Rocco Becht brushes off frustration and UCF, and 7-0 Iowa State is imperfectly perfect

AMES — Was it the best worst game a quarterback ever played, or the worst best game?

It was neither. It was pretty great, really. Iowa State’s Rocco Becht did what the great ones do, winning without their ‘A’ game.

“I played bad today, and I’ll put that on me,” Becht said. “I gave our defense a bad time, giving (UCF) really pick-6s. I’ve got to be better.”

He was good enough, though, oh yes he was. Becht took his team 80 yards in 10 plays in the space of 1:18 without the benefit of a remaining timeout, and got the ninth-ranked, 7-0 Cyclones a 38-35 win over UCF at Jack Trice Stadium.

Becht’s 1-yard TD run with 30 seconds left put Iowa State ahead, 36-35. He ran in a 2-point conversion for punctuation.

The Knights of Orlando got the ball back in need of a field goal to tie the game, but the Cyclone defense that was gouged for 354 rushing yards closed out the improbable win.

Becht threw a second-quarter pass that was intercepted and returned 63 yards for a touchdown by BJ Adams. It would have been two pick-6s, but UCF’s Braeden Marshall dropped his at the ISU 1 as he crossed the goal line following his 70-yard return. No Cyclones picked up the “fumble,” and the Knights scored from the 1 on the next play for a 35-27 lead.

How do you win a game by giving up two scores like that? How do you win when you give up 196 rushing yards to running back RJ Harvey and another 154 to quarterback Jacurri Brown? How do you win when you give up so much?

By not giving up.

“All that was in my mind is forget about what happened in the past and move on and play that drive like it's, you know, like it's our last thing,” Becht said. “Which it was.”

UCF had a first down at the Iowa State 46 with 2:05 left. The Cyclones stopped the next three plays, the Knights punted into the end zone, and out came Becht and his boys with a long way to go and a short time to get there.

“I knew we were going to score,” Becht said.

Becht scrambled to keep a play alive from the ISU 36 before hitting Jaylin Noel for 29 yards to make you think this might actually be doable. Becht had missed open receivers several times this night, and was just 20 of 46 with the two painful picks. But that pass and a 16-yarder to Noel two plays later were pinpoint.

On second-and-goal from the 4 with time growing ever shorter, Becht ran for 3 yards. Hurriedly, his guys lined up and he powered into the end zone to send the sellout crowd of 61,500 into levitation mode.

Forget all the College Football Playoff brackets of the past week that had Iowa State slotted in the No. 4 seed as the Big 12 champion. That’s all hot gas in mid-October with how crazy college football is and how unusually level the playing field seems across the country.

UCF is 1-3 in the Big 12, but Harvey has over 3,100 career rushing yards and Brown’s 6-foot-4, 220-pound frame to go with his speed and agility is a defense’s nightmare. Every league win is a good win.

Maybe this game was an indicator the Cyclones aren’t as good as their 7-0 record suggests, that they can’t keep falling behind and rallying. OK. But they are 7-0, something an ISU team hasn’t said since 1938, and they did come from behind to beat Iowa, Baylor, West Virginia and UCF.

“We were walking off the field,” Becht said, “and I was telling Beau (Freyler) and J.R. (Singleton) that we needed this. This is the game we needed going into our bye week, knowing what we need to fix, and knowing the areas that we're not good at right now.“

What they are good at is resilience. Oh, they also amassed 530 yards capped by those essential final 80. However, the rushing game that had been so good to the Cyclones the last few weeks dried up after Carson Hansen’s 57-yard touchdown run in the first quarter.

Except when Becht ran by design or scrambled, and more often it was the latter. His career-high in rushing had been 31 yards. He carried 20 times for 97 yards, and it was 111 if you subtract the yards he lost getting sacked three times.

“I just kind of let free and just played it like it was backyard football,” he said.

For at least two more weeks, Iowa State is unbeaten and in the top 10. These are good days here, and who’s to say there won’t be more to come this season?

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com