Beat ASU, and great Cyclones football season will turn into a glass ceiling-smasher

Iowa State playing in Saturday’s Big 12 championship for a spot in the College Football Playoff? Yeah, that sounds like big-time fun.

Anybody, anywhere who pooh-poohs the Cyclones going 10-2 and getting to this game against Arizona State in Texas is doing so because they want to, not because they should. You win as many games as anyone else in a 16-team major conference, you’re more than legitimate.

The Big 12 clearly doesn’t have a lot of glitter in the eyes of the College Football Playoff selection committee, and with reason. It hasn’t had a single win against a nonconference opponent that resonated with the nation.

The best Big 12 win against an outsider is BYU’s 18-15 September win at SMU, with Iowa State’s 20-19 September win at Iowa the runner-up.

That’s not a lot, you say? Fine. What was the Big Ten’s best nonconference triumph? I’d say Oregon’s last-second, 37-34, home win over Boise State.

None of the teams Indiana, Ohio State and Penn State played outside the league approached being a Top 25 club.

Texas squashed Michigan in Ann Arbor. Alabama did the same to Wisconsin in Madison. The Big Ten had as many mediocre teams as the Big 12 this season, and maybe more. I’d take 5-7 Kansas or 5-7 Utah over 5-7 Wisconsin, 5-7 UCLA or 5-7 Michigan State.

The reality is the Big 12 could easily have the No. 12 seed in the CFP, face a Georgia or Ohio State on the road in a first-round game, and quickly and thoroughly be dispatched. So what?

More than once, this is a conference that has hopped off life-support, darted out of the hospital, and gone straight to the nearest nightclub. Today it has the player that will win the Heisman Trophy next week, Colorado’s Travis Hunter.

It has Arizona State running back Cam Skattebo. None other than Nick Saban said "That's gotta be my favorite player in college football, man. This guy is rugged, tough. I mean, I just love a great competitor. He's all that."

It has a heck of a story in ASU, with 34-year-old head coach Kenny Dillingham. He was voted the Big 12’s Coach of the Year after guiding a team picked to finish 16th in the league to the title game.

Then there’s Iowa State. It was down 13-0 at Iowa and won, which was just a sign of things to come. The Cyclones have outscored opponents in second-halves by 202-96 and in fourth-quarters by 123-55.

For younger fans, seeing the Cyclones win more than not has become old hat. This is ISU’s seventh winning season in the last eight, seventh winning Big 12 season in the last eight.

For those of us who saw the team play in the three or four decades before that, the Cyclones’ winning remains fresh, a sharp contrast to most of what we’ve seen from ISU football in most of our lives.

Matt Campbell’s Cyclones send players to the NFL. They send playmakers to the NFL. They defend. They collect more turnovers than they make.

They are disciplined, fourth in the nation in fewest penalties per game. They are 16-for-20 on fourth-down conversions, the second-best percentage in America.

No matter what happens in Arlington, this is a very good team that has had an excellent season. If you’re a Power Five conference club that wins 10 games, your team reunions in 10 or 20 or 50 years will be jammed with great memories rehashed.

This game against ASU, though, is a chance to not only break Iowa State’s glass ceiling by getting its first conference championship since 1912, but to leave pieces of chandeliers scattered from Jerry Jones’ stadium all the way up I-35 to Ames.

The CFP will be full of football old money. Alabama and Texas, Ohio State and Notre Dame. Iowa State could be the crypto. Oh, to see the Cyclones’ fans levitating with joy and gratitude as opposed to those who shrug it off as their birthright.

Campbell has used the word “process” roughly 8,448 times since coming to Ames. But a process, it has been. Saturday, that process just might proceed to the national playoffs.

If it happens, watch out for pieces of chandeliers if you’re driving north on I-35 from Dallas.

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