The Cyclones have had a rough go on the football field the past two weekends and are returning home to regroup before seven straight Big 12 games to close out the year.

The Cyclones (2-2, 0-1 Big 12) are coming off consecutive losses at No. 13 Iowa and No. 7 Texas going into their showdown with intrastate adversary Division I-AA Northern Iowa.

Iowa State wants to stop the skid before entering the most challenging three-game stretch of its schedule, but coach Dan McCarney said the Cyclones certainly won’t be overlooking the Panthers.

“We’re looking forward to a great game with Northern Iowa,” McCarney said. “Two weeks in a row we’re playing teams that played for a national championship in 2005.

“Division I or I-AA has nothing to do with it; this team won 11 games last year and played for a national championship. They’re a great program.”

With several Division I programs already falling to I-AA opponents this year – the most notable being Colorado’s loss to Montana State – McCarney said the Cyclones will be fully focused on taking care of business Saturday.

“We know the importance of this game,” McCarney said. “We need to win and we need to look good doing it.”

The Cyclones did not look good in the first five minutes of their game against Texas, falling behind 16-0 after a bevy of miscues, including a snap over punter Michael Brandtner’s head for a safety.

However, the Cyclones rallied to pull within 16-14 in the first half, a fact McCarney said can’t go unnoticed.

“We learned a lot about ourselves in that game,” McCarney said. “I knew we had a lot of resolve going in there. We spotted them 16 points right off the bat, and that’s 40 or 50 to nothing real easily without a lot of resolve.

“It takes a lot of guts to fight and scratch and claw back into it when it’s 110 degrees or whatever it was there.”

For the third straight game, the Cyclone offense was stifled in the second half and failed to score a touchdown. Iowa State did not score a single point in the second half against Texas, and the Cyclones have just six points in the second half of their last three games.

These facts have put the Cyclones backs to the wall, said quarterback Bret Meyer, leading to the team’s belief that the season has officially started over.

“We have to start over – start from scratch,” Meyer said. “We’re a .500 team now, just like the beginning of the season. We’ve got eight games left and two directions we can go.”

Meyer likened the situation to similar problems the Cyclones faced by starting 0-3 in the Big 12 in 2004 and 2005.

“In the past, we’ve had situations like this and we’ve gone the right way, so that’s what we’re trying to do,” Meyer said. “We haven’t played good enough to take anybody lightly yet this year, so we’ll be ready to go .”

McCarney said the offensive struggles are because of a lack of consistency from everyone involved with the unit. However, McCarney said, the team is close and he believes the ISU offense can be the dominant force it was expected to be from here on out.

“We’re trying to put it together,” McCarney said. “We just need to be more consistent. It’s a missed block here, a wrong route here, a dropped pass there. We just have to keep our focus.

“If we want to have a season we can be proud of, we have to be more consistent, no doubt about it.”

The Cyclones will face the Panthers at 6 p.m. Saturday at Jack Trice Stadium.

The game is not scheduled to be televised but more than 50,000 tickets have been sold for the game, which is one of many events planned for Family Weekend.