6B = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
SPORTS
WEDNESDAY,OCTOBER 23,2002
Cyclones try to rebound against ranked Texas
By Rick Kerr
iowa State Daily via U-wire
iowa State University
AMES, Iowa—After being dismantled by the Oklahoma Sooners last Saturday, the 17th-ranked Iowa State football team will look to rebound this week when it travels to Austin, Texas to face the eighth-ranked Texas Longhorns.
The Cyclones (6-2, 3-1 Big 12) will face their second consecutive top 10 opponent when they meet Texas (6-1, 2-1), ISU head football coach Dan McCarney was disappointed with his team's performance at Norman, but he knows that it was only one game.
"It's a hard loss for us, obviously," McCarney said. "I just remind them that we're not 2-6, we're 6-2, and we've still done a lot of good things this year."
McCarney also said the Cyclones can't dwell on last week with the opponent they face this weekend.
"We can't sit around and keep worrying about the Oklahoma game. It's all done and behind us," he said. "Texas is a tremendous football team. We're really going to have our hands full, and hopefully we can bounce back and play much better football this Saturday."
The Longhorns responded to their own loss to Oklahoma the previous week by defeating Kansas State 17-14 on Saturday.
Texas head football coach Mack Brown has been impressed with the Cyclones this season, regardless of their performance
against the Sooners.
"Iowa State has hud a great year," Brown said. "They ran into a buzzsaw on Saturday, but Oklahoma is a great team."
Brown expects a tough game with the Cyclones, and he knows that McCarney will have them ready. "They'll bounce back because [McCarney] is as tough and as strong and aggressive a personality as any coach in the country right now," he said. "I give [him] credit for turning that program around and making it one of the best in the country."
Texas features a defense that is allowing only 13.7 points per game, good for fifth in the nation.
Their offense is led by senior quarterback Chris Simms, averaging 214 yards per game, and sophomore running back Cedric Benson, who is third in rushing in the Big 12 with 105 yards per game.
Iowa State continues their gruesome second-half schedule of road games, but McCarney is not looking for any sympathy.
"If you got a good football team -- which I thought we did, I think we do, I believe we do -- then you enjoy going on the road in those atmospheres where it's you against the world," he said. "Your focus has to be tremendous when you go in environments like that, but that's part of the challenge as a coach or a player. It's a tough battle, but we're not waiting for any sympathy vards, and we're not getting any."
Texas is well aware of what they have to do to beat Iowa State
"(Seneca Wallace) didn't play well, but neither did anybody else on our offense. He's a fabulous young man and he's a great competitor."
Dan McCarney
Iowa State head coach
-- contain quarterback Seneca Wallace -- and after the Oklahoma game, they have seen how it can be done.
McCarney is aware of this, and knows that everyone else will be studying the tape as well.
"Everybody knows he's the key to our offense, and now Oklahoma's done just a fantastic job of shutting him down and shutting our offense down, and there hasn't been a lot of that this year," he said. "It's a tremendous challenge, but one that we're looking forward to, and we're hoping that we can play a lot better football this week."
After his performance against Oklahoma, finishing with 43 passing yards and three interceptions, many feel Wallace may have lost his chance at the Heisman, but Brown has seen this kind of thing before -- when he coached a Heisman winner, current Miami Dolphin running back Ricky Williams.
Dazzling Texas Tech offense to roll into stiff defense
By Will Shanley Colorado Daily via U-wire The University of Colorado
BOULDER, Colo.—Practice makes perfect, or so the saying goes.
And for the Colorado defense, practice hopefully will produce proficiency when Texas Tech and its three-ring circus spread offense travel to Boulder this weekend for a crucial Big 12 tilt.
The Buffaloes' most recent opponents, Kansas and Baylor, hopefully have supplied sufficient practice for the Buff defenders, considering both teams utilized a similar offensive style to Texas Tech - one that employs three and four wide receiver spread sets.
Inaddition, the Buffs can add San Diego State, a team the Buffs dropped 34-14 earlier this year, to the list of Buff opponents that run wide-open, pass-happy attacks. Basically, the schemes attempt to spread the field with multiple receivers and create opportunities on short routes and over the middle.
"If you could pick the progression through a schedule; to have the one (running) back Kansas, the one back or no back Baylor, and now the one back Texas Tech offense, I think that works to our advantage." said CU defensive coordinator Vince Okruch after Saturday's game. "I feel that way right now – to have those two games prior to Texas Tech, that will help us."
going over the top for big scoring strikes.
And if the last weekend's shutout of Baylor was any indication, then the Buffalo defense might be peaking at an appropriate time. The 251 yards yielded by the Buffalo defense was their most stingy effort of the season, and the four turnovers collected and four sacks recorded were also season bests. The shutout was the first one posted by the Buffs since a 37-0 drubbing -- also of Baylor -- in 1999.
"We challenged our defense this week in practice and they accepted the challenge and they answered it," head coach Gary Barnett said. "It is hard to get a shutout no matter who you are playing, but I thought we tackled well and played the ball well."
However, Barnett admitted that the Baylor offense was not as lethal as some squads in the Big 12, considering the Bears offense has been shutout twice this season and ranks 70th nationally in total yards per game. But Barnett added that like Baylor, Texas Tech employs a nearly identical offensive scheme, relying almost exclusively on the pass.
Kliff Kingsbury leads the powerful Tech offense, as the senior QB surpassed the 10,000 career yards mark with an amazing 510 yards passing last week against Missouri.
Kingsbury leads the Big 12 and is 15th nationally with a 145.9 QB rating.
These similarities are something that the Buffs hope will work to their advantage next week against an explosive Texas Tech offense.
"Last week (against Kansas) we put in a lot of new stuff for those kids, a lot of new zones and we made some mental mistakes," secondary coach Vance Joseph said. "This week we took some of that stuff out and played more base dime (six defensive backs)... and this will help over the next two games against Tech and Oklahoma, because we will be in dime coverages for the next two weeks."
Joseph said that although the Buffs struggled with newly incorporated defensive looks and coverages against Kansas, the Jayhawks punished CU for 29 points and 450 yards, reintegrating some of those complex defenses against Texas Tech will be paramount in slowing down a team led by experienced quarterback Kliff Kingsbury.
"Playing a senior quarterback like that, we will need to have a lot of different looks because we can't just sit back and be targets," Joseph said. "We have been preparing for the last month and it showed last week by putting in some new defenses. Now we have scaled down to where we can really handle it."
For the Buffs, the practice has been performed, and now they must execute.
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