It took only a few minutes, but ISU football coach Gene Chizik sent an everlasting message to his players.

Unhappy with the pace his new team was warming up at on the first day of practice, the ISU coach sent his team to a different field.

The message: Chizik’s expectations would always be met.

“When you start practice and when you play this game, you play it at one speed all the time, and that’s full speed,” Chizik said. “If you don’t give us that any time during practice, right now, we’ll do it over, so I think that message kind of got to them pretty quick.”

It was during that workout that the new coach let everyone know he was in charge.

“He’s got a set of standards that he’s going to demand of these guys and he’s not going to settle for less,” said Cyclone broadcaster John Walters. “I think that’s a great message to send to these guys and I think that message, 15 minutes into the first practice, sent that message loud and clear – that we’re not going to settle for mediocrity and we’re going to do this the right way.”

Settling for mediocrity is something Chizik has never done.

In assistant coaching stops at Auburn and Texas, Chizik’s teams have earned Big 12 and national championship honors with the Longhorns in 2005 and an SEC title with the Tigers in 2004.

Now, the former defensive coordinator will try to do the same with a Cyclone team that finished the 2007 season with a 4-8 overall record (1-7 in Big 12 play) by giving it a crash course on learning how to stay in the game mentally, Chizik-style.

“They’ve got to get to the point where they believe that they can do that,” Chizik said. “It’s something that we’re trying really to hone in – understand the swings of the game, don’t get too high and don’t get too low, stay the same and keep playing.”

Chizik hasn’t tried to promote his players himself. When asked about the hype surrounding junior college running back J.J. Bass, he responded to reporters with a question of his own.

“I’m not sure, what has you all excited about him?” Chizik asked.

When asked about the status of the team through the first several practices of the fall, Chizik once again kept things simple.

“I can use the 200-year-old coach’s cliche and say we have a long ways to go, which is true, but I think we are and I think we’re about where we though we would be,” he said.

That is a place where only winning is accepted. And now his players are buying into the concept.

“Coach Chizik and all of our coaches aren’t guys willing to sit back there and have a .500 record and things like that,” said senior wide receiver Todd Blythe. “They’re all winners and they’re all coming from winning programs where they’re used to success and that’s something they’re going to get us used to.”

That willingness to not accept anything but the best was obvious to others even while Chizik was an assistant for Mack Brown at Texas.

“He is the entire package for being a great head coach,” said Brown in an e-mail interview.

While he may not yet have won his first game as a head coach or taken his team onto a field against a non-ISU opponent, Chizik said he thinks his team already has a winning edge to them, regardless of what happened last season.

“I think they are hungry,” Chizik said. “I think they want to excel. They want to be better than they were last year. They want to be a contender-type football team in the Big 12. That’s what they have appeared in the first three days of practice to want to do.”