GLENDALE, Ariz. — The weight of disappointment and failure has gotten heavier just about every year for the better part of a century. Yes, there were moments of success and glimmers of hope, but, for the most part, year after cursed year, the Iowa State football program added to its collection of miseries.
Given 100 years to accumulate, the heap of losses and humiliations buries a program in rubble that blots out the light toward a path out and starves the oxygen needed to endeavor toward an escape, if one could even be seen.
Iowa State football spent something close to 100 years as an unsolvable problem, its own history weighing it down from finding a new future. Even if someone could start to maneuver a way out, to clear a path, how long would it take to unburden all of failure?
It took Matt Campbell five years.
Twelfth-ranked Iowa State defeated Oregon 34-17 on Saturday to win the Fiesta Bowl, cement the 2020 season as the best in program history and deliver on Campbell’s promise to change the culture of Cyclone football from laughingstock to national relevance.
“We're always going to have to go up the rough side of the mountain at Iowa State, just because that's who we are. That's how the program is,” Campbell said. “And yet, when you have elite character, elite leadership, great things can happen. And that's really what we've been able to develop now in our fifth year.”
The team’s 9-3 record matches the most wins in a season in program history, while the victory over the Ducks represents the program’s first win in its first appearance in a New Year’s Six bowl game. All while managing the COVID-19 pandemic that has cost and upended lives across the globe and turned college sports into even messier beast to tame than it typically is.
“As coach (Matt) Campbell said, we were the laughingstock of the Big 12 at one point,” All-American running back Breece Hall said. “Just envisioning what coach Campbell thought that we could do here. That's the reason why I came here. To see what we accomplished today, it's Iowa State history.”
"History" is a tortured word at Iowa State, where a first bowl appearance didn’t happen until 1971 and the trophy case remains without a conference championship since 1912. Recent history was just as troublesome as the ancient, when Campbell took over a program in 2015 that had won eight games combined the previous three seasons. It didn’t get better when Campbell hit the recruiting trail after his first Cyclone team went 3-9.
Then, though, they began to break through.
This year’s senior class beat top-five teams and won the Liberty Bowl in 2017. The Cyclones went to bowl games and flirted with contending atop the conference in 2018 and 2019. Then, in 2020, it all came together in a way never before seen at Iowa State.
“We recruit all these guys with a hope and a dream,” Campbell said. “And then all of a sudden, we're 3-9 (in) Year 1. And I think it's so fitting that, as we leave here, and this senior class leaves here now 9-3, they really flipped the script the entire way.
“Maybe for some programs, that's easy to do; but (people) know the history of this program for the last 100-plus years. It's not real easy to do here. And this group did it. This group literally rewrote the history books.”
Although Campbell sold players on a “home and a dream,” it was a well-articulated one.
“When he called me and said hey, ‘We're playing Big 12 football, we've got tools,’” quarterback Brock Purdy, an Arizona native, said. “It's not already made, but I wanted to help that out and get it to where it needed to be. And so that was really our conversations when he was recruiting me.
“So here we are back at home in the Fiesta Bowl, and I think we're able to take the next step as a program. And we did that today.”
Five years in the making. No skipped steps. No instant success. Just consistent improvement with one historic reward at the end.
“This team literally became the best version of itself it could be,” Campbell said. “This 2020 Iowa State football team reached its full potential. There's not one regret. There's not one, man, woulda, coulda, shoulda.
“This group's literally reached its full potential and become the best version of itself it can be.”
After a century, Iowa State has emerged from the debris of defeats and the wreckage of wretchedness. And they are standing not hobbled by the challenge, but strengthened by it.
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