Mailbag: Examining Iowa State football's late clock management vs. Iowa in the Cy-Hawk game
AMES − There are a couple of ways to look at Iowa State’s 20-13 loss to Iowa on Saturday.
One way would be to say the Cyclones played it close and, despite a lot of mistakes and even more youth, had a chance to win it late.
Another would be to say Iowa dominated the game, let Iowa State hang around with some false hope and ultimately slammed the door shut.
Iowa State coach Matt Campbell appears to be in the camp of the former.
“I’m really proud of our football team,” Campbell said. “I think this is the best we’ve played in this football game since we’ve been here.”
Peterson: Iowa State's Campbell called Saturday's game his team's best Cy-Hawk performance
That’s debatable, but the final score and Campbell’s 1-6 record against Iowa are not.
The Cyclones head into a road game at Ohio next week with a 1-1 record and an offense that struggled mightily against a very good Iowa defense.
There’s lots to unpack, so let’s get to your questions in this week’s postgame mailbag.
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Clock management. That’s one frustration.
To set the scene: Iowa State took over on its own 20-yard line with 9 minutes, 52 seconds to go and down 14 points.
The Cyclones then went 14 plays and 80 yards in 6 minutes, 59 seconds (while using one timeout) to score on a 16-yard toss from Rocco Becht to Jayden Higgins.
That put the Cyclones down seven with 2:53 to go and two timeouts left to take. The Iowa State defense got the three-and-out it needed on the ensuing possession, but so did their Hawkeye counterparts on the Cyclones’ following possession to end the game.
Here’s what Campbell had to say:
“The biggest thing you wanted to do regardless of what anybody else wants is you want to score the touchdown. The fool is, ‘Go fast and be wrong,’ or how about do it right and give yourself a chance to win the game, which is exactly what we did.
“The only thing there were a couple of plays there where we had probably had a chance to maybe score a little earlier. Again, we’ll learn from it and grow from it, but at the end of the day, the response to when it didn’t work to come back and make it work is all that really matters. Gave ourselves a great chance to win the game.”
So Campbell isn’t exactly wrong – it is indeed better to go slow and score than to go fast and not.
But it is possible to go fast and score. That’s sort of what football has largely become.
That, though, misses the real question of that moment: Is Iowa State capable of playing fast and scoring in a high-pressure situation?
It would appear the coaching staff didn’t think so.
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It’s probably worth splitting the difference here. Iowa State didn’t need to be in a full-blown 2-minute drill, but soaking 7 minutes off the clock is far from ideal in that situation. At best, Iowa State was going to get one final possession to try to tie, and it probably could have gotten a second if it would have scored faster.
Again, score faster is an easy thing to say, but so is we can’t score fast.
Probably needs to be some nuance and give and take there.
When is Matt Campbell going to accept that he just can’t win in the margins consistently?
I don’t think Campbell is going to soothe a lot of upset feelings by declaring this was the best his team has played in his seven Cy-Hawk games, but I do think it’s worth thinking about why he would say that.
The first reason is that because maybe it’s true. Iowa State beat Iowa last year, but no one would call that game a masterpiece. In the five other matchups, Iowa State lost by double-digits three times, had two players collide into each other on a late punt return in 2019 and lost in OT in 2017.
So there’s an argument, I suppose, that it’s just honesty.
I don’t think that was likely the motivation, though.
Campbell, as he’s noted and will undoubtedly continue to note, has an incredibly young team. An incredibly young team that features some of the best recruiting classes in school history.
So staying upbeat, positive and optimistic with that locker room makes sense. It makes sense to keep them engaged and bought in for this season, and it makes sense to keep them focusing forward. Because whatever happens the rest of the way in 2023, it’s not hard to see the potential down the road for this team.
They’ve got a lot of good young players. Maybe even special young players.
More: Five numbers that told the story of Iowa State football's loss to Iowa in the 2023 Cy-Hawk game
That, though, is going to do little to satisfy the current frustrations. And the current frustrations are never just the current frustrations. As they always are, they’re influenced by past frustrations – like squandering the best roster in school history in 2021 and going 4-8 in 2022.
So leaning on "process" publicly in 2023 is going to be a lot more difficult than it was in the pre-Fiesta Bowl days.
Ultimately, I doubt Campbell cares about that much. He’s got years of runway with athletic director Jamie Pollard, and any fans feeling antsy now are going to say they always believed in Campbell if he turns this group’s potential into heaps of wins in a year or two.
But if Iowa State can’t deliver on "winning in the margins" for a third-straight season, any frustrations with that mantra are going to be 100 percent justified.
As always, it will be decided on the field. What serves as evidence, though, might be different for Campbell (improvement) than it is for fans (wins).
If those two things converge, Iowa State is in for a surprise season. If they don’t, December will just be basketball season for the second-straight year.
Travis Hines covers Iowa State University sports for the Des Moines Register and Ames Tribune. Contact him at thines@amestrib.com or (515) 284-8000. Follow him on X at @TravisHines21.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Mailbag: Examining Iowa State's late clock management in Cy-Hawk game
