Iowa State football earned its 10th win. Is the Big 12 title game next?

AMES — Iowa State has waited more than 100 years since its last football conference championship.

The Cyclones will have to wait a few more hours to find out if they have a chance to stop this streak next week. But after a 29-21 win over Kansas State on Saturday night, and with all due respect to Tom Petty, waiting isn’t the hardest part.

Winning is.

And this Iowa State team has done that more than any other in the program’s history.

The Cyclones are 10-game winners for the first time ever, and if BYU can hold off an upset from Houston in the early hours of Sunday, they will play Arizona State for the Big 12 title next weekend in Arlington, Texas.

More:Big 12 Tiebreakers Central retains live coverage of Iowa State football and other title contenders

More:Iowa State football beat rival Kansas State for the Cyclones’ first 10-win season

If Houston beats BYU, the Cyclones will be eliminated from the Big 12 title game via tiebreaker despite the best regular season the program has ever seen.

Whatever happens out in Provo, Saturday night was an incredible success and an incredible season for the Iowa State program.

A historic season possibility opened up with a 7-0 start that matched the program’s best all-time, and the three-game winning streak to close the regular season put that possibility back in play after two tough losses.

These Cyclones are thugs.

They are rarely elegant. They are hardly dominant. They never stay on screen for long.

The injuries that plagued the defense caused this team to nearly lose its footing in the final month of the regular season. But they didn’t.

This group – whether they make it to Arlington or elsewhere – will always be remembered and defined by their resilience.

Whenever these cyclones were hit, they would calm down and fight back with everything they had in them.

Ten times that was enough for a win.

Now we have to wait and see if Iowa State’s best regular season ever will be enough to play for a conference title. The wait will no doubt be agonizing, but at the end of the day, the Cyclones will have to settle for knowing what they’ve done. If 10 wins – seven in conference play – aren’t enough, then the football gods have their cruel joke.

Iowa State will have its 10 wins with a chance to extend that to 11 in the upcoming bowl season.

If it’s enough — and Iowa State entered the title game with about a 96 percent chance if they beat the Wildcats — then you’re in for the biggest game in program history.

Maybe you’d rank the Fiesta Bowl, which caps the 2020 season, at No. 1. After all, it was the first January bowl – appearance or win – in school history. An argument could be made for the 2020 Big 12 title game, but Iowa State will have a better chance of beating Arizona State next weekend than this team does of beating Oklahoma. And the 2020 team had little chance of securing a spot in the playoffs with a win. This Iowa State team is almost certain to win.

The Iowa State Cyclones have 10 wins.

We don’t yet know what exactly that means. However, the Cyclones did the hard part.

Breaking News

Dellupodisabato

Leave a Reply Cancel reply