Iowa State coach Matt Campbell and select players met with the media Wednesday to recap last Saturday’s win over Northern Iowa and to preview next Saturday’s game against the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Here are a couple of the biggest story lines this week. 

Campbell compares Montgomery to NFL running back

It’s easy to see the talent that sophomore running back David Montgomery possesses, but Campbell went one further and compared him to Kareem Hunt. Hunt, a former Toledo Rocket and current Kansas City Chief, played under Campbell at Toledo where he rushed for 4,945 career yards. 

Hunt was drafted in the third round of this year’s draft and was named the Chiefs starting running back recently. 

“The biggest thing for me is their maturity and being ready to play at an early age,” Campbell said. “David [Montgomery] had to do that last year for us, kind of a really similar role that Kareem [Hunt] did.”

Along with maturity, Campbell also saw similarities in the way they are able to dictate the pace of the game at a young age. He then went on to tag Montgomery as an all-around back and Hunt as more of an elite speedster. 

“It means a lot [to be compared to Kareem Hunt], definitely an honor pretty much,” Montgomery said. “He’s a great player, obviously, he’s in the NFL right now.”

Lifelong Cyclone fan, Lensing finally takes on Iowa

Carson Lensing, a redshirt freshman from Fort Atkinson, Iowa, is a lifelong Cyclone fan. However, he can’t say the same about other members of his family that reside in Northeast Iowa.  

Lensing’s earliest memories of watching the Cy-Hawk games were when he would head over to his grandparents’ house and watch the biggest rivalry in Iowa on the Big Ten Network. Now, whether or not his grandparents were Iowa or Iowa State fans was answered with a riddle. 

“Like I said, my grandparents’ had the Big Ten Network,” Lensing said. “So, that side of the family has a little more Hawkeyes fans.”

Now family divide to the side, Lensing quickly has to deflect texts from his friends that attend Iowa, too. However, he said those exchanges often get dirty sometimes with the smack talking getting heated. 

Despite that rivalry internally with his friends and family, Lensing can only look back on the Cy-Hawk series and see how it has changed from being a spectator with those same people, to now taking the field and having those people be his support system. 

“It means a lot more growing up as a fan, now I mean it means a lot right now too, but to me right now it’s just another game,” Lensing said. “That’s what we got to look at it as. You can’t go in there with heavy emotions, you know you got to be assignment perfect and it’s something I’ve looked forward to, like as an Iowa State fan my whole life.”

“But I gotta play it likes it’s another game.”