Who knows if Iowa State will have an improved football team in 2023.
It would be disingenuous to say I have a vibe either way after Saturday’s Spring Game at Jack Trice Stadium, but it is hard to not be impressed by some of the things we saw in the condensed offense vs. defense format.
The offensive line looked more physical, but who knows what that means against a Spring Game defense. Jirehl Brock carried the football and looked great after his season-ending injury last season. The defense was dominant at times, and got diced by the offense at others.
There isn’t a ton to take away from this one individual day in Ames, but it is easier to take something away from the totality of 15 practices for the program’s head man.
“I don’t look at it as just today,” said Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell. “I look at the collective whole, your 15 practices. Honestly, I think you’ve seen great growth from our football team. The one thing I really appreciate about our group, I thought our coaches, from everybody in the organization, the goals we had set out in January to grow ourselves forward, you’ve really seen that happen through the first eight weeks of January and February to really all spring practice. I think a collective win for our program from our coaches and our players.”
Iowa State is going to take any win it can get after last year’s 4-8 season that stalled the momentum of a rising program. You have to take any win you can get when you’ve got a young team, and Campbell has a young team.
Of the 12 players who caught passes on Saturday, Brock and fellow tailback Eli Sanders are the only ones who consistently saw significant snaps a year ago, and Brock’s season was abbreviated.
There were 31 Cyclones who recorded a tackle in the spring game, and I think you could consider one, linebacker Gerry Vaughn, a veteran.
That’s a lot of new faces.
It won’t be that way once this team is all back together this August considering a handful of Iowa State’s starters on both sides of the ball, including wide receivers Jaylin Noel and Dimitri Stanley, cornerbacks T.J. Tampa and Myles Purchase, tight end DeShawn Hanika, defensive tackle Isaiah Lee and others, did not play.
We know what those guys can do.
Saturday was about all the other guys getting another opportunity to show what they can do, and to do it on a stage in front of people who aren’t affiliated with the football program.
This day, like the 14 days of practice before it, was about growth.
“When you’re young, you grow forward,” Campbell said. “You saw it as a team a year ago and I don’t think we’ve stopped. I think we’ve only accelerated it since January. When you are young, the nice thing as coaches is you can personally see the growth happening. Even today, there was a lot of real positive growth forward. Believe me, the growth process isn’t done. There’s a lot of work to do. We’re going to have to have a great summer. We’re going to have to have a phenomenal fall camp. The challenges aren’t getting any easier from the first game of the season, a really great UNI team coming in here and they’ve been a great challenge and a great opponent to us. We’ve got 12 opponents and they’ve all got great talent and great players. We’re going to have to continue to grow forward to be ready for the challenges coming.”
The big challenges for this program will arrive on those 12 Saturdays this fall, but its already faced adversity this offseason with coaching changes on the offensive side of the ball and just the general noise that follows a disappointing season.
The next challenge will be pushing momentum forward into the summer, especially with players set to take their final exams and return home before rejoining the team in May for workouts.
“When we’ve been at our best, I feel like we’ve mastered that,” Campbell said of carrying momentum through this period. “When we’re doing really well, you’ve got to take the humility of what did we do well through 15 practices individually and where are your gaps? We’ll look at that from a schematic standpoint. Where do we need to be better? Each individual, starting on Monday, we’re going to meet with every kid in our program, where are you at, what do you need to do well, how do we move forward. We’ll finish with exams then we’ll come back here at the end of May and we’re going to have to attack it no different than we did in January or February. There’s a lot of work to do. Now, it becomes personal growth until we come back together in August as a football team.”
