While I'm 40 and liked ISU during the Walden years, I didn't really become a fan until college, which was the start of the McCarney era. Unlike CW, I can remember when Seneca and ISU stomped Nebraska and beat ranked TTU ("the run game") where it felt like ISU is actually going to be nationally relevant and can compete for conference titles. The division setup helped, but the shift of power to the South was just happening, and it was not nearly at the level it was a couple years later. We all know where things went from there.
Maybe because I wasn't heavily invested in ISU football in the Walden era I absolutely hate the nut cup talk. Reality is we are in a tough spot to win, similar to the Kansas schools, Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern, etc. yet add on decades of poor AD work with the football program. There's nothing magical or cursed. A stacked deck and bad management equals failure, with the occasional painful close call that every program has, just magnified when those are the apex of decades of bad football.
Pollard has put us in the position to be competitive as long as we have damn good coaching, which we also have. History is pretty clear in college football. Over the long run good coaches win and bad coaches lose. Yes there are outliers and some differences based on school natural advantages, but whether it's Campbell's ISU, Snyder's K-State, Mason's Minnesota and Kansas, Shula's Alabama, Blake's Oklahoma or Strong's Texas, no job is going to carry a bad coach, and no job is going to smother a great coach over time.
In terms of the OSU-Campbell concerns, I do not claim to have intimate knowledge of any of this, but have had a fair amount of interaction with one of the members of the staff. Here are my impressions about how Campbell and his staff think:
- They KNOW they can and will win big here. It's just a question of how long it will take to build what they want. The two ingredients they need to have are an AD and fanbase that are dedicated to building a winner. They feel like that's in place.
-They are in this to BUILD something, not be part of something. They want to achieve something special and unprecedented. Not that they couldn't do that at tOSU, but they feel like ISU is ripe to do this.
