Last season, coach Paul Rhoads and his team walked off the field at Sun Devil Stadium Insight Bowl champions, the team’s first bowl victory since the 2004 Independence Bowl.

At the time, it seemed the team had nowhere to go but toward improvement. However, the newest polls have the Cyclones finishing last in the Big 12 North due to their young defense and difficult schedule.

“[The players] know what’s out there,” Rhoads said. “They know what the challenge is, they know that by some polls they’ve been rated to have one of the toughest schedules in all of Division I football. They also embrace that. If they didn’t, then we have the wrong kids for our program. They’re excited about that challenge. They’ll prepare to play those games no differently than if it were a team in the top 10 or not in the top 25.”

Looking past the difficult schedule and the lack of support from any of the media polls, the team seemed optimistic about the upcoming season.

Junior cornerback Leonard Johnson was not willing to make a bold prediction about how the Cyclones will be this season. However, he was confident the team would be able to be competitive even with a younger defensive unit.

“[The younger defensive players] have been learning and practicing hard this summer,” said Johnson. “We’ve all been coaching each other throughout the whole process. They’ll get snaps, they’ll get reps and they’ll gain confidence throughout camp so they’ll be ready by the first game.”

Johnson also said the team had been expecting this year’s team to be full of younger players on defense since last season.

Because the team knew what to expect, players and coaches began working on getting the underclassmen enough reps in practice so they would be prepared to take the next step this season and fill the gaps left by such standouts as former players Kennard Banks and Jesse Smith.

“We’ve got guys with experience,” Johnson said. “We’ve played those guys, and we’ve molded those guys because we knew [last season] this season’s team would be a young team. [The younger players] have seen playing time, it’s just they haven’t seen a full game at the position.”

Despite the Cyclones finishing ranked 11th in total defense and 10th in passing defense, the team still believes it will be able to stop the pass; thanks in large part to the experience the Cyclones will be returning to their secondary and the time they will have to work during training camp.

“We’re going to have to make a lot of improvements,” said senior safety Michael O’Connell. “We have four weeks to get ready and every day we’re going to come together to work. This is a great time for us because this is the only time of the year where we can just focus on football and football only, because once we start school we’ll be busy with classes. So this will be a good time for our defense to gel together and create that identity for 2010.”

While the team’s defensive secondary may not have been its strongest part of the team, it still managed to rank second in takeaways, finishing with 17 fumble recoveries and 15 interceptions.

However, of those 15 interceptions, five of them were from senior defensive back David Sims, who will be sitting out the first game due to suspension.

Last year’s Big 12 Newcomer of the Year was found guilty of credit card fraud charges and was not available during media day. However, Sims is practicing with the team, and both Rhoads and Sims’ teammates expect him to be a large part of this upcoming season.

“I really don’t know everything that happened [with Sims] but he apologized,” said junior cornerback Ter’ran Benton. “I never knew him to do anything like that, it was so out of character. He’s already back on the field and he acts like a team captain. We don’t treat him any differently, and we still expect a lot from him this season.”

Looking past the team’s off the field issues and low expectations from numerous media outlets, the Cyclones are excited to begin training camp and believe once camp begins, they will be poised to have another successful season.

“We’re not listening to the outside,” Benton said. “We’re hungry this season, and what I mean by that is we’re going to have to go out on the field and show everybody what we’re about with the pads. We can’t really tell anybody that, so we’re going to have show them.

“We’re not really worried about what [every team on our schedule] is going to do,” he said. “We know Texas, Oklahoma, Utah and Iowa are good, but we can’t worry about that. We have to worry about what we’re going to do as individuals and as a team.”