An extra month of practice will pay only dividends for Sam Richardson.

The redshirt freshman quarterback was jettisoned into the spotlight and a starting role after his five-touchdown performance in a win against Kansas but showed his novice in a close loss to West Virginia.

Now preparing for Tulsa (10-3, 7-1 C-USA) in the 2012 Liberty Bowl, ISU coach Paul Rhoads said Richardson has been making the most of getting more than a week to prepare knowing he will be the starter.

“One thing that Sam needs to do with these practices is be more assertive,” Rhoads said. “It’s one of the things that I didn’t see in the whole process of the season — whether it’s training camp or those weeks in the middle of it when he was fighting for the starting job himself.

“And I think he’s doing that now that he’s got a start under his belt and two games worth of snaps. I think he is responding to that in that way.”

Rhoads, who will be leading his Cyclones (6-6, 3-6 Big 12) to a bowl game for the third time in his four-year tenure, said he expects everybody to be improving in the 15 practices leading up to the Liberty Bowl.

Developing an identity as an offense is one of the main tasks Richardson will be relied upon to help facilitate and ignite.

“Coach Rhoads’ main point is to develop over this next month, and it’s to develop as a player and as an offense,” Richardson said. “That’s our main focus right now.”

One of the key components to Richardson’s success will be the establishment of the “jet” tempo — a fast-paced tempo designed to score quickly and wear down the defense in a short period of time.

“We’ll catch them off guard in basically every play if we just go fast and we go long or keep longer drives and sustain them,” said tight end Ernst Brun.

Brun said Richardson practiced well in the weeks leading up to his first significant game action, but having that first start under his belt only will help him moving forward.

“Now he knows what he has to do and how fast the game is going and where his reads are,” Brun said of Richardson. “It’s not practice anymore, so the tempo is much faster and he has to look at the whole field now.”

As far as his experience, Richardson said he’s now differentiated his expectations from when he was in high school to now as a starting Division I FBS quarterback.

“I’ve really developed my passing game quite a bit, whereas high school you can run around and make plays with your feet,” Richardson said. “Out here, I really think I’ve developed trying to make all the passes you have to make out here.”

In his two games of having played more than one series, Richardson has accounted for seven passing touchdowns and zero interceptions. Comparatively, this stat is indicative of possible success with Richardson behind center since both Steele Jantz and Jared Barnett have made their share of turnovers, especially during critical moments of the game.

“I’ve got to continually stress scoring in the red zone,” said first-year offensive coordinator Courtney Messingham. “I would say, for the most part, we did a pretty good job getting touchdowns when we were in the red zone. But yet we still, when you go back and look at the year, turned it over too many times in the red zone.”

Kickoff is slated for 2:30 p.m. CST on Dec. 31 from Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium in Memphis, Tenn. The game will be shown on ESPN.