It’s a coach’s worst nightmare: Guiding a team in your first year as head coach through a conference schedule that has over half of the teams ranked in the top 10 in the nation.

That is the task for Iowa State head football coach Dan McCarney — try to beat four Big Eight schools that are some of the best in the nation.

“The timing wasn’t the best for me to come into the Big Eight conference,” McCarney said at his weekly press conference on Tuesday. “It just so happens right now with the schedule that we have in front of us, that these may be as good of teams as there’s been in the Big Eight in a long time.”

Actually it is the first time ever in the history of the Big Eight conference to have five football teams in the top 12 in the nation. Nebraska has been ranked No. 2 since the start of the season and Kansas State, Colorado and Kansas are ranked No. 8, 9 and 10, respectively. Oklahoma is 12th in the coaches poll and No. 13 in The Associated Press poll.

“We’ve got four teams in the top 10 in our remaining 6 games and every one of those 4 teams has got big, strong, physical teams, and they’ve got depth and more size than we do,” McCarney said. “We’ve just got to try and hang in there and make it a four-quarter game, and hopefully we can make the plays in the fourth quarter that we weren’t able to Saturday.”

The Cyclones start their rough schedule this Saturday when ISU takes on No. 10 Kansas in Lawrence. The Jayhawks are coming off an impressive win at Colorado, 40-24, last weekend. Head Coach Glen Mason’s squad is 5-0 for the first time since 1968.

“It’s a great example of what can be done. Kansas was not a household word by any means in football before Glen took it over,” McCarney said.

The Cyclones’ head coach said his team needs to play perfect football on Saturday if they want to have any chance of beating the Jayhawks.

“We have to collectively have our football team play their best game,” he said. “And in the game last Saturday, there was at least 10 kids that played their best game of the season for us — that’s one of the reasons we hung in there and had a real good opportunity to win the game.”

McCarney said all of the upsets that happened last weekend in college football gives the Cyclones a glimmer of hope.

“It gives the Iowa State coaching staff and this program a lot of hope that we can turn this thing around,” he said.