If defense wins championships, it is no wonder the 2008 football team didn’t end the season with any hardware.

The Cyclones ended the season ranked 112 out of the 119 Football Bowl Subdivision teams in total defense, yielding 452.83 yards per game. All those yards translated into more than 35 points a game for ISU opponents.

The team has said they will need to play better defensively in order to win games this year.

“There are a lot of things we need to get better at, and tackling is definitely one of them,” said senior linebacker Jesse Smith.

That theme has been repeated over and over by coaches and players alike. In order to improve its tackling, the team has gone all the way back to the fundamentals.

“Feet. If you’re going to be a great tackler, you’ve got to bring your feet and your hips all the way to the tackle,” head coach Paul Rhoads said. “We refer to it as ‘taking the extra step.’ You’ve got to move your feet all the way to the tackle,”

The defense will be taught those fundamentals by a defensive coordinator who, though new at Iowa State, has 40 years of experience. That includes nine years as an assistant to Bobby Bowden at Florida State where he helped the Seminoles win a national championship in 1993. For the last seven years, Wally Burnham has been the defensive coordinator for South Florida, culminating in the 10th-ranked defense in the nation last season.

Burnham has given the defense a new mantra for this season: swarm and punish.

“Swarm the football and punish whoever’s got it,” Burnham explained with a smile.

One of the ways the Cyclones hope to accomplish that is with the blitz.

Burnham likes to blitz for a couple of different reasons.

“I think the kids love it, frankly,” he said. “I think it is an aggressive style of defense. We want to be aggressive, we don’t want to sit back and have people dictate to us, ‘OK, you can’t do this because we are doing this.’”

Burnham is planning on using the blitz both to make the defense aggressive and to give them a kick start if they start to drag.

“If you get out there in a game and everything is kind of slowing down, you can use the blitz to make people more aggressive,” Burnham said.

The Cyclones hope to use that more contentious style of defense to slow down the high-powered spread offenses in the Big 12. In addition to being more aggressive, Iowa State’s own version of the spread offense will help the defense prepare for that style of play.

“It will help us out tremendously,” said senior defensive end Rashawn Parker. “We get to see it every day in practice, we will see different schemes. We will probably see every scheme that we are going to see in the Big 12.”

Seeing the spread in practice will also help get the Cyclones used to the pace and conditioning necessary to defend such an offense.

“[The spread offense] does tire you out a lot,” Parker said. “You don’t get a lot of rest in between huddles. You just stay out there on the field as they send in the plays. They throw the ball a lot sideline to sideline, so it’s a lot of running involved and it’s hard to sub guys in and out.”