The monkey is off of the Cyclones’ back.

For the first time in 17 tries, Iowa State will come home from a road trip a winner after getting a 34-14 win against Kent State on Saturday night.

“We have a very happy football team,” head coach Paul Rhoads said during a post-game radio interview. “We had some demons that we needed to exorcise as far as winning on the road, and we took care of that.”

Rhoads has now led the Cyclones to their second straight 2-1 start, but the road win is the first since they beat Texas A&M in October of 2005.

Iowa State jumped out to a 27-7 halftime lead with three touchdowns from junior quarterback Austen Arnaud. Arnaud completed a 22-yard touchdown pass to Jake Williams and added rushing touchdowns of nine and three yards in the first half.

The offense racked up 259 total yards in the first half after tallying only 303 total yards in last week’s loss to Iowa. The Cyclones finished with 404 yards, including 234 yards rushing.

Saturday’s game was a mirror image of last week’s game for the Cyclones, as this week it was Kent State that turned the ball over five times and committed eight penalties for 69 yards.

However, the Cyclones didn’t play a much cleaner game than the Golden Flashes, turning the ball over four times and committing eight penalties for 85 yards.

The Iowa State defense was able to hold Kent State to 302 yards of total offense in the game, including just 47 yards rushing. Kent State’s freshman quarterback Spencer Keith went 21-of-32 passing with two touchdowns, but was also intercepted once and sacked twice.

“We did a fantastic job on third down, overall, as we gave up only one third down conversion,” Rhoads said. “I think our defense has improved every week as we move through these first three games. I thought the tackling today was very crisp, and we’re showing good marks of improvement.”

Iowa State’s junior running back Alexander Robinson ran his way through the Kent State defense for 143 yards and a touchdown. Meanwhile, the junior receiver Williams was Arnaud’s top target, getting four catches for 51 yards and a touchdown. Senior Marquis Hamilton added four catches for 42 yards, including catches on Iowa State’s first three offensive plays of the game.

Arnaud finished 13-of-21 passing with 144 yards and the touchdown to Williams, as well as getting 42 yards on nine carries.

Iowa State scored only once in the second half, but the game was seemingly in hand and Rhoads used the game as an opportunity to get some of his team’s reserves time on the field later in the game.

True-freshman linebacker Jake Knott racked up six tackles in cleanup time, and redshirt-freshman running back Jeremiah Schwartz had 31 yards rushing and 30 yards receiving late in the game.

“We did let off the gas a little bit, we didn’t focus as much, and suddenly they were playing right with us and we couldn’t get ourselves out of that,” Rhoads said. “We’ll learn from it, and maybe in the long run, because we got the victory, we’ll take advantage of it even more and not repeat those mistakes as we keep going through the season.”