You study film. You sit down in some side room in the Jacobson Athletic Building with your teammates, and you watch Nebraska score 41 points on you in the first half.

You watch the crowd jump around, the refs signal touchdown, the scoreboard light again.

And then you worry about Missouri.

That’s how you deal with a loss in Lincoln.

“We started bad,” Cyclone linebacker Justin Eilers said. “A pick for a touchdown. Special teams let them have a good punt return. They had a short field to work with. They get another touchdown. Get another pick. They have a short field to work with.”

Eilers pauses, taking it all in. “We just really hurt ourselves,” he said.

That is the players’ consensus this week. Nebraska played well, but we hurt ourselves.

“We got a good picture of what it takes to be a big time team,” linebacker Matt Word said.

Big time means exploiting an opponent’s mistakes.

Short fields aside, Word, Eilers and defensive end Kevin DeRonde said they didn’t make their correct “fits,” or in simpler terms, were not where they needed to be on any certain play.

“If everybody’s not in the right spot doing their right assignment, [Nebraska’s] going to make big plays,” Word said.

You correct the mistakes that lead to big plays in practice the following week.

“You gotta get refocused,” DeRonde said. “You gotta move on.”

And if you don’t, Word said, you “get whooped again and again and again.”

“What you did wrong?” DeRonde said. “Correct that in practice.”

So the Cyclones think they have corrected their mistakes from this week.

They’ve also faced the facts.

“We got something to prove to ourselves,” Word said. “Gotta play every week.”

In the first half at Lincoln, Eilers said, the whole team wasn’t ready. “When you let Nebraska get going, man, they’re almost impossible to stop,” he said.

“We went into halftime saying `we can play with these guys. Who cares if they win the game,'” Eilers said.

After the Cyclones allowed 287 yards in the first half, while amassing 151, they limited the Huskers to one touchdown in the second half.

So, only seven points were scored, but Nebraska racked up nearly 200 more yards, finishing with 476 total.

“In the second half, we’re meeting them at the line of scrimmage,” Eilers said.

And the ISU offense ended with nearly 200 more yards: 336 total.In the second half, Eilers said, all Cyclones played better.

Iowa State does not view last week’s game as a setback to this year’s team. DeRonde said the Cyclones need to return to shut-outs, much like the Baylor and UNI games.

“We can’t have a let down,” Word said.

Last year, Iowa State followed every loss with a win.

That’s the plan for this year.

And again, it begins on the brown, worn-down grass of the practice field.

“We need to practice with a lot of intensity,” Eilers said.