Hlas: Ames-to-Dallas caravan in December?

Remember when we were younger, and the best-case scenario we saw for Iowa State football this season was winning enough games (six) to become bowl eligible? Me, neither.

Where does one begin to wrap one's mind around what Iowa State has done in the first two-thirds of this season?

Unlike its win at Oklahoma a few weeks ago, its victory over TCU Saturday in Ames wasn't an enormous upset. But it did make the Cyclones the first team to knock off two top-five teams before November since Florida in 2005.

At 4-1 in the Big 12 (6-2 overall), Iowa State is in a tie with Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and TCU for the Big 12 lead. The top two teams in the regular-season standings advance to the championship game in Arlington, Texas.

How realistic is 16th-ranked Iowa State's chance of doing enough winning between now and season's end to reach that game? If its defense keeps playing the way it has played through five conference games, there could be quite a caravan on I-35 from Ames to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in early December.

The schedule is hard, but the Cyclones won't face a defense in the next four games that is as good as TCU's. As for ISU's own defense, it got the best of TCU quarterback Kenny Hill Saturday after Hill arrived with 15 touchdown passes and just three interceptions. That was after it got the best of Texas Tech's Nic Shimonek, fifth in the nation in passing yards per game. That was after it got the best of Oklahoma's Baker Mayfield, sixth in passing yards per game and a possible Heisman Trophy finalist.

So what's up this week and next? On Saturday, ISU is at West Virginia and faces Will Grier, second nationally in passing yards per game. The week after, the Cyclones host Oklahoma State and Mason Rudolph, the nation's leader in, you guessed it, passing yards per game.

But Hill, Shimonek and Mayfield can tell Grier and Rudolph that Iowa State doesn't have a garden-variety leaky Big 12 defense. Like West Virginia's, which ranks 115th nationally.

Iowa, meanwhile,

has a monster headed its way. The Hawkeyes' opponent this week is Ohio State. The No. 1 thing the Hawkeyes can hope for is the Buckeyes spend most of this week reliving their 39-38 win over Penn State Saturday.

The trouble is, the Buckeyes absorbed a 31-16 loss to Oklahoma on Sept. 9 that seems to have made them mean-mad, Ma. Outside of the Penn State game, they haven't been held under 49 points in a Big Ten game.

Oh, OSU is also 12th in the nation in total defense.

The score and the rally tells you the Buckeyes had to pull out all the stops to beat Penn State, and they did. But they also outgained the Nittany Lions, 529 yards to 283.

How do the Hawkeyes hang around with Ohio State for four quarters given Iowa's uninspiring offense? Uhhh ... the same way it hung around with Penn State last month in Kinnick. Don't let the Buckeyes finish drives with touchdowns.

That could be a wee bit problematic. OSU quarterback J.T. Barrett has turned this year's Heisman race into a two-man battle with Penn State running back Saquon Barkley. Who, by the way, had 21 carries for just 44 yards against the Buckeyes.

Barrett was unreal against Penn State, completing 33 of 39 passes for 328 yards and rushing 17 times for 95 yards. He has 22 passing touchdowns and zero interceptions since the Oklahoma game, and has completed three-fourths of his passes in that time.

Yikes!

That November home win Iowa had over Michigan last year as a 21-point underdog? Winning Saturday might be a bigger upset.

But this is college football, with rhythms that travel everywhere but in a straight line, making the possibilities seem endless.

Iowa State, after all, will be among the teams named Tuesday in the first set of College Football Playoff rankings. If you think hard enough, you can remember a time when that seemed unlikely.