Head coach Bill Fennelly of the Iowa State Cyclones reacts during the first quarter against the Colorado Buffaloes at the CU Events Center on January 14, 2026 in Boulder, Colorado. (Photo by Andrew Wevers/Getty Images)
There you have it, one of the worst weeks of Iowa State basketball in recent memory is said and done. The men got waxed 84-63 at Kansas and fell victim to a court storming in a 79-70 loss at Cincinnati over the weekend. Not only did the women’s week not go much better, it actually went even worse, falling to five consecutive losses after losing 68-60 at Colorado and 86-58 at Oklahoma State.
Anybody that tuned into even a minute of any of those four disasters does not need me to take a deep dive into what happened, but what can each team do to right the ship?
Some of my colleagues would argue that the women’s team’s issues are not fixable at the moment. That’s where they’re wrong, there is always a fix if you are willing to go to the measures it takes to make it happen.
It was a worse road trip week than something out of a Griswold storyline. Thankfully, for the fans, the sun rose again the next day and there will be another week of opportunities.
Lack of dimensions
The women’s team has faced allegations of one-dimensionally dishing the ball to Audi Crooks, and up until this week I defended them. This week was the final straw personally, as injuries to Addy Brown and Arianna Jackson have made a once effective offense inefficient.
Both Brown and Jackson are players that alter the game primarily in ways outside of scoring; however, the scoring hole left in their absence is gaping.
It was not the combined 18 points per game that was making a difference, it was the fact that if they had an open look, they would take it and have a high chance to make it.
Other than Jada Williams, there has not been another player around Crooks that has shown a willingness to throw up 10 shots a night and an ability to make half of them without Brown and Jackson. While I firmly do not believe the team is one-dimensional at full-strength, they certainly have been without Brown and Jackson.
It is time for someone to step up and look to be a double-digit scorer for the Cyclones, because swarming Crooks is a viable strategy when there are three players on the court without a score-first mentality.
Five losses in a row is a stretch that is swiftly dragging the Cyclones down the NCAA Tournament seeding charts. If the leak is not patched in the next couple of weeks, this team is at risk of missing the big dance.
First Missteps
The perfect 16-0 start for the men was finally broken with a pair of road Big 12 losses. This team’s issues appear much more fixable and give off the vibe of a temporary falter rather than a complete collapse.
This team has struggled all year with playing peak basketball during the first few minutes. Sometimes teams start slow, I was a part of plenty of those types of teams. It’s near impossible to make players that slowly kick into gear get hot fast. What has been successful in these scenarios is switching up the starting lineup.
If it were up to me, I would open up the games with a couple of center-less minutes, run the floor and try to get easy transition buckets and open threes. Once a few players settle in, you sub in your center and slow the game down.
The turnovers have also been brutal of late. While 12 turnovers in each of the last two games is not the end of the world, it’s how those turnovers have happened. Half of them were preventable with a little bit of court awareness. Back to the basket strips and silly forced passes to contested teammates have left possessions on the board.
On the bright side, lineup tweaks and a little more awareness is a much more fixable issue than altering the philosophy of players that have spent their whole lives playing a different way. That is a task the women will have to tackle and tackle soon.
A lot of people on social media have said it is time to ask the hard questions. Well, I am not in the press conferences, so there is no way for me to ask them. What I can do is take a stab at answering them. The sky is certainly not falling for the men’s team yet, but the women’s team is running out of time to get things figured out.
