Iowa State once again showed that they have what it takes to pull off wins in the second half.

A 3-3 halftime tie was broken with two big plays by quarterback Seneca Wallace and receiver Lane Danielsen.

On Wallace’s third-quarter scramble, he first rolled to his right and found nothing. Throwing the ball away and running out of bounds crossed his mind, but once he got around the edge and then cut back, he saw daylight.

“At first when I was running over there towards the sideline I was thinking ‘throw the ball away’ or ‘step out of bounds,'” Wallace said. “When I got to the edge I knew I could get past him. I had some blockers out there and I just tried to make a play.”

Up until that point the offense seemed to be out of sync.

“We played all right in the first half, but we just didn’t get into a rhythm,” Wallace said. “We found our rhythm in the second half. We just needed that one big play to get us going.”

While Wallace was providing that big play, Danielsen was taking it all in from the end zone.

“I ran a little bubble screen,” Danielsen said. “He came over to the right and I ran to the back of the end zone. I sat there and watched the whole thing. I saw Wagner make a heck of a block.”

The block Danielsen was referring to allowed Wallace to walk into the end zone.

“We don’t get blocks like that except for every now and then,” running back Michael Wagner said. “Usually that is for the offensive line, but when I got it, it was great. Me being a smaller guy, it made me feel like I was six feet.”

ISU head coach Dan McCarney has seen Wallace wave his magic wand and make plays out of nothing before.

“I just said ‘score Seneca, score.’ You can run that play back 100 times and never get tired of watching it,” McCarney said. “He has that cool calm look about him like its no big thing, ‘I just made 11 guys miss me twice out there.’ It was one of the biggest plays in us winning the second half.”

After Wallace’s heroics Danielsen decided it was his turn to make a play. He took a pitch from Wallace on a reverse and outran the Red Raider defense 79 yards to break the 10-10 tie. It was the first time the play had been run since the game against Kansas.

“I knew I had a chance if I could get some blocks and make a couple guys miss,” Danielsen said. “Jack Whitver and Jamaul Montgomery were there to make a couple key blocks and I made a couple guys miss and got lucky.”

Iowa State once again relied on a high-scoring second half to gain the victory. They are now outscoring opponents 161-44 in the second half and have scored at least 17 points in every second half this year.

They tallied 28 points in the second half for the third time this season.

“We got a good gut check in the second half,” McCarney said. “We have been a real strong second-half team all year and it doesn’t just happen just because you talk about it, it happens in weeks prior.

“Offensively we just did a better job of executing, we got our running game going. We just knew we had to run the football and we got a lot of hard tough yards in the second half. We caught the ball better in the second half and we made some more third-down plays.”