KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Paul Rhoads stood at a podium inside an unused locker room in Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium.

He looked drained from leading his team for 60 minutes on the field on a hot, humid September day.

He looked down at the paper in front of him, trying to find the answer to a question about his defense.

His answer was short, but it told the whole story.

“262 yards would not be a good day defending the run,” Rhoads said.

Iowa State (1-2, 0-1) allowed 262 rushing yards and committed eight penalties in its 27-20 loss to Kansas State (3-0, 1-0) on Saturday afternoon.

The Wildcats’ Daniel Thomas showed why he is considered one of the nation’s top running backs, carrying the ball 34 times for 189 yards and two touchdowns.

“He’s a great player,” Rhoads said. “He’s big, he’s strong, he’s fast … he’s a special player.”

Thomas’ two touchdowns both came in the second half. The first, midway through the third quarter, was a 1-yard, leaping score that came after a 69-yard interception return for a touchdown by ISU sophomore linebacker A.J. Klein. Thomas’ second score was the game winner, a 2-yard run with 6:47 left in the game.

Throughout the day, the ISU defense struggled to bring down KSU rushers on the first or even second hit, and Thomas had eight runs of 10 or more yards.

“I know we can tackle better. I’ve seen it happen,” said ISU linebacker Jake Knott. “He’s just such a good back, he’s going to make people miss sometimes and there’s nothing you can do.”

Thomas has 552 yards rushing through the season’s first three games, second only to Michigan’s Denard Robinson, who has 559.

The senior from Hilliard, Fla., also has six touchdowns already after getting 11 all of last season.

“He’s a very elusive back and we didn’t do a great job fitting our gaps and corralling him as a team,” Knott said. “If he got one on one, he made somebody miss and we should have been making those tackles.”

Aside from Thomas, five Wildcats combined for the team’s remaining 81 rush yards.

Quarterback Carson Coffman led the way for the five, gaining 48 yards on 10 carries. Three other Wildcats — Aubrey Quarles, Brodrick Smith and William Powell — each had one carry of more than 10 yards.

“We didn’t expect [Coffman] to run that much,” Klein said. “We have to make adjustments on the field, take it as it comes. We just have to do the best we can to adjust, and we didn’t do a good enough job on the run.”

The last three weeks, Iowa State has faced three of the country’s top rushing offenses. Kansas State is the nation’s 11th-best running attack — averaging 260 yards per game — while Iowa is No. 56 and Northern Illinois is No. 21.

“We’ve game-planned as much as we could,” Klein said. “Missed tackles, again, are the big thing.”

Rhoads said coming into the season that he thought Iowa State’s inexperienced front seven — a group that started three sophomores at linebacker, and two juniors and two seniors on the defensive line —needed to improve week to week.

Iowa State’s rushing defense, though, is ranked 112th of 120 Bowl Subdivision teams, allowing 231 yards per game. Last season, the ISU rush defense was 86th in the country, allowing 165 yards per game.

“We just need to focus on getting the stops and getting in our gaps a lot more,” Knott said. “When we get there, making those tackles because that’s what happened today. We’d get there and just would miss a tackle.”