LMAO
- Thread starter ChickenNuggetMan
- Start date
2020 was a great season but with a massive asterisk. I'm happy our program and our team got to experience these things but it's not comparable to normal years and IMO shouldn't be used for a bellwether regarding the state of the program.
No asterisk. It was just great.
Campbell has been great but it's not too late for him to turn it around. He's still a relatively young coach for the D1 P5 level.
This offseason will be a bigger test for him than his first season.
This thinking is BS. Everyone in the country had the same issues and we were the better team. Why is it so difficult to accept this? Should we put an asterisk next to Alabama's championships because they only play 8 conference games or they have nicer weather? It was a fantastic season and my only regret is that the admin. kept us fans out of the stadium for that first game against Louisiana. The 15K of us that came to the games were huge contributers to the success that season and I believe we win that game if there are fans in the stands. IMO
As you said it was a different time and bowls were a lot different in Bruce's era.
Bruce never had the opportunity to apply his particular coaching methodology in a COVID season. Perhaps it would have yielded an 11-1 season even reaching the CFP, or it could have been 5-7.
Campbell didn't get the chance to show what he could do in the 1970s era Big 8 either. Perhaps he would have defeated Nebraska three seasons in a row going 10-2 or maybe he would have finished 5-6 from 76-78.
From my perspective Bruce still has the most consistent and successful multi-season run of any Iowa State coach by winning 8 games three seasons in a row. No other coach in the history of the program has achieved that feat whether it was modern era or ancient era
Perhaps A.W. Ristine could have done it with more games per season. If Matt hits 8 wins three seasons in a row, even at 8-5, I'd say he finally surpassed Earle Bruce as the greatest Iowa State football coach ever. As it stands right now, he is up there with Earle Bruce and has achieved more in a single season but hasn't equaled or surpassed him in consistency over multiple seasons. It's just my opinion and despite my misgivings over this season, I do believe Matt has achieved some amazing things. It is why I just find this recent stretch of games since October utterly bizarre.
See, this is the problem. I'm not saying we didn't deserve those wins or that we weren't a great team that year, I'm suggesting you cannot compare that year to 2019 or 2021 or any other year without mentioning exogenous circumstances. It's not an insult and it's not to denigrate the team's achievements, it's to provide context as to why that season in particular might have been an outlier.
I personally don't believe we would've had the success we had without COVID. The years before and after we went 7-6 with bowl losses. I think that's probably a better representation of where we are as a program. The problem with not looking at 2020 in context is that you'd conclude that ISU went from first in the league to dead last in the span of two years. I don't think that's what happened. I think we went from a middling team to last in two years and middling teams will have down years. That makes me less harsh on CMC.
Last edited:
We had issues with COVID, CMC runs a tight mouthed ship though so not much came out at the time. One issue with the 2021 season is that many of those players came back for potential CFP invite. When we lost to Baylor, that was toast and injuries were building. It was a snowball and you could tell the returning players started losing fire and desire and that pulled the team down some. While that is unfortunate, it is understandable to a point. It's like knowing you are fighting for a promotion and halfway through this big project, you learn that you will not have a shot at it. You will most likely lose a little fire about that project and mail part of it in on it.
I'm sure we also had COVID issues but that's not really the point. The point is just that fans probably shouldn't extrapolate any deeper meaning about the state of our program from 2020. Under CMC I think our mean season is 7-8 wins. Sometimes, due to circumstances (COVID, NFL players at key positions, a weak OOC schedule), we'll over perform like we did in 2020. It's not to take anything away from the coaches or players that year, they were able to take advantage of those circumstances and win, good on them. But the risk is that fans watch that and think that "we've arrived." That's probably not a valid conclusion from 2020.
On the flip side, I think this year is also an outlier. Due to negative circumstances we're under performing (young team, bad OC). I think over the next year or two we revert back to the mean and win 7 or 8 games again. So just like I would tell folks that 2020 doesn't all of a sudden mean we're a CFP-caliber team, 2022 doesn't mean the sky is falling. I don't really think we're the worst team in the Big 12, I think it's just a down year.
