One major problem that ISU has, year in and year out is overall team talent. Not every coaching staff at State is horrible at recruiting. They aren't new to it. My question is: is there an organic reason why State lacks talent on a regular basis? Is ISU too hard to get into academically? Is Ames too close to cornfields (AKA "boring" to pull in top prospects? Is the CLIMATE bad enough that that negative (November games) outweighs Ames' limited # of other attractions? As an outsider, I'm wondering if too tough academic standards might be a root of many other problems.
COLUMN: 5 thoughts on the CyHawk beatdown
- Thread starter ChrisMWilliams
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ISU is a northern school in a southern based conference.
Lots of players in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc, but we play no league games in those states. So hard to pull kids from there. ISU football never visits
So we have to convince kids to come from Texas and Florida, to forsake the SEC or Texas/Oklahoma schools to come play at ISU. Long trip for them
Its no coincidence that Nebraska has had a rough go of it since moving to the Big 10.
Texas was a fertile ground for them, harder to convince kids come north and play in Lincoln, when families in Texas will not get to see their kid live.
No options to change it, but I do believe that is part of it. Also adding Houston to the conference will only make it worse from a Texas recruiting perspective. Cincinnati will help it however in my opinion
Nebraska 's recruiting hasn't suffered and they still pull in recruits from TX and CA along with other fertile areas including Louisiana. Their biggest problem is QB play and adapting to a much more physical league. They've always had talent but they can't keep their defensive front 7 healthy and move the football with any consistency due to mediocre QB play
Then I will return to the relatively stringent academic admissions standard. State has a reputation for sound academics, as all the State grads on here know. IS that a factor working against getting top flight talent to Ames?
Earlier someone posted that there was no excuse for State to at least have big, good OLinemen. I agree with that, over at Iowa City, the emphasis is on developing OLine players.
Earlier someone posted that there was no excuse for State to at least have big, good OLinemen. I agree with that, over at Iowa City, the emphasis is on developing OLine players.
Successive quick three and outs are about as bad as turnovers.
Being an AD is tough. You have to give a head coach long enough to recruit their own players and get their new system all installed and running efficiently, but after that has happened you need to know when it's been long enough to know that this coach isn't going to ever get it done.
With Rhoads, I think JP waited one or two years too long to send him packing. An AD needs to decide after about 4 or 5 years if the program appears to be headed in the right direction or not and make the call.
Look at KF. It was a good thing they gave him 4-5 years before canning him. Same goes for CMC. You can't make any harsh judgments about him after 2 games. He has very little on both lines to do anything right now. Tucker is the only guy on ISU's OL or DL that would play at Iowa last night if he was on their roster. You just can't compete with the opposition when that is the case.
With Rhoads, I think JP waited one or two years too long to send him packing. An AD needs to decide after about 4 or 5 years if the program appears to be headed in the right direction or not and make the call.
Look at KF. It was a good thing they gave him 4-5 years before canning him. Same goes for CMC. You can't make any harsh judgments about him after 2 games. He has very little on both lines to do anything right now. Tucker is the only guy on ISU's OL or DL that would play at Iowa last night if he was on their roster. You just can't compete with the opposition when that is the case.
Um...obviously I was going with the "why don't they drop Miami(Ohio), FCS team, etc. ISU may not have been competitive 'this year' with them but at least we were most of the last 10 years and in a Power 5 conference. But, whatever.....
Nobody is going to hold up Iowa as the gold standard in recruiting. If I remember correctly, they were ranked somewhere in the 50's last year. They get it done with a combination of adept talent recognition, coach and system retention and luck.
And always seeming to find a better than "solid" QB. In the Big 10 that is really all you need to be competitive.
This all goes back to the money, doesn't it? Everyone schedules two scrub teams and one good team that they rotate home and home with. If Iowa scheduled one scrub team and two teams that they had to go home and home with they would lose money.
That's why the answer to your question is always "Let's drop Iowa State" and never "Let's drop a scrub team"
I consider myself pretty level headed... I dinged Iowa mightily last year because their schedule was horrible. But I didn't blame them for it. It's just what's going to start happening in these giant conferences, some teams are going to get super easy schedules. You can take that into consideration when ranking teams, but you can't blame them. I would love for everyone to play every team in the conference like we do, but we're well beyond that being a possibility.
I know you (CW) likely don't have any control over the captions used in the USA-Today picture, but the caption is so wrong it's funny ... it refers to 4 Hawkeye players making the tackle (when there are only 3 in the picture) and two of them are supposedly wearing the same number. 