OKLAHOMA CITY – No one expected a national championship. Critics pinned Iowa State as one of the worst teams in the Big 12.

And even after its first-round loss to ninth-seeded Oklahoma on Thursday, the ISU men’s basketball team wasn’t looking back.

It’s looking forward.

“I felt it was a great season for us in our first year here,” ISU guard Mike Taylor said about all the newcomers on the team. “Next year we just have to learn from the mistakes and learn from the hard times that we went through this year and get better. We have a nice freshmen class coming in that we can build on.”

The season started out rough, with six players from last year’s team leaving early. In addition to that, two players who had committed to Iowa State backed out of their scholarships.

And yet, the Cyclones almost finished in the top half of the Big 12 – a win over Texas Tech in the last game of the season would have made them the sixth seed in the tournament.

The season saw its ups and downs, starting off 6-0 before losing five out if the next six games.

But the Cyclones didn’t play the blame game. They bonded together as much as they could.

“We have grown as a team more than anything,” said ISU coach Greg McDermott. “Any time there is a new coaching staff and only four or five returning players, and then you bring in five or six new players . and you lose five out of six, you find out a lot about guys’ character.

“That’s when they’re going to turn on each other, start pointing fingers and come up with every reason under the sun as to what’s wrong besides taking a look in the mirror. To our guys’ credit, they did not do that.”

Junior forward Rahshon Clark, who played an instrumental role as a freshman and a sophomore under former coach Wayne Morgan’s teams, took on more of a defensive role under McDermott.

It wasn’t an easy adjustment, but it was one that undoubtedly benefited the team.

“I wasn’t as much as a scorer as I was last year, but there’s no big deal about that,” Clark said. “I have been doing things I wasn’t doing last year, like playing good defense and rebounding the ball.”

Although it wasn’t a storybook ending, it was a fitting one – a dogfight to the very end and a mentality to pick up the pieces and move on.

“I’m pretty proud of where they finished and most proud they never quit,” McDermott said. “They didn’t quit early in the season when they had a bad stretch, and they didn’t quit in a game like today when the chips were really against them.”

Next year, the faces won’t be new and neither will the philosophy. And that stability will be a rock for the Cyclones as they roll into another season.