Big 12 coaches have said plenty of kind words about Kalani Sitake, but Iowa State’s Matt Campbell may have offered BYU’s head man the highest praise yet.
“They’re a really great team,” Campbell told reporters Tuesday of the Cougars. “I think I’ve 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’s how much I think of him.
“How 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’re playing really good football right now.”
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Campbell’s Cyclones will host Sitake’s squad Saturday afternoon in Ames, with Iowa State hoping to snap a two-game losing skid against unbeaten BYU.
According to Campbell, the key to the Cougars’ 7-0 start has been their physicality.
“It starts with the toughness of their quarterback,” Campbell said. “I 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.
“And then on top of that, they’ve 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’re a complete offense and can really attack you in all facets of it.”
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.
“Yeah, he’s really tough. I would just say the first word that comes to my mind is he’s just tough,“ Campbell said of Bachmeier. ”He’s gritty, he’s tough, and I really love his ability to extend plays. I think he does a great job of that.
He’s 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’s hard to do when you’re physically running the football like that.”
Campbell continued, “So (Bachmeier is) really impressive in terms of just his mannerisms, his toughness. And you can tell that football team believes in him. He’s got great leadership ability and credit to him. He’s really done a great job this year.”
As for his own team’s leadership, Campbell expressed confidence in his players being able to shake off their recent two losses and get back on track.
“I say this every year, you’re going to have adversity. You’re going to have tough days. Man, in our world here, that’s just how we’re going to live and how we respond to it defines who we become,” Campbell said.
“And those are the crossroad moments, man. How do you respond when it’s 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’re going to hang your hat on our great kids right now.”
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.
But BYU has gone 18-4 since then, becoming one of the top groups in the Big 12 and country as a whole.
In order to hand the Cougars their first loss of 2025, Campbell referenced three “pillars” that will be most important for an Iowa State victory.
“I don’t care what game it’s been, we’ve got to win the turnover (battle), number one,” Campbell said. “We’ve got to do a great job of creating explosives and eliminating explosive plays. And then, I think from a special teams standpoint, we’ve got to be able to do a great job of playing what we’re capable of playing on special teams. And so I think those three things are still pillars of our success and they’ll be pillars in this football game for sure.”
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