Last year, the Big 12 Conference’s defenses were all given front row seats to a fireworks show lasting roughly two months, as the conference displayed some of the most prolific high-powered offenses in college football history.

The Iowa State defense was not left out of the pyrotechnic display put up by the conference’s offensive juggernauts either, allowing 41.8 ppg in conference play, better than only Kansas State and Texas A&M.

This off-season has a new outlook for the Cyclones much-maligned defense as Wally Burnham takes the helm as the new defensive coordinator.

Burnham, the defensive coordinator for South Florida over the past seven seasons, is coming in after leading some of the top defenses in the country.

In seven seasons with the Bulls, Burnham’s defenses ranked in the top 28 in the nation six times, with his 2008 squad finishing No. 10 in the nation in total defense.

Experience and learning from those squads is sure to help this year’s Cyclone defense.

“We’ve got [film of South Florida] and how we run and tackle, and that’s the two things that evidently, they couldn’t do here in the past — I don’t know how many years,” Burnham said.

Stopping a spread offense is difficult because of the dimensions it brings to the field, using up to five wide receivers and stretching the field to its maximum capacity.

The old saying “the best defense is a good offense” might be just the thing Iowa State needs to get it prepared to take on the spread.

“Going against the offense we have, with that high-powered, fast-pace offense, it definitely gets us ready to play in the Big 12 with these teams that run no-huddle offenses and spread the field. It’s definitely going to help us with our conditioning just going against our offense,” said senior nose guard Nate Frere.

A new spread attack on the offensive side of the football for the Cyclones is what the defense practices against every day in the Bergstrom Indoor Practice Facility, and seeing the looks day-in and day-out will pay dividends come gameday.

The Cyclones return a lot of experience on defense for the 2009 season, having 12 players who started at least one game last season back to build a solid foundation to work with.

“The defensive line, the corners, we feel pretty good about those two positions,” Burnham said. “And then our safeties and our linebackers are a little bit behind on what we’re trying to do. The old adage is you’ve got to be strong down the middle, but right now we’re not that strong down the middle. Not that we’re bad, it’s just that we’ve got to get better. So I’d say overall the front and the corners are our best.”

Up front has been an Achilles’ heel for Iowa State over the past few years, registering only 12 sacks last season, with four of those solo sacks recorded by Kurtis Taylor.

Taylor graduated, leaving a void at defensive end to fill. But Burnham said the team will come around.

“We’re experimenting right now inside with our three technique, our nose guard, and trying our defensive ends on different sides and see if that’s best fit to stop the spread offense,” Burnham said.

“They’re doing what we’re asking them to do. Some people are right-handed and some people are left-handed, and they can do and perform things much better depending on their strengths.”

Before the team can worry about stopping these spread offensive attacks by teams such as Oklahoma State, Missouri and Texas Tech, the defensive unit needs to start with the fundamentals of the game — tackling.

“We do tackling drills every day, but you know, we struggled with that in the past, and whatever you struggle with you’ve got to work at,” Frere said. “Even if it’s what you might think would be the easiest thing for a defensive player to do, sometimes it’s not.”

Head coach Paul Rhoads, whose specialty is defense, says he’s “not sure if any defense can really stop these high-octane offenses,” but thinks the key is to slow them down. Frere and his defensive teammates don’t necessarily see it that way.

“I don’t like to think of us as just a defense to slowing teams down, I’d like to hope that we could really shut down an offense. But I mean that might not happen in all instances,” Frere said. “There’s a lot of high-powered offenses in the Big 12, and there’s a lot of good teams with good players, so just slowing people down, if that’s what we’ve got to do, that’s what we’ve got to do.”