GAME DAY: Iowa State at Oklahoma State
Thanks to consecutive wins over Kansas and TCU, the new mission in the Iowa State locker room is to become just the third team in 134 seasons to pull off a nine-win season. But first thing’s first and that’s becoming just the 13th Cyclone squad to achieve eight wins by knocking off Oklahoma State on Saturday in Stillwater. It’s been a rollercoaster season for head coach Matt Campbell’s team, which became the first team to start 5-0 after playing in the Aer Lingus Football Classic. However, the Cyclones dropped their next four games before reeling off consecutive wins to sit at 7-4 overall and 4-4 in Big 12 play. A win against the Cowboys would also give ISU a winning conference record for the eighth time in Campbell’s 10 seasons at the helm. Prior to his arrival, the program had just one winning conference season in 20 years. The Cyclones have already enjoyed unprecedented success with 25 wins since the start of 2023, setting a new school record for wins in a three-year period. Iowa State comes into Saturday fresh off a dominating effort against Kansas in a game it never trailed in after scoring the game’s first 17 points. It owned a decisive 39:08 to 20:52 edge in time of possession, racking up 462 yards of total offense. Playing with three more safeties down due to injury and only Marcus Neal remaining as a starting defensive back from the start of the season, it turned out the Cyclones’ best defense was the offense getting back on track. In doing so, they also snapped a three-game losing streak to their long-time conference rivals.
On the opposing sideline, Saturday will mark Senior Day but also the end of a long 2025 campaign for an Oklahoma State program going through a changing of the guard from Mike Gundy to newly hired Chad Morris, who will leave North Texas to take over starting next season. Stuck in the middle of that is interim head coach Doug Meacham, tasked with leading the Cowboys one final time against the Cyclones. In eight games since Gundy was fired and he assumed the lead duties, the results in Stillwater haven’t been that much different than they were before. OSU still hasn’t won a game since the month of August when it opened the season with a 27-7 triumph over UT Martin. However, the Cowboys have shown some signs of life in recent weeks and dropped a pair of games by one-score margins at UCF (17-14) and home to Kansas State (14-6). But this is still just not a very good team, and especially on the offensive side of the ball where the Cowboys rank 132nd in scoring offense averaging just 14.3 points per game and 127th in total offense with less than 300 yards per outing. They’ve scored more than 20 points just once over the past seven games. Oklahoma State is not much better on the opposite side of the ball and rank in the 100s in both scoring and total defense. It’s hard to gauge if it will be more of the same this weekend, or if OSU will be that desperate team playing with nothing to lose and fighting to win one for the seniors and Meacham, a long-time assistant coach under Gundy who’s in his 12th season in Stillwater and graduated from the school in 1988. Morris was announced as the next head coach this week, so much of the talk will be on how he will soon take the reins. That will likely involve a mass exodus of transfers (14 have already announced their intention to leave) and a near-complete overhaul of the roster via the portal. So, I’m leaning towards this being a game the Cowboys just want to get over so the players and coaches can start considering their next steps.
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