As the national athletic landscape shakes, Iowa State has athletic stability

CEDAR RAPIDS — For 18 years, Iowa State Athletic Director Jamie Pollard and his coaches and staff have barnstormed Iowa in a bus, making a dozen or so stops to hold events and talk with their fans.

It’s pretty low-tech for the 21st century, but the retail way works. Head football coach Matt Campbell signs autographs and poses for pictures with Cyclone fans who wait patiently in line.

Campbell understands the necessity, and so do his ISU colleagues. This isn’t Texas, or Ohio State, or Alabama. Iowa State has to work harder and be more personal with its customers. As it was a week ago Monday at the Veterans Memorial Building.

Many cars with Iowa State-themed license plates were parked on the Second Avenue Bridge above the Cedar River as their owners met with Pollard, Campbell, and the rest of the ISU crew.

These are good days for Cyclone sports. Iowa State finished 17th in the nation in the Directors’ Cup final winter standings for Division I athletic prowess.

That was second-best in the Big 12 to all-powerful, departing Texas, and ahead of power programs like Oregon, Georgia, Texas A&M and yes, Iowa (a very respectable 31st).

“We’ve never even been remotely close to 17th,” Pollard said. “(The standings) is not a subjective thing. It’s an objective thing. You’ve got to get to national championships and the postseason and produce, and our teams have done that.”

Pollard said if you looked at the budgets of the top 25 Directors’ Cup teams, his program is the most-efficient and “It’s not even close.”

Iowa State’s men’s basketball team won the Big 12 tournament and reached the NCAA Sweet 16. The Cyclone women basketballers took Stanford to overtime before losing in the NCAA second round. ISU’s wrestlers had their best NCAA tourney finish since 2010 at fourth place, six years after they were 45th.

In the fall, the Cyclones’ football team went 6-3 in the Big 12 and won four straight league road games.

And things may get better yet, competitively, in 2024-25.

The football team was heavy on sophomores and freshmen last season and knows it has a quarterback in Rocco Becht. The men’s basketball team returns its talented guard trio of Tamin Lipsey, Keshon Gilbert and Curtis Jones, and forward Milan Momcilovic and is a fixture in preseason top 10s.

The women’s basketball team should be very good and deep, with a national star-in-the-making in Audi Crooks, who scored 40 points in ISU’s first-round NCAA win over Maryland.

Rest doesn’t come easily for Pollard, though. In the new College Football Playoff television deal the CFP will have with ESPN, the SEC and Big Ten would get a combined 58 percent of the base revenue distribution.

Big Ten members will get estimated potential CFP payouts per school at about $21 million to $12.3 million for Big 12 members.

Meanwhile, the NCAA and its power conferences are about to settle House v. NCAA to the tune of $2.77 billion for college athletes denied NIL compensation dating to 2016.

Reportedly, a settlement would include a new system in which between $15 million and $25 million a year can be distributed directly from a power-conference school to its athletes.

Said Pollard: “Every dollar you spend going forward, you’re going to have to ask yourself if it’s better to spend it on a student-athlete or is it better to spend on a program. If it’s on the program, what do you spend it on?

“It’s coming for all of us.”

Pollard persuaded his coaches to decline bonuses and take pay cuts during the COVID-19 pandemic to help keep him from cutting any jobs, let alone teams.

“We talked about if we keep everybody it will allow us to be successful when we come out of it,” he said. “I would say the fact that now we know there’s a problem, it allows us to do what we need to do to make sure we continue to be successful while I think other people are going to be deer in headlights.”

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