Assume Iowa State wins this weekend. The victory would make the team 6-1, marking their best start since 1938.

Ed Bock was a captain of the 1938 Cyclone team that finished the year 7-1-1. Football, in its fledgling state, was much different than the game that takes place today.

“For one thing,” Bock said, “if you took someone out of the game, [he] couldn’t come back in until the start of the next quarter.”

“Today, we don’t know who the hell is coming out,” Clyde Shugart remarked.

Both Shugart and Bock often lose place of who is in the game due to the steady wave of substitutions.

Talk to a football expert, and he or she will tell you the era in which Shugart and Bock played was known as “iron-man football.”

Bruises, scrapes, and sore muscles be damned. These guys had to play both ways. Most athletes rarely had time to catch their breath.

“Lots of players played 60 minutes,” Shugart said.

Most offensive linemen not only played a full game, they did not dwarf the backfield in 1938 as some do today.

Shugart played at or around 200 pounds. Henery Wilder, the team’s leading rusher that year, tipped the scale at 195. Wilder finished an injury-shortened season with 497 yards in five games.

Yet today’s team does hold some resemblance to the team of yesteryear.

The 1938 team was not picked to finish well. In 1937, the team was able to muster three wins to six losses.

Everett Kischer, much as Sage Rosenfels today, was expected to have a productive year as quarterback.

But Kischer and company accomplished something this year’s team could not — they beat Nebraska.

Kischer scored the lone touchdown for the Cyclones when he took a lateral from halfback Gordon Ruepke and scampered ten yards across the Lincoln sod into the end zone.

Bock found it difficult to stave off Nebraska and fullback Sam Francis defensively. He brought down Francis on one play in the second half, and rose to find his three front teeth missing.

According to Bock, when Francis came down, his shoe drove through Bock’s teeth, decapitating his pearly whites “cleanly at the gum line.” It was decided that he would have the teeth replaced at the end of the season.

Iowa State held on to win 8-7.

After the game, Iowa State gave Bock a “special helmet.” Bock believes it to be the first helmet ever made that included a face mask.

Two weeks later, Iowa State played Kansas in front of 15,000 fans at Clyde Williams Field in Ames.

Bock had filled the void on his gum line with wax teeth by the Jayhawks game. He missed a tackle during one play of the Kansas game, but Bock would have the last laugh.

As the Kansas back headed off into the distance, Bock spit out his wax teeth, and “Kansas got a 15-yard penalty for unsportsman-like conduct,” he said.

Iowa State proved to be for real, defeating Kansas 21-7.

The Cyclones were now 3-0 in the Big Six and had won eight straight games. The streak extended into the previous year at the Cyclones had finished the season by winning the last two games.

But when Wilder went down against Marquette, Iowa State’s fortunes reversed.

The Cyclones were able to squeak out a 7-0 victory against Marquette. The following two weeks ended in a tie against Kansas State, and a loss to Oklahoma.

“We just couldn’t connect on passes against Oklahoma,” Bock said as they lost by a final of 10-0.

After the season, six players were drafted to the NFL.

Shugart spent six years with the Washington Redskins. Bock had an offer from the Bears for $300 a month, but he stayed in Ames.

He coached the offensive line for $200 a month while working on his Master’s in engineering.

He took a job with Mansano Chemical Company in St. Louis where he would years later become president and CEO.

“I don’t regret it [not playing pro football] at all,” Bock said.

Football is different now and Bock always “had my heart set on being an engineer.”