Hawkeye Football Opponent Preview: Iowa State

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Cy-Hawk week comes early. Iowa State rolls into Kinnick in week two on September 12 with a new head coach, a new roster and back-to-back Cy-Hawk wins. The Hawkeyes will no doubt have a chip on their shoulder and be looking for their first win in Kinnick in the series since 2018 (yes, really). Let’s break it down.

The State of Iowa State Football

The 2025 Cyclones went 8-4 overall, 5-4 in the Big 12. By most measures it was a successful year. Iowa State opened the season with a marquee international game victory, defeating #17 Kansas State 24-21 in Dublin to win Farmageddon. They proceeded to make it back-to-back wins in the Cy-Hawk with a 16-13 win over the Hawkeyes in Ames. That’s enough for most ISU fans to call it a successful year.

But the Cyclones hit a major drought, dropping four straight games in the middle of the year, including in their only other game against a ranked opponent vs #11 BYU at home. They finished the regular season with road wins over TU and Oklahoma State with a bowl opportunity awaiting them at season’s end.

Then everything hit the fan in Ames.

ISU’s ten-year leader and virtual savior of the program, Matt Campbell, accepted the Penn State head coaching job on December 5. The Cyclones, in the immediate aftermath of losing their head coach, voted to decline their bowl invitation citing player injuries and the obvious disruption of the program. The program walked into the offseason with no head coach, no bowl game and a roster that was about to completely turn over.

The Big Changes for 2026

New head coach

Iowa State moved fast. Same-day fast. Within hours of Campbell’s news breaking on December 5, 2025, athletic director Jamie Pollard announced the hire of Jimmy Rogers, the 36-year-old Washington State head coach who had finished 6-6 in his lone season in Pullman. Before Wazzu, Rogers had built one of the great recent FCS résumés as the head coach at South Dakota State — including a 15-0 perfect season and 2023 FCS National Championship. He’s a defensive-minded coach with a track record of player development, particularly at the quarterback position.

The Iowa angle on the Rogers hire is impossible to ignore: he was Mark Gronowski’s head coach with the Jackrabbits. The Iowa transfer QB won the Walter Payton Award (the FCS equivalent of the Heisman) under Rogers’ tutelage. How his approach will work in year one in Ames will be interesting. He certainly had a winner at SDSU.

New quarterback

Iowa State’s quarterback situation in 2026 is going to look nothing like its 2025 situation. Rocco Becht, the three-year starter who finished his Iowa State career #2 all-time in passing TDs (64), #3 in passing yards (9,274) and second all-time with 26 career wins, followed Campbell to Penn State. He took two of Iowa State’s three Cy-Hawk wins this decade with them.

The replacement is Arkansas State senior transfer Jaylen Raynor. Raynor was a Sun Belt Freshman of the Year in 2023, throwing for 2,550 yards with 17 touchdowns while leading the conference in yards per attempt. He’s a strong-armed quarterback who fits the Rogers system.

Iowa State also added Zane Flores from Oklahoma State (started a few games as a freshman in 2025), retained Connor Moberly from the prior roster and brought in Hudson Kurland in the freshman class. There is some depth but this is a group that has never faced Phil Parker before and that doesn’t typically bode well for a first year head coach.

The Rest of the Roster

The QB room isn’t the only place Iowa State is rebuilding. The full number is staggering: 55 players left Ames through the portal last cycle, roughly offset by transfers coming in (15 of them following Rogers from Washington State) and the Cyclones opened fall camp in August with zero returning starters.

What left

• QB Rocco Becht → Penn State (2,584 yards, 16 TD in 2025; 26 career wins as a starter)
• RB Carson Hansen → Penn State (952 yards, 6 TD — the leading rusher)
• RB Abu Sama → Wisconsin (732 yards, 5 TDs — second leading rusher)
• Top receivers Brett Eskildsen and Chase Sowell, TE Ben Brahmer → all Penn State
• Safeties Marcus Neal and Jamison Paton (125 total tackles + 4 INTs) → Penn State
• CB Jontez Williams → USC 
• DT Domonique Orange → NFL 
• Three assistants also followed Campbell to State College

Again, anything can and usually does happen in this weird rivalry, but that many new faces makes it really hard to be overly optimistic if you are a Cyclone fan for the whole season. Playing this one early, in Iowa City against the wizardry of Phil Parker is no bueno for ISU in El Assico.

What Iowa State Brings to Kinnick

The early-season Iowa State team will be a lot of new faces trying to find their identity under a first-year head coach with a brand-new playbook. Defensively, expect Rogers to install the run-stop-first scheme that made his SDSU defenses among the best in the FCS. That is obviously of utmost importance against an Iowa offense that has been built on establishing the run for more than two decades.

Offensively, the philosophy will likely lean on the running game and quick play-action — the system that turned Gronowski into a star. Raynor, however, is no Gronowski. He’s talented but in a different universe as a runner. In just week two, it’s a tall task to take a fresh playbook and execute to the level needed against an Iowa defense.

In terms of the roster itself, the turnover is almost 100%. Here’s a breakdown of some of the notable names coming to Iowa City

DE Isaac Terrell (Washington State) — the crown jewel: 7.0 sacks, 12+ TFL, named 2025’s top Pac-12 DL performer. He anchors a defensive front stocked with WSU imports (DT Bryson Lamb, edge Malaki Ta’ase).
LB Montreze Smith Jr. (Austin Peay) — FCS Freshman All-American: 74 tackles, 8.5 TFL, 4 sacks, 3 INT as a redshirt freshman.
RB Cameron Pettaway (Bowling Green) — 2025 MAC Freshman of the Year who led the nation in kick-return average (33.0).
WRs Omari Hayes (Tulane, 515 yards) and Cody Jackson (Tarleton State, 799 yards, 6 TD) — the projected top two receivers.
Ten transfer offensive linemen — the entire room is new, pulled from everywhere: Oklahoma, Auburn, Michigan State, Montana, UNI, and two D-II schools.

Projecting the Early Depth Chart

Obviuosly these are just projections. There’s no official two-deep yet as camp opened August 5 and Rogers says most jobs won’t be settled until week three or four of camp. Treat all of this as pencil with a giant eraser on hand.

Series History

The Cy-Hawk is one of the longest and most contentious rivalries in college football, dating back to 1894. Iowa leads the all-time series 51-23, but the recent picture is less rosy: Iowa State has won three of the last five, including back-to-back wins in 2024 and 2025. Iowa’s last home win in the series came in 2018 in a 13-3 rock fight.

While it’s been eight years since Iowa won at home, it’s only been two straight wins in Iowa City for the Cyclones (El Assico took a break in 2020 due to COVID). The Kinnick matchup before that 2018 grind out is the one Hawkeye fans are hoping has parallels given the potential similarities in the run game. Iowa won that one 42-3 in the most lopsided Cy-Hawk victory of the Ferentz era.

Overall, despite the slide the last five years, the Hawkeyes seven of the last ten meetings dating back to 2015.

What to Watch For

• The Jimmy Rogers debut. Cy-Hawk is one of the most-watched non-conference games in college football, and Rogers has already raised the stakes himself: he picked Iowa State to win the Big 12 at media days, with a roster that returns zero starters. Bold is one word for it. Every playcall will get dissected in real time.
• Jaylen Raynor under the Kinnick lights. Rogers said at Big 12 Media Days that Raynor enters camp “as the one.” A sold-out Cy-Hawk crowd is a different animal from a Sun Belt Saturday, and how the new ISU offense handles the environment early will tell us plenty.
• How Iowa’s offense looks in its second game and first P4 test. Whoever wins the QB battle gets his first power conference opponent test, against a defense led by a head coach with an established track record. This is the game where the Iowa offensive identity for 2026 starts to crystallize, even if Lester and the Hawkeyes are still figuring out who the starting QB will be.

The Bottom Line

With such a dramatic rebuild underway in Ames, it’s hard to know what exactly to expect in just week two of the season. The flip side to playing a week two matchup with a new head coach and almost entirely new roster is the whole world knows what to expect out of Iowa. The offense may be still evolving, but we now Iowa is built on the run game and we know how the defense will play. But there is really no scout on Jimmy Rogers at this point given the lack of P4 track record.

FanDuel opened Iowa -12.5 back in May and the number has held into early August. Vegas is pricing the roster teardown in Ames, not the recent rivalry history. The Cyclones still come in with two straight Cy-Hawk wins and things almost always seem tight in this one.

My prediction: this one is scarier in the buildup than on the scoreboard. Rogers’ first Cy-Hawk against Tim Lester’s Year 3 offense is a real schematic chess match for a half, and then the depth gap and adjustments take over. Hawkeyes 35, Cyclones 13.

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