Increased understanding spurs hope for improvement on Iowa State offensive line

Editor’s note: Third in a nine-part series looking at each Iowa State football position group ahead of the 2023 season.

AMES — When first-year Iowa State offensive line coach Ryan Clanton’s name is mentioned, two more names immediately spring forth: Spencer Brown and Trevor Penning.

Clanton helped turn both former Northern Iowa standouts into early-round NFL Draft picks, so when he chose to join ISU head coach Matt Campbell’s staff in Ames, current ISU offensive linemen took notice.

“He talks about how you can really know something if you can teach it,” said junior Tyler Miller, who is one of four offensive linemen on the Cyclones’ roster with significant starting experience. “So I think with how he’s explaining things with what we’re doing, it’s not just what a certain person is doing on a certain play and just knowing who you have to go to. It’s like you learn the entire run. The whole surface of the run. To me, that’s really cool. You understand everything as a whole.”

Increased understanding along ISU’s front should lead to better execution and less confusion. The Cyclones struggled up front in 2022, which further hindered a mistake-prone and injury-plagued offense that ranked a dismal 113th nationally in scoring (20.2 points per game), and 116th in rushing (108.0 yards per game).

“You talk about the O-line room and having depth there makes you feel like you can be consistent — especially in the run game, regardless of who is out there,” ISU offensive coordinator Nate Scheelhaase said. “It might look a little bit different in the run game with who you’ve got out there and what they do best, but at the same time, I do feel like we’re in a better spot from a depth standpoint.”

Whether being merely “better” across the offensive line and in the running game will suffice as the Cyclones seek to shake off the effects of their first losing season since 2016 is anyone’s guess. But slow, steady improvement in terms of both execution and results is all Campbell and his staff asks for — especially Clanton, who excels at distilling arcane concepts into plain English.

“Just the way he’s taught the versatility of all five positions, it’s been really fun to watch,” senior offensive lineman Jarrod Hufford said. “It’s been really fun to watch people learn and grow, just thinking outside the spot they’ve played in, but understanding the offensive line as a whole, and understanding why each position does a certain thing on different plays. It’s been cool.”

It’s also promoted a stronger bond in the offensive line room. When personal growth mirrors collective advances, trust deepens and once-faded optimism returns.

“We hang out all the time,” Miller said. “We just have a great group of guys that I feel like, like I said, we’ve all come closer, and I think part of that has to do with Coach Clanton, as well. You know, bringing more people along with you, because it’s not just us five (potential starters) up front. It takes everybody in the room to make everybody else better.”

Bigger, too. New director of strength and conditioning Reid Kagy tasked every Cyclone with adhering to Campbell’s “bigger, faster, stronger” blueprint — and naturally the guys who were already big made some of the most impressive gains. Hufford, for instance, said he added 30 pounds of muscle in the offseason to his already expansive 6-5 frame.

“Even with that, I can move faster,” the 325-pounder said. “I can move way faster and I can move even more weight. I definitely feel like I’ve gotten a lot stronger and a lot faster, and a lot more, like, bodily disciplined.”

Now it falls on Hufford and his fellow offensive linemen to translate that discipline into a force for good for the Cyclones writ large. The progress is apparent. Better results obviously must follow.

“That offensive line has to have confidence coming off the football and understanding what’s going on,” Campbell said. “I think it’s been a top-down mentality and obviously one of the strengths that I talked about when we hired (Clanton is) he’s a really good teacher. And I think that starts when everybody’s aligned to that vision.”

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