It was exactly what Iowa State feared.

“We talked all week long about getting off to a good start — let’s get points, let’s get ahead of them,” ISU head football coach Dan McCarney said. “We don’t want to be in a hole.”

But a huge hole was exactly where the Cyclones found themselves in the first half of Saturday’s home finale as Colorado scored touchdowns on its first three possessions and later added 16 points in a two-minute, 43-second span to lead Iowa State 37-0 at halftime.

The Buffaloes (5-6, 3-4 Big 12) came to Ames with a losing record — a first for an ISU opponent this season.

It made little difference to Iowa State (2-8, 0-6 Big 12), which hasn’t scored in the first half in four games.

“It’s hard to pinpoint what really went wrong. It was probably a lot of things,” said senior defensive tackle Jordan Carstens, one of 27 seniors making a final home appearance. Carstens picked up his second sack of the season among six tackles.

“It seemed like everyone on the team wasn’t ready to go and wasn’t able to come out with the kind of fire we needed to at the beginning of the game,” he said.

Colorado sophomore quarterback Joel Klatt shredded a usually reliable Cyclone secondary, completing 21 of 27 passes for 288 yards and two touchdowns.

Senior D.J. Hackett caught a 42-yard pass to open the scoring and later made a 37-yard reception on third-and-23 to set up the Buffaloes’ third score. He was wide open on both plays.

“We really had some uncharacteristic breakdowns in our secondary,” McCarney said. For just the second time, a McCarney-coached team has dropped eight straight games — the Cyclones lost 13 in a row from October 1996 to October 1997.

Iowa State’s offensive woes continued — the Cyclones could muster just 30 yards in the first half before finishing the game with 223.

Adam Benike’s 31-yard field goal early in the third quarter marked the first time Iowa State had scored since Austin Flynn’s two-point conversion run with 8:23 left against Texas Oct. 18 — a stretch of 162 minutes, 51 seconds of game time.

“When you’re down by 40, it is nice to get on the board, but I don’t think anybody is out there celebrating,” senior receiver Jack Whitver said. “We want to score in the first quarter and in the first half and make it a competitive game.”

Klatt’s passing and a dormant offense were more than enough to doom Iowa State, but the Cyclones assured their demise by turning the ball over three times and committing 11 penalties for 96 yards.

“We just haven’t been able to put a complete game together,” Carstens said. “We’ve played well in some areas and not so well in other areas.”

Tailback Stevie Hicks, who ran for 55 yards on 15 carries, said Iowa State needs to somehow establish consistency in order to have offensive success in season-ending road trips to Kansas and Missouri.

“We all have to do the right thing on every play,” he said. “It seems like when we go downhill, we just stay down for a while.”

Waye Terry became the first ISU quarterback to take every snap in a game since a nonconference loss to Northern Illinois Sept. 27 — which, coincidentally, was the last time Iowa State had a lead in a football game.

“I started off a little slow, I didn’t start the way I wanted to,” Terry said. “We’ve just got to make more plays and start faster.”

For their part, the Buffaloes — who needed a win Saturday and must defeat Nebraska at home Nov. 28 to become bowl-eligible — said the 44-10 win was the result of a workmanlike performance.

“We felt that coming in here we had to be aggressive on both sides of the ball, and we felt like we got that,” Colorado head coach Gary Barnett said. “It’s just a good, solid win for us.”

By the time Lorenzo Sims brought Terry down after a meandering 12-yard scramble on the game’s final play, and the Buffaloes declined yet another holding penalty, almost all of the Jack Trice Stadium crowd had left the soaked and chilly seats, unwilling to watch a team coming off three straight bowl appearances finish its 14th loss in its last 17 games.

“[It was] not the way we wanted to finish this home schedule for these seniors,” McCarney said. “It was a surprise that we didn’t play better than we did.”