On Saturday night, Steele Jantz might as well have been two different players.

The first-time starting ISU quarterback led the Cyclones to a 20-19 victory over instate rival Northern Iowa, scoring two rushing touchdowns and passing for another touchdown despite throwing three interceptions and completing only 45 percent of his passes.

“He made some mistakes that uncharacteristically he hasn’t made,” said coach Paul Rhoads. “He rolled outside and threw back against his body through the middle of the field for a bad interception. I mean, my wife, Vickie, knows not to do that.

“But he hadn’t done that in all training camp. First-game jitters, trying to make a big play when something was not there, those are the things that he’s got to make sure he doesn’t do in the future.”

Even though Jantz was ultimately able to make the plays sufficient to lead the Cyclones to a victory, his play through most of the game met numerous criticisms and he was able to notice his mistakes after watching film of the game.

“I just was able to see why certain things weren’t working, why sometimes I felt a little rushed in the pocket,” Jantz said. “[It’s just] being able to slow it down. In the game, things will go wrong but you won’t really know why, so I was just able to see why.”

Jantz admitted he was a little too hasty to escape the pocket at the slightest instance in which he felt rushed.

“Sometimes there were people [rushing me],” Jantz said. “But when there wasn’t, I was still not really trusting my line enough and so I was just getting out of the pocket too fast.”

However, Jantz’s demeanor in the huddle was not reflective of his trigger-happy tendencies to scramble outside the pocket.

“He’s surprisingly calm for a guy that hasn’t been in there,” said left tackle Kelechi Osemele. “He just kind of felt it seemed natural, like he [wasn’t] really as nervous as I expected him to be.”

Despite the three interceptions that blemished his name on the stat sheet, Jantz’s productivity in the clutch moments overshadowed the negatives of his performance in the game.

“I thought he was really a shining star as far as the offense is concerned,” Rhoads said. “He made big, clutch plays at the end of both halves, at the end of the game, certainly when the game was on the line and certainly when he was tired from a physical standpoint.”