On November 29th, 2025, the Iowa State Cyclone football team notched a narrow and unaesthetic 20-13 victory over the Oklahoma State Cowboys in Stillwater, Oklahoma. For the Cowboys, the game was their last opportunity to avoid a winless 2025 Big XII campaign. They would end the season 1-11, having fired their head coach, Mike Gundy, only three weeks into the season -- ending the second longest coaching tenure in FBS football at 20 years. The Cyclones, meanwhile, would end the season with an 8-4 record, a disappointing conclusion to a season that had started 5-0.

That an 8-4 season could be described as a disappointment in any terms is a testament to head coach Matt Campbell, who over 10 seasons managed 8 or more wins 4 times, including two trips to the Big XII championship game and an 11-3 season in 2024. Prior to his arrival, Iowa State only had one 8 win season in 35 years. Their last conference championship was the same year as the sinking of the Titanic. There are only two Power 4 football programs with a worse winning percentage over their history than Iowa State -- One is Northwestern, and the other, Indiana, went on to win the National Championship in January.

Six days after the victory over Oklahoma State, the most successful era in the history of Iowa State football would end. Rumors swirled that Penn State had been rebuffed by BYU’s Kalani Sitake and their attention turned to Campbell. On December 5th, Matt Campbell was announced as the new head coach at Penn State, and Iowa State announced the hiring of Jimmy Rogers. Though headlines and social media posts signaled the inevitability of the move, due to the timing of the respective announcements, Iowa State appeared to have hired a new coach an hour or two before the old one had officially left.

I had very little ill will toward Matt Campbell for his decision to leave, and I wasn’t alone. The Iowa State athletic director, Jamie Pollard, gave a teary eyed speech thanking Campbell for his loyalty over his decade as coach, including turning down many rumored offers and opportunities at both other colleges and the NFL. Not many coaches would turn down the Detroit Lions to stay in Ames, yet Matt Campbell did. He also didn’t move to a rival school or make a lateral move that would inflame the inferiority complex of the fanbase -- while on paper, Penn State and Iowa State compete at the same level of the sport, in any way that matters -- facilities, finances, recruiting, player compensation, exposure, access to the post-season -- Penn State has the advantage. Campbell’s salary nearly doubled overnight, not to mention his chances to compete for a playoff appearance or national championship.

I wonder if he also had a sense that if he stayed, his best days in Ames were behind him. The only likely accomplishments left on the table as coach of the Cyclones were a conference championship (he got two bites at that apple in championship game appearances in 2020 and 2024, but came up short), or a fringe appearance in an ever-expanding playoff. I sensed a growing malaise across the fanbase. Iowa State football fandom had been defined for fifty years by being the scrappy underdog in a conference with the likes of Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas -- all teams that fled in the last fifteen years of realignment. Cyclone fans would sit through our team getting shellacked year-after-year for the occasional reward of beating a team that we had no business competing against.  Iowa State football was never more competent than under Campbell, but the emotional highs of stunning Oklahoma on the road, or beating Texas so thoroughly that the opposing coach’s post-game rant on the bus went viral, became harder to generate in a conference with like-competition and fewer traditional rivalries. The seasons were good but predictable: Win or lose against Iowa by a field goal. Grind out 7-9 wins against the Cincinattis and Houstons and Kansas States of the world. Go bowling. See you again next year.

After the departure of the coaches, came the players. Iowa State announced the team would not accept an invitation to a bowl game, citing fears that the roster of willing players would be too thin to safely field a team. Over the coming weeks, the depths of those concerns became apparent. Sixty players appeared on the depth chart released at the beginning of the 2025 season, though many more would make an appearance in a game at some point. Of those sixty players, only fifteen will return to Iowa State for the 2026 season. Thirteen of them exhausted their eligibility, graduated, or ended their playing careers. Thirty-two of them entered the transfer portal. 

Over fifty total players would exit the program in total. Most will probably benefit from the move -- more money, more opportunities to play, a chance to choose a coach and scheme that fits them with the benefit of college-level playing time under their belt. Some may have had help finding the exit door, evidently not fitting the vision of the new staff and encouraged to seek opportunities elsewhere. Twenty-four of the former players will find a lot of familiar faces at their destination, having followed Matt Campbell to Penn State. The new Iowa State staff countered the exodus by importing fifty new players, with sixteen following Jimmy Rogers from Washington State. 

When Iowa State takes the field again on September 3rd against Southeast Missouri state, they will look nothing like the team that entered the locker room after the final whistle blew in Stillwater, Oklahoma in November. There will be a few who stayed behind -- a placekicker, a defensive lineman, a former return specialist upgraded to a starting running back, but those players will be more exceptions than they are the rule.

I am reminded of the Ship of Theseus paradox, a philosophical question that asks us to imagine a ship with parts replaced so thoroughly over the years so thoroughly that no board or nail remains of the original vessel -- can it truly be said to be the same ship? It’s a riddle challenging us to resolve our desire for continuity in a reality where everything is undergoing motion and change.   To some extent, sports fandom has always grappled with this puzzle -- players get traded away or retired, hated rival players become beloved hometown heroes through the machinations of free agency. As Jerry Seinfeld (setting aside his parallel interest in the lives of 18-24 year olds) once observed, sports fans are really just cheering for laundry. Wait five years and generally every college sports team will be a completely new set of players -- only the jerseys stay the same.  Few coaching staffs last much longer than that either.  Even in the professional ranks, where graduation and eligibility rules don’t force roster turnover, teams rarely look the same for long. No member of the 2019 Minnesota Timberwolves remains on the roster.

Traditionally though, these transitions are gradual -- only a quarter or a third of the roster turns over each year and the fan grows accustomed to a few new faces each year surrounded by familiar players. What occurred at Iowa State was different -- the Ship of Theseus was taken into dry dock for repairs and a completely different ship sailed out weeks later with Theseus’ name hastily stenciled on the side. Worse yet, the better part of the old ship is still out there sailing. In all likelihood, Penn State’s depth chart entering the 2026 season will feature more Iowa State players from last season than Iowa State’s will. I know their names, their stories, I have cheered their successes and muttered under my breath at their failings. In fits of irrationality endemic to the mind of a sports fan, I have silently believed them to be of superior character and effort while facing off against the despicable and wretched opposing players.

College football fandom asks us to embrace the idea that the players are mostly like us, even as we know that they are nothing like us. They attend the same school that we (or a loved one) attended, they sit in the same classroom seats, walk across the same campus, they are part of the same community -- we ask them to be both player and fan. They are young and imperfect and, on most rosters, the majority of them will have boring jobs like us one day. Most fans also understand that their experience on campus is nothing like ours is or was, their academics and practice schedules so carefully managed that many could probably not find their way to the student union. And when they suit up on Saturdays (and increasingly Fridays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays) they become something very unlike us -- not only athletes pushing the limits of the human body, but avatars of a greater community to which we belong. Their win is our collective victory, and their loss is our mutual defeat. Fans are responsible only for themselves -- athletes are held responsible for our collective wellbeing.

Now, eight years into the transfer portal era, five years into the Name, Image and Likeness era, and a year into the Revenue Sharing era, we’re reminded, sometime in drips and drabs and sometimes in a flood, that the athlete’s position in our community is conditional in ways that disrupt our fiction of the sport. The players change schools, they are more loyal to coaches more than campuses, they follow a paycheck. For those fans who seek to maintain their old fiction of college football, whether through necessity or ignorance, there are explanations to be found in the moral decline of the young athlete, the corrupting influence of TV revenue, and the nationalization of the sport. 

I have observed over the past six months how many in my team’s fandom have been able to make sense of the loss of these players as a heel turn -- having betrayed the community they once belonged to. The once celebrated three-year starting quarterback with a highlight reel of clutch plays was actually a liability with head-scratching accuracy problems. The promising young tight end who doubtlessly left money on the table in past off-seasons to continue at Iowa State was never actually the loyal son we believed him to be. The coach who defied years of rumors about the next step on his coaching ladder was at last revealed to be playing the long-con -- just another opportunist using Iowa State University as his stepping stone.

Though I have experienced the deep dejection felt by many other fans, I have not been able to bring myself to feel negatively toward those who have left. I suspect I would enjoy the emotional catharsis of moving on from the past era and routing for the new players as the true Cyclones, superior in every way, I’m sure -- hardworking on the practice field, passionate on game day, and certainly virtuous in their motives for choosing our team to play on over its competitors.

Perhaps I’m too educated of a fan, with a media diet that explores the business of college football -- I know how these things go well enough to not read malice into it. Perhaps it’s because I work for a different school, and I know the internal dance of balancing my affection for my alma mater with my duties of performing school spirit for my employer. Maybe I’m just old, and I can’t muster the same outrage that a younger person can when they are betrayed or disappointed for the first dozen times by a sports team’s decision making. Mostly, I think I’ve just grown fond enough of the coaches and players to trust their judgment on their decisions more than my own.

I have felt the anxiety of weighing my options between the familiar and beloved and the unknown but thrilling, and I can imagine how Matt Campbell, after 9 years of choosing the former, might need to choose the latter. I loved my experience at Iowa State, and if I had been approached with even $50,000 to leave it behind, I have no doubt that I would have. I have left jobs for pay raises, I have moved across the country, for smart reasons and dumb ones, and I am grateful that no one saw fit to speculate on those over social media posts. If I believe that in some ways I have had similar experiences in life to the players and coaches I cheered for, then perhaps it's this: I have loved, with all my heart, people and places and communities that I knew I needed to move on from, and that I was filled with gratitude for them, even as I resisted every urge to look back to gauge their approval for my decision.

The first Saturday of this September, an Iowa State football team will take the field in Jack Trice Stadium against Southeast Missouri State. For all my unfamiliarity with the player’s names and personalities and moral character, I suspect the first time a pass is thrown into coverage or the ball hits the turf on a fumble, the lurching of my stomach will confirm that I still care just as much. 900 miles east, Penn State will kick off their season against Marshall on the same day. I may end up watching some of that game too. I doubt my stomach will lurch in the same way it used to on a dangerous pass by Rocco Becht, or an interception by Jeremiah Cooper, but I suspect I’ll end up cheering them on all the same.