Just looked at some more posts on CycloneFanatic. I had limited access to the other ISU boards because they require subscriptions.

The consensus now is that they will dominate us, and that our team is little more than a glorified UNI. One wag said that our defensive record was against the little sisters of the poor and should be discounted. Another opined that if they had any offensive issues in the game it would not be due to OHIO's defense but due to their patchwork offense (I suppose alluding to the shuffling due to the gambling scandal).

There were a few comments on Twitter X that went like this:

"Jon Heacock says that Ohio will be the 'steepest' competition his team has played against this year, citing the Bobcats' scheme and amount of returning starters & veterans on the team."

This was quickly followed by comments like these:

"Ohio is horrible. Lost to a bad SDS team and only beat Long Island & Florida Atlantic. Cyclones should win easily, although it was stupid to play this game on the road."

"Coach speak. If Ohio scores 10 on offense our defense is questionable. If the offense scores less than 20, they are a weakness."

Then an Iowa fan taunted them with this:

"Yall playing a road game against a DIII opponent?"

The general tone among the Cyclone faithful, as L.C. documented earlier, is that this will be a walk in the park and that the only reason they are playing in Athens is to help with the recruiting of Ohio high school players.

Let's hope some of this can end up on the locker room walls in Peden!

Iowa State is on speed dial with Syracuse, Pitt, Indiana, Kansas, and Mizzou when G5 teams want to host a P5. Do those fans know who they are? They've visited Akron, Toledo, and Tulsa in the last decade.

As for that Iowa fan, I don't think any fanbase whose team has lost to an FCS opponent in the not too distant past has any space to scoff at "lesser" levels of college sports.

Complete ignorance of what happens in a college sports season and you see it every year from P5 fans. As if an upset doesn't happen every week. "No, not us! That could never happen to us. Didn't you hear?? We're IOWA STATE!"

Reminds me of joke that friend of mine in Columbus, a big BuckNut, played on me the year that Toledo beat Michigan. The week of the Michigan game, which was in Columbus that year, he called me on the phone with an excited voice,

"Did you hear that they had to cancel the Michigan game?"

Me, "No, you got to be kidding."

"Yes, it's true, the Michigan team bus is stuck on the road, they couldn't get past Toledo."

Meh. whoever wrote this sounds like a whiny little bitch. You don't get to just never go on the road.

Not to go too deep into it but the only reason ISU is playing in Athens is that it is a return game on a home-and-home series. This isn't a new thing as ISU has played road games at Group of 5 schools before and will continue into the future as they already have an H/H set up with BGSU in 26/27.

Just look around CFB the next two weeks, Alabama is at USF this weekend, and it is the same situation, the back end of a home and home.

For Ohio, it is a rare thing becoming more popular in scheduling these days (H/H), Ohio has P5 teams in Cincinnati and WVU both set to visit Athens in the future and Syracuse has already come to Athens and Ohio will travel to NYC for a backend of that H/H.

The Game is on ESPN U - a national TV channel and nowadays everything is streamed and can be seen everywhere.

On the topic of recruiting - while it is harder to play games in areas where you recruit unlike some other sports where you can promise to play a game near a player's hometown, (football schedules are made 8-10 years out.) an example of this is that the Ohio field hockey team played in Maine to open the season and it was a game made during the recruiting process of two sisters from Maine. While the Bobcats football team recruits Flordia well, it is hard to tell recruits that they can get a game down there, so last week's trip to Florida was special for those guys.

Kind of a turn about from last year when the defense struggled through the first four games, then gelled together to get to a 10-win season...if the offense can turn around (as I think it will), Katie, bar the door!

I may be confused here, but are you saying that the offense has been slow this year because they put in a new system? Considering the success last year, and the fact that the key coaches are still the same, it's surprising to me that they would have made radical changes to the offensive system.

This kind of went viral on the ISU fan boards:

https://x.com/HawksChronicles/status/1703157743878541761?s=20

No the defense last year.