ISU Fball Head Coaches

ClonerJams

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Life as an ISU fan has hardened me
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Drew0311

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Out of curio
its v. sad that McCarney is considered one of the greatest of all time coaches at iowa state with a 39% winning %.

that just how sad the history of iowa state football is


Out of curiosity how old are you? Nothing against you but the younger generation has no idea how poss poor our facilities were back then compared to everyone else. I was an Iowa State ball boy and the locker room has rusty lockers in the old Okson building. It was like a high school in the locker room. Probably worse than some high schools. Mac finally got them to invest in facilities and I think the big 8 started to pressure teams like us to get up to speed. K State was really bad also. So our old coaches may have had horrible record but that was mostly do to us not keeping up back then. Campbell has way more to work with.
 

inCyteful

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Didn't ISU have penalties/sanctions stemming from recruiting violations under the Criner staff (ultimately led to his firing)?

Edit: Simple search says they lost 4 scholarships and put on probation for 2 years. Thought it was harsher than that and ultimately leading Walden's demise. Looks like that wasn't the case.
What sucked about those sanctions is we cheated and still sucked.

Things were not finer.

We had some flag footballs games at the stadium that looked better.
 

madguy30

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And some of the worst beatings in our history I think.

Walden and Criner are at least in the conversation for beat downs.

Mac got 70 hung on him a couple of times by Nebraska.

He's also the owner of the one-for '97 team. They were BAD.
 

cyballrulz93

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Mac's win totals actually went down his first three years (95-3, 96-2, 97-1). Bumped up to 4 wins in 98 and the streak-breaker win at Iowa probably bought him more time. It's amazing how much patience Gene Smith had with him. If those results happen in this day and age he's out the door after year 3.
 
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Drew0311

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What sucked about those sanctions is we cheated and still sucked.

Things were not finer.

We had some flag footballs games at the stadium that looked better.


Everyone else was doing the same thing. They went after a bunch of schools like Iowa State so they could leave the big boys alone and act like they were doing something. Jeff Braswell got screwed over so hard for that nonsense. NCAA basically cheated him out of a career. He was a monster
 

BCClone

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Not exactly sure.
I know everyone talks about the turnaround CMC has done here and well deserving, but Coach Mac really did something close to a miracle. Granted, I have even said he benefitted from a weak North Division and getting to skip OUT to two years at a time. That being said though, there was nothing here for Mac to build on, it literally was a **** show.

I'm not trying to take away from CMC, but JP really did start to put some nice pieces in place before CMC got here. I started at ISU in 1990, watching the program go from bad to a laughing stock while I was at ISU, was pretty disheartening. I graduated in 1994, after watching 0-10-1 that previous season. The fact that Mac had us in a bowl game 6 years later is pretty miraculous, no matter who we were playing.

OK, all that being said, that list is really depressing.
You saw it go from decent to laughingstock. 89 we were 6-5 I think. That’s not bad.
 

nrg4isu

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I'm not apologizing for our entire history of bad football... however, we have not had the benefit of for example the big 10 west schedule. Nebraska and Oklahoma were nearly every year, Texas pretty often as well.

Our new league will hopefully mean sustained success in the win column. Hopefully we can erase some of those godawful stats that the media likes to bring up so often (never 10 win season, conference championship 1906 or whatever it was)
 

CascadeClone

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You cant understate what Mac did. I graduated in 94. In 95, Walden went 0-10-1 and wasnt really close to competitive in most games. They were hopeless.

Mac came in and pumped a million gallons of optimism and belief out of an absolutely dry well. He might have been the only person anywhere with the level of perseverance and personality needed to bring ISU out of the 9th level of hell.
 
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Land Shark

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You cant understate what Mac did. I graduated in 94. In 95, Walden went 0-10-1 and wasnt really competitive in most games. They were hopeless.
They were really bad. What was also bad was we had a locker room with mice in the corners eating at shoulder pads, maybe 6 working showers in the locker room and no practice field. Our equipment was driven to games in a yellow-painted UHaul truck.

Those coaches were bad but ISU had zero idea of how to be good at football back then
 

Cycsk

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I know everyone talks about the turnaround CMC has done here and well deserving, but Coach Mac really did something close to a miracle. Granted, I have even said he benefitted from a weak North Division and getting to skip OUT to two years at a time. That being said though, there was nothing here for Mac to build on, it literally was a **** show.

I'm not trying to take away from CMC, but JP really did start to put some nice pieces in place before CMC got here. I started at ISU in 1990, watching the program go from bad to a laughing stock while I was at ISU, was pretty disheartening. I graduated in 1994, after watching 0-10-1 that previous season. The fact that Mac had us in a bowl game 6 years later is pretty miraculous, no matter who we were playing.

OK, all that being said, that list is really depressing.


I like the "mutual admiration society" of Campbell and McCarney.
 
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t-noah

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Two things stand out, above what others have said. 1) Coaching 8 seasons or longer is a rarity at ISU! Only 4 people have done it and one was Jim Walden! 2. Joe Meyers and Homer Hubbard are our two best coaches in terms of winning percentage! That's right! Who? Bert German, A.W. Ristine, Ira Brownlie, Clyde Williams, and Pop Warner are our top 5 highest "winning percentage" coaches.
 
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Stormin

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Out of curio


Out of curiosity how old are you? Nothing against you but the younger generation has no idea how poss poor our facilities were back then compared to everyone else. I was an Iowa State ball boy and the locker room has rusty lockers in the old Okson building. It was like a high school in the locker room. Probably worse than some high schools. Mac finally got them to invest in facilities and I think the big 8 started to pressure teams like us to get up to speed. K State was really bad also. So our old coaches may have had horrible record but that was mostly do to us not keeping up back then. Campbell has way more to work with.

You should have seen Clyde Williams Field. New stadium and Olson building were big improvements in 1975. Every coach has more to work with today. Iowa State is better today with facilities. So is everyone else. It’s still a struggle. And look at NIL today. Uphill battle.
 
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