Jimmy Rogers walked into Iowa State expecting a rebuild. What he got was a full demolition.
Matt Campbell left for Penn State this offseason, and the program he built over a decade in Ames collapsed almost overnight. Fifty-five Iowa State players entered the transfer portal. Fifteen of the team’s 22 season-ending starters left. Rogers is now trying to build a Big 12 roster from the ground up with a couple of months to do it.
This is the cost of head coaches leaving for bigger jobs in the new college football landscape. Players follow coaches. NIL collectives chase talent across schools. The transfer portal makes it easy for an entire roster to dissolve when the head coach packs up.
Rogers came over from South Dakota State, where he was one of the most successful FCS coaches in the country. He took over a Jackrabbits program that had won three FCS championships and kept the dynasty going. He is a winner. He understands player development. He has a track record of getting the most out of overlooked talent.
None of that matters if you do not have players. The Iowa State athletic department made Rogers a hire who could rebuild the program at a slower pace, but the timeline accelerated when the roster left. Now Rogers has to do in one summer what Campbell took five years to build.
The transfer portal additions have been respectable but not spectacular. Iowa State landed a few mid-tier Power 5 transfers and a handful of FCS standouts. The talent base is closer to a Sun Belt team than a Big 12 team right now. That is going to show up on the scoreboard in September.
The schedule does not do Rogers any favors. The Cyclones open with a competitive non-conference slate before diving into Big 12 play against teams that have not lost their cores to the portal. Iowa State could be staring at a two- or three-win season as a realistic best case.
The bigger question is what this means for the program in two and three years. Rogers is being asked to win at the highest level with a roster that would have been a mid-tier MAC team last year. The athletic department has not put unrealistic expectations on him publicly, but the boosters expect bowl eligibility, and bowl eligibility is going to be a stretch.
The Campbell legacy is also worth talking about here. He built Iowa State into a consistent winner. He took the Cyclones to multiple bowl games. He developed Brock Purdy into a starting NFL quarterback. The fact that the entire program collapsed the moment he left says less about Campbell and more about how fragile college football rosters are in the portal era.
NIL is part of the problem. Iowa State does not have the same collective money that Penn State or Ohio State can throw at a player. The Cyclones who left were almost universally chasing bigger paydays at programs that can outbid them. Rogers does not have the resources to keep that talent home, and that is not changing anytime soon.
The smart play for Iowa State is to lean into Rogers’s strengths. He is a developer. He finds players nobody else wanted and turns them into starters. Build the program around hungry transfers and high-effort recruits, and let the system create a culture that wins games even when the talent level is lower than the opponent’s.
That works at South Dakota State. It is going to be much harder to make it work in the Big 12. But it is what Rogers does, and right now it is the only path he has.
Year one is going to be ugly. Year two will be the real test.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
