2020 OU Schedule Preview: Iowa State

Cyclones have the Big 12's best defense and the right quarterback to shock the world. Is that enough to make a run at the championship game?

Matt Campbell / Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Every Wednesday going into Big 12 Media Days on July 20-21, SI Sooners will break down Oklahoma’s 2020 schedule. Today: Iowa State.

2020 Oklahoma Sooners schedule

• Sept. 5 — Missouri State
• Sept. 12 — Tennessee
• Sept. 26 — at Army
• Oct. 3 — Baylor
• Oct. 10 — Texas
• Oct. 17 — at Iowa State
• Oct. 24 — Oklahoma State
• Oct. 31 — at TCU
• Nov. 7 — at West Virginia
• Nov. 14 — Kansas State
• Nov. 21 — Kansas
• Nov. 28 — at Texas Tech
• Dec. 5 — Big 12 Championship Game

Most forecasters predicted that Iowa State would challenge for a spot in the Big 12 Championship Game in 2019.

Instead, the Cyclones finished 7-6.

Maybe all the forecasts were just a year early.

Matt Campbell’s fifth Cyclones squad may very well be equipped for a run at Arlington in December, and it’s because he’s been patient and prudent in building a foundational culture in Ames.

Quarterback Brock Purdy / Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

“The biggest thing for us is we know who we are now,” Campbell told the Ames Tribune in February. “There is an identity to Iowa State football. The identity in terms of a football culture is our attitude and effort. When you watch our kids play, our kids play really, really hard. We’re going to play hard for 60 minutes. Now with attitude and effort and you can add the attention to detail piece of it with consistency. 

“ ... For four years we’ve proven we can play with great consistency of attitude, effort and toughness. Our kids are going to go in, play hard and give ourselves a chance to win football games. The difference between success and failure is found in those margins of attention to detail.”

Tight end Charlie Kolar / Reese Strickland-USA TODAY Sports

It also helps that quarterback Brock Purdy, who led the Big 12 in passing yards last season, is a junior with 21 career starts, and that 10 starters are back on defense, including all-star candidates JaQuan Bailey at end, Greg Eisworth at safety, Anthony Johnson at cornerback, and Mike Rose and O’Rien Vance at linebacker.

Five-time league champ Oklahoma comes to Ames on Oct. 17 – it’s the Cyclones’ homecoming game – so the schedule seems favorable, although two November road trips to Texas – at TCU on Nov. 7, and at Texas on Nov. 21 – loom.

Matt Campbell and Lincoln Riley / Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

Wideouts Deshaunte Jones (24 starts) and La’Michael Pettway (10) must be replaced on offense. But the real holes are on the offensive line, where four starters from 2019 are gone after combining for 146 career starts. That kind of experience is impossible to replace.

“Any time the offensive line is the youth of an offense or a team, you can’t really go any faster than that offensive line can go in terms of what you do offensively,” Campbell said. “They have to master it and then you move forward. If you don’t, then you have real inefficiency to who you are as a program and who you are as an offense. It forces you to go a little bit slower and forces you to make sure fundamentally you’re completely sound in what you do. You can’t do what any of those players can’t do. You have to find out what they can do and build around it.”

Greg Eisworth / Reese Strickland-USA TODAY Sports

Like all coaches at all programs this year, Campbell was excited to see what kind of depth developed around the returning starters. But the pandemic shut down spring practice, so like everyone else Campbell is left to guess at who the new starters will be.

But that’s OK. That’s why successful programs build from the ground up.

“It’s interesting because there are times we’ve done that with maybe less talent. It’s allowed us to win big games because we were fantastic in that attention to detail and margins,” Campbell told the newspaper. “Now it’s just catching that up to where we are now as a football program. That’s easy to say. Obviously that next step is really, really hard to do. It takes another restructuring of the alignment within the program to make sure we can take that next step.”

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