gridiron team (it had suffered its 17th consecutive nonwinning campaign). They successfully pried Hayden Fry off the U of North Texas campus; his third season at Iowa resulted in a Big Ten cochampionship and the Hawkeyes' first Rose Bowl appearance since the 1958 season.

Fry, after previously saving UNT football (and doing the same at SMU before that), became the winningest head football coach in U of I history. After the 1998 season, he stepped away from Iowa City 143-89-6. [His successor there, Ferentz (one of Fry's old assistant coaches), is now 126-85 at Iowa.]

#27 years ago, Kansas State University's potentates decided to take their institution's football program right back to the drawing board after Sports Illustrated called K-State football the worst of all major NCAA grid teams during the 20th Century. (The Wildcats didn't win a single game in 1987 or 1988, won just three times combined in 1985 and 1986, and since America's television era began in the late 1940s, had racked up just four winning seasons- 1953, 1954, 1970, and 1982. And only the '82 effort came with a bowl bid attached- the first one in KSU history.) 

So...they called another of Fry's assistant coaches, Bill Snyder, and asked him if he'd like to resurrect what had been labeled a "basket case." 

Snyder took the Kansas State job...and got the 'Cats a winning season in 1991. He followed that up with the 2003 Big 12 championship (the Big Purple upset heavily-favored Oklahoma, 35-7) and a share of the league's 2012 title with those same Sooners.

Bill tried to retire after the 2005 season...but when school officials realized Ron Prince wasn't cutting it in Manhattan, they culled Snyder out of retirement in time for the 2009 cycle.

Iowa's old offensive coordinator now stands at 191-100-1...all of that at K-State.

#After the Southwest Conference broke up following the 1995-96 academic year, the Big 8 took in four of the now-defunct league's members: Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, and Baylor. (A&M split for the Southeastern Conference after the 2011-12 academic cycle...and took Missouri with it.)

The team from Waco, TX instantly became the whipping boys in the newly-reformulated Big 12. Things got to the point where even Iowa State could count on an automatic W whenever the schedule called for the Bears and Cyclones to taste it up. 

Chuck Reedy (remember him?) was the last head coach to give Bearball a winning record in the 20th Century; his 1994 and 1995 Baylor teams turned the trick. Over the next dozen years, Dave Roberts, Kevin Steele, and former NFL star Guy Morriss tried to get Baylor football back to where it could play in bowl games...let alone where Grant Teaff (the head coach in Waco from 1972 to 1992) took it: To the top.

They couldn't match Reedy or Teaff. 

The top brass at the world's largest United Methodist school yanked Art Briles off the campus of another old SWC school, the University of Houston.

Briles followed a pair of 4-8 showings with Baylor's first winning record of the current century- a 7-6 finish in 2010 (the Bears lost the Texas Bowl). Since then, his high-powered offense has produced a league title in 2013 and a piece of last year's Big 12 top prize (shared with TCU, a- you guessed it- one-time SWC member).

Art will be 64-35 at Baylor if his Bears knock the Cowboys from the unbeaten ranks tonight. (At Houston, where he coached from 2003 to 2007, his Cougars were 34-29.) 

So, there you are...if Iowa, Kansas State, and Baylor could take steps to clean up the rot that had set in on football at each of those schools and turn those teams into consistent winners and even champions, Iowa State certainly can, too.

Cyclone fans deserve it.  

By the way...a big shout-out to the people who put www.sports-reference.com/cfb together. Most of the information in this post came from that site.

Now You Can't Tell the Conferences without a Scorecard

I saw this in my local newspaper and I cringed.

It was announced last week that Louisville will quit the Big East Conference (the Cardinals just got through tying Cincinnati and Rutgers for the league football title) and, effective in two years, go into the Atlantic Coast Conference...the exact same decision made earlier this year by Pittsburgh and Syracuse.

And Louisville's decision came after (1) Notre Dame decided to take all of its sports- except football, of course; can't jeopardize that contract with NBC- to the ACC from the Big East and (2) Rutgers itself decided to trade its membership in the Big East for a chance to become the Big Ten Conference's 14th member. (Maryland- a charter member of the ACC, a league that goes back to the 1953-54 academic year- will start doing its thing in the Big Ten in 2014, same year Rutgers officially becomes a member of the league that gave us Nile Kinnick, Dave Winfield, Magic Johnson, and Katie Smith.)

And I'm wondering to myself: "When will all of this end?"   

I thought it was going to end with the Big 12 Conference taking in TCU and West Virginia...a move that still leaves that circuit with ten schools, what with Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, and Texas A&M all saying "bye bye." (I still believe that Texas A&M and Missouri wanted the bigger paychecks Southeastern Conference membership could provide...and that Nebraska wanted to go into the Big Ten because it got tired of losing to Texas in football. Oh, well...)

All of these ACC moves during this 21st Century have been all about that green folding stuff...especially the kind that football can generate. [Remember when the league snatched Miami (FL), Virginia Tech, and Boston College from the Big East during 2004-05?]

The Big East retaliated by prying Cincy, Louisville, and South Florida (they've got football teams) as well as DePaul and Marquette (schools that used to compete on the gridiron) out of Conference USA.

And then C-USA made up for that by yanking Rice, SMU, and Tulsa out of the Western Athletic Conference.

In turn, the WAC enticed New Mexico State and Utah State out of the Sun Belt Conference.

Here we are, almost a decade after the ACC sought to prove it could compete in football.

And I'm wondering to myself: "When will all of this end?"   

I remember when the Big East got started (1979-80, same year as the Horizon League and the Atlantic Sun Conference, neither of which wages a football championship). The BEC was billed as the East Coast alternative to the ACC, then- as now- the most respected circuit when it comes to men's basketball.

The Big East was the league the sports reporters up in the Northeast (especially in the New York City area) had been on their knees begging for.

And they were licking it up, all right. Between 1979-80 and 1990-91, Big East squads had won as many NCAA Division 1 men's hoops tourneys as did ACC contingents- two apiece, with North Carolina's 1982 win and North Carolina State's 1983 conquest followed by Georgetown winning it all in 1984...then getting evicted from the throne room a year later by Villanova.

All four of those championships ranked right up there in NCAA history.

At that very moment, both the ACC and BEC were building good resumes in women's basketball (at a time when the SEC and the then Pac-10 were the most respected leagues)...but the championships wouldn't start coming until the middle 1990s, when North Carolina got it done (1994), only to lose its title a year later to Connecticut.

By then, Big East officials had started offering their schools a football championship...so that they wouldn't play as independents anymore.

And it looked good at first...as long as Miami (FL) was the dominant team in the Big East.

1991 was the first year Big East teams fought for a football championship. A year later, the SEC went from 10 members to 12...by taking in football indie South Carolina and by getting Arkansas to jump the Southwest Conference.

The SEC leaders found out they could now split their circuit into divisions and put on a championship football game.     

Within five years, other Division 1-A conferences sought to duplicate the SEC and get their own grid title games going. When the SWC imploded in 1996, the Big 8 took in four of its schools and became the Big 12. The Mid-American Conference expanded to 12 schools. (It's now got 14.) C-USA took in Houston and eventually got other universities to join.

And the WAC ballooned to 16 members...only to become a joke to sports reporters and talk-show hosts. (In 1999, eight WAC schools got tired of being laughed at by the Jim Romes of the world and formed the Mountain West.)

But now, with this current amount of movement going on among D-1-A institutions, the WAC is celebrating its 50th birthday with a limp...all because it might have to drop football.

Idaho and New Mexico State have decided to go it alone (a la Notre Dame and original WAC member BYU- one of the Mountain West's charter members). And this after Fresno State, Hawaii, and Nevada left the WAC in time for this current school year...duplicating Boise State in the process by going to the Mountain West.

WAC newcomers Texas State and Texas-San Antonio are already ticketed for other leagues...like C-USA or the Sun Belt.

Oh, well.

The next several years really are going to be interesting as conferences and schools alike prove it's really all about The Money. 

After all, if schools and conferences won't be loyal to each other, how in the world can their fans expect to show continued loyalty?

And I'm still wondering to myself: "When will all of this end?"