The 2020 Iowa State Cyclones are going to make a big push to become the 5th Midwestern team to win a Big 12 championship in this upcoming season. They may not have it in them, God knows the league could be competitive this season (or be hampered in a dozen fashions by COVID-19), but their … [Read more…]
Heading into 2019 one of the big questions for Iowa State was, “who’s going to replace Hakeem Butler?” The “infrastructure of the team looked stronger than at any previous point under head coach Matt Campbell, they were returning all five starters on the offensive line, Brock “pump fake Purdy” at quarterback, and then had three … [Read more…]
Some of these breakdowns will include single teams, others will pack together multiple squads. I intended for every post to be the latter but the Jayhawk posted ended up longer than expected. Building a Big 12 contender from the Midwest is something that has rarely coincided with using “space force” tactics. Mark Mangino got the … [Read more…]
Today it was announced that Arkansas is firing head coach Chad Morris, meaning that they’ll be joining Florida State and probably USC in hunting for their next head coach in the upcoming silly season. Chad Morris is a fellow who’s had a major impact on the game of football, even without having much in the … [Read more…]
Now that the Big 12 season is underway, there’s been a few interesting stories and subplots cropping up across the league. I figured it’d be fun to hit on a few of the particularly relevant ones that have been cropping up. Trejan Bridges to safety? This one looks like a nothing burger, but in a … [Read more…]
I’ve written about the Wisconsin Badgers quite a few times over the last few years. I may mention them again soon to relate the full story of this exchange I had with Gary Patterson: The Badgers also came up in this recent piece where I described which teams derive the greatest strength from monopolizing in-state … [Read more…]
Matt Campbell has been pretty excited this offseason about four developments within the Iowa State program. First, they have their OL more or less set with all five starters from 2018 returning. The lineup they relied on down the stretch was solid and all returns but they also have potential upside if some of their … [Read more…]
Last Friday at Football Study Hall I broke down OSU’s evolving approach to offense and contextualized it somewhat within their plan for attacking the Cyclone Inverted Tampa-2 defense last season. That post started as me determining to look back and try to fully grok how it was that OSU was able to drop 42 points … [Read more…]
Yes, I’m going to volunteer for this annual beating once more and break down every recruiting class in the Big 12. I started with the Texas class, which you can read about over at Inside Texas, next I move through the Big 12 going from north to south. This is Matt Campbell’s highest rated class … [Read more…]
At the 2016 Big 12 media days Matt Campbell was a little resistant to the idea that the goal at Iowa State was to build a Midwestern-Style football team to take on the Texas-based squads elsewhere around the league. However, I came back and revisited the topic at the 2018 Big 12 media days and … [Read more…]