Welcome to the Ultimate College Football Preview for 2023. Every team in FBS Football will be covered in this daily blog release. All of your favorite teams from the ACC, AAC, Big 12, Big 10, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West, PAC 12, SEC, Sun Belt & even every Independent. Think of these daily college football previews as a cheat sheet going into next year.

2022 Recap:

The Cyclones started their 2022 season off very hot going 3-0. They even beat Iowa in Iowa City for the Cyhawk trophy. That might be on of the last good thing that happened for Iowa State in 2022. They lost 8 of their last 9 games to end the season. I will say their defense was actually very good and finished 18th in point per game only giving up just over 20 points a game. The issue all year was their offense was just dreadful and really hard to watch. They finished 114th in the country with again over 20 points a game. If you look they scored under 20 points 7 seven times. To sum it up, defense really good, offense historically bad.

Head Coach:

Matt Campbell in my opinion is one of the best younger coaches in college football. Yes last year was terrible we know that, but look at the rest of his time in Ames. Campbell has been there for seven season and 5 of those seasons the Cyclones had winning records and went bowling. Campbell is a 2 time coach of the year and has a New Year Six bowl win, the 2020 Fiesta Bowl. This is all at a place that was a horrible football school before he go there. They only had 19 winning seasons in the previous 100 before Campbell was the head man. I have no doubt he will get the ship turned around after last year. That is what good coaches do after a down year.

Key Players:

Red Shirt Junior QB Hunter Dekkers is back after a very rocky first season as the Cyclones starter. Dekkers had 3,044 yards on a 66.1% completion percentage with 19 touchdowns and 14 interceptions. Dekkers needs to throw the ball down the field and stretch defenses more. He needs to do that while simultaneously cut the interceptions down. Dekkers has the ability to do this talent wise he just needs to make the right reads and know when to take his shots. As of now there is no X WR on the depth chart to help Dekkers and Xavier Hutchinson is gone. In fact only 2 WR with any catches are on the roster now. Senior Dimitri Stanley is going to have to contribute a lot more than his 32 catches for 383 yards and 1 touchdown. A lot will come on Stanley’s shoulders as he is the only WR to really do anything for the Cyclones last year. I am sure he will get help with people transferring into fall camp. The running game was not great either last year but do have leading rusher Jirehl Brock who had 445 yards rushing, 4.5 ypc, and 3 touchdowns. Again not a lot of production coming back. That might be a good thing as the offense was historically bad. Leading tackler Gerry Vaughn is back in his LB position after having 71 tackles, 4.5 TFL’s and 1 sack. The secondary has their leading guys in tackles with Beau Fryler and Myles Purchase. Iowa State will have a strong defense again with these players and others back. They do need some depth at DE and LB though.

2023 Prediction:

Looking at the Cyclones non-conference schedule I definitely think at worst they will go 2-1 and 3-0 is not far fetched. They should easily handle Northern Iowa and Ohio. They beat Iowa last year in Iowa and the Cyclones were bad. So yes they can beat them at home this year when I expect them to be better. The Big 12 conference schedule could be a gauntlet this year with new teams coming in. The road games at BYU, KSU, Oklahoma,Baylor and Cincy. If they can go 2-3 or 3-2 in road games they can really make a run at a good year. The home conference games are Ok State, TCU, Kansas and Texas. TCU is down after losing a lot of players last year, OK state, Kansas and Texas will be hard. I am saying 3-1 but could see 4-0 or 2-2. The schedule is very tricky for Iowas State. I will say their ceiling is 10-2 if everything goes absolutely perfect and guys really step up on offense. The floor is 6-6 this is just a typical year in the competitive Big 12, but I always will bet on Coach Campbell.

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