Iowa State Football Post Mortem: Farm O’Geddon

DUB-lin, Ireland

Let’s get this season started, ladies and gentlemen! A fairy tale start over in Ireland against Kansas State in the Farmageddon rivalry in a Top 25 matchup with every pair of eyes in the College Football World on the Cyclones and Wildcats. The 2025 Season is here. Finally. And the Cyclones, while it wasn’t perfect, made the plays when they mattered.

What Went Wrong

First Half Turnovers

The Cyclones lost 2 fumbles in all of 2024… it took all of 16 minutes of game time to match that total in 2025. The second of the

two occurred on a Rocco Becht sack in which a defender came virtually unblocked and jarred the ball loose. The first fumble came on the doorstep of an early 7-0 lead when the Cyclones, who had 2 game-winning QB sneaks last year, decided to run an inside HB pitch play inside the 1 yard line and it slipped through the hands of Abu Sama in the rain and the Wildcats recovered. Inexplicable mental errors and some poor cooperation from Mother Nature were some things that played a role in the early game calamities, and hopefully now, those issues are out of the way.

Blown Coverages

We could play the “what if” game all the day long when it comes to this opening game of 2025, as you could most every game that’s played, but the difference with this one is that it’s a “what if” game that doesn’t often arise with Jon Heacock defenses. The Cyclones gave up a pair of big play touchdowns in the second half of Farm O’Geddon, and both came off of a blown coverage. Now, I’ll give the freshmen playing safety a bit of slack here. There’s a lot of pressure in that game to be playing your first “big boy” snaps, and I understand that… but they were still horrible mistakes that really shouldn’t happen. Carson Van Dinter and Khijohnn Cummings-Coleman have incredibly bright futures ahead of them, and with the guys that we have in the secondary alongside them (we’ll talk more about them later) I have no doubts that Saturday’s mistakes are going to be a one-time occurrence.

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Transfer WR Room

Chase Sowell and Xavier Townsend will have their moments this year, but Saturday was not one of them… No catches for the transfer duo as the WR room still figures itself out (we knew this would be a deep room when the staff didn’t put a single position without the “ORs” that they love so much, and its understandable the two new guys in the room may need a little longer to get ramped up to speed, but 0 catches is not something we should come to expect or anticipate moving forward.

What Went Right

“Gotta Have It” Plays

If the Cyclones needed a play, they got it basically every time, largely due to quarterback Rocco Becht. 4th downs? 3/3. Game-winning play call? Absolutely. 12-play, 60-yard drive to ice the final 6:23 of the clock? Money in the bank. Seemingly every play that the Cyclones needed late, Rocco Becht and the rest of the offense came up in the clutch as he has for basically his entire career under center in an Iowa State uniform. The kid has some stones, and he’s finally starting to get the national praise for it.

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Carson Hansen

I don’t know if we’ve heard fully if playing Abu Sama for the majority of the game was a strategy call or if Hansen had some sort of injury concern, but whatever the case was, a fresh #26 in the backfield against a defense that has worn down over the course of the game is a scary thought for opposing teams… So scary, in fact, that Rocco Becht dialed up a play specifically for him to ice the game on 4th and 3 with just over two minutes to go. When the game was on the line and the offense needed that spark off the sideline, Carson Hansen was that guy.

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Winning

‘Nuff said