Early this season, Iowa State head coach Gene Chizik said of his team running the ball often, “That’s 200 years of football right there.”

Two hundred years? I’m assuming Chizik wasn’t a history major.

But while the sport hasn’t been around that many years, I’ll bet the phrase, “Defense wins championships” has, and the Iowa defense is going to set the Cyclone offense all the way back to when Chizik thinks the game began.

How good has the Hawkeye defense been? In the first two games it allowed three points, 193 rushing yards, 245 passing yards and has sacked the quarterback seven times. In addition, the unit has picked off four passes.

The Iowa defense has played so well that a backup — defensive tackle Karl Klug — won Big Ten Defensive Player of the Week honors after the FIU game.

Admittedly, the defensive domination came against an FCS team and a team that won one game a year ago, but let’s compare that to what Iowa State did against an FCS team and a team that went 3-9 last year.

Against South Dakota State and Kent State, Iowa State gave up 45 points and 760 yards of total offense. The Golden Flashes rolled up 410 yards of offense on the ‘Clones. If it wasn’t for extraordinary special teams play by the Cyclones, Kent State might have walked out of Jack Trice Stadium victorious for the second straight year.

If the Iowa offense only scores half of what it’s been averaging this year, the Hawkeye faithful still won’t have anything to worry about, because the Iowa State offense won’t be able to move the ball all day. And by the way, the Iowa State offense raises a quandary: If you have two mediocre quarterbacks, does that mean you have one good quarterback?

Oh, and the Iowa offense won’t score only half of what it’s been averaging. Ricky Stanzi is the change fans have been waiting for at quarterback. His coming out party was carving up FIU, and the skinny guy from Ohio will put his name in Hawkeye lore with a dominating performance against Iowa State. And while Stanzi is the new golden boy, Shonn Greene is the engine that powers the Hawkeye offense. He’ll be cracking heads for four quarters as the Hawkeyes soar high above the Cardinal and Yellow.

— Mike Brownlee is a student at the University of Iowa and writes for The Daily Iowan.