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<\/p>\nBig 12 coaches have said plenty of kind words about Kalani Sitake, but Iowa State\u2019s Matt Campbell may have offered BYU\u2019s head man the highest praise yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re a really great team,\u201d Campbell told reporters Tuesday of the Cougars. \u201cI think I\u2019ve talked about Kalani before, my respect for him, and if my own son could play for anybody in college football, I would want my son to play for him. I mean, that\u2019s how much I think of him. <\/p>\n
\u201cHow he leads a football program and a team, and you see it. I mean, they play for each other. They play really great complimentary football, and they play great team football. So much respect for them, and across the board, they\u2019re playing really good football right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Special Collector’s Issue: “1984: The Year BYU was Second to None”<\/p>\n
Get an inclusive look inside BYU Football’s 1984 National Championship season.<\/p>\n
Campbell\u2019s Cyclones will host Sitake\u2019s squad Saturday afternoon in Ames, with Iowa State hoping to snap a two-game losing skid against unbeaten BYU.<\/p>\n
According to Campbell, the key to the Cougars\u2019 7-0 start has been their physicality.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt starts with the toughness of their quarterback,\u201d Campbell said. \u201cI love their running back, tough, physical football player. And then when you look at those five offensive linemen, man, those guys are really talented players, guys that play a lot of football. So I think when you start with this BYU team, you talk about physicality and their ability to run the football.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then on top of that, they\u2019ve got playmakers on the perimeter. You see it in their special teams game, you see it offensively. All those guys are doing great things in all phases of the game. So they\u2019re a complete offense and can really attack you in all facets of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much like the rest of the country at this point in the season, Campbell has been impressed by BYU freshman quarterback Bear Bachmeier, especially in regards to his rushing ability.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, he\u2019s really tough. I would just say the first word that comes to my mind is he\u2019s just tough,\u201c Campbell said of Bachmeier. \u201dHe\u2019s gritty, he\u2019s tough, and I really love his ability to extend plays. I think he does a great job of that. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s physically tough that he can almost literally run the football in the A and B gap throughout the football game and have the ability on the next play to make a great throw on the outside 10 yards deep. That\u2019s hard to do when you\u2019re physically running the football like that.”<\/p>\n
Campbell continued, \u201cSo (Bachmeier is) really impressive in terms of just his mannerisms, his toughness. And you can tell that football team believes in him. He\u2019s got great leadership ability and credit to him. He\u2019s really done a great job this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for his own team\u2019s leadership, Campbell expressed confidence in his players being able to shake off their recent two losses and get back on track.<\/p>\n
\u201cI say this every year, you\u2019re going to have adversity. You\u2019re going to have tough days. Man, in our world here, that\u2019s just how we\u2019re going to live and how we respond to it defines who we become,\u201d Campbell said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd those are the crossroad moments, man. How do you respond when it\u2019s not going well? How do you pull yourself up and keep moving forward? So I look forward to the challenge, what I love about it, what I love about our kids. But you\u2019re going to hang your hat on our great kids right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last time Iowa State faced BYU was in 2023, when the Cyclones crushed the Cougars 45-13 at LaVell Edwards Stadium in one of the lowest points of the Kalani Sitake era. <\/p>\n
But BYU has gone 18-4 since then, becoming one of the top groups in the Big 12 and country as a whole.<\/p>\n
In order to hand the Cougars their first loss of 2025, Campbell referenced three \u201cpillars\u201d that will be most important for an Iowa State victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t care what game it\u2019s been, we\u2019ve got to win the turnover (battle), number one,\u201d Campbell said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to do a great job of creating explosives and eliminating explosive plays. And then, I think from a special teams standpoint, we\u2019ve got to be able to do a great job of playing what we\u2019re capable of playing on special teams. And so I think those three things are still pillars of our success and they\u2019ll be pillars in this football game for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
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BYU Cougars head coach Kalani Sitake and Iowa State Cyclones head coach Matt Campbell talk after the Cyclines beat the Cougars 45-13 at LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023. | Spenser Heaps, Deseret News <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Big 12 coaches have said plenty of kind words about Kalani Sitake, but Iowa State\u2019s Matt Campbell may…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,3125,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-242819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-news-feed-local","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}