YES? NO? MAYBE? UH, MAKE THAT ‘YES’

As per Iowa State’s Rivals site:

ISU Athletics Communications

The Iowa State Athletics Department has called a 7 p.m. news conference for tonight (Wednesday, Nov. 8 ) in the Jacobson Athletic Building to make an announcement regarding its football program.

Iowa State Coach Dan McCarney and Director of Athletics Jamie Pollard will speak.

They don’t call press conferences to announce that things are going to stay the same, kids. Dan McCarney, pretty much the only football coach in ISU history to have any sort of sustained success, is done. Like we said earlier, resigned, fired, whatever, McCarney is gone.

There are any number of ways to spin this. One is that ISU’s season is horrible, much more horrible than a spate of injuries can account for. Another is that ISU athletic director Jamie Pollard wants to get “his guy” in there. Yet another is that Pollard fears losing momentum coming off a year of record high season ticket sales. Fans don’t flock to watch losing football teams, after all.

Now, it’s certainly true that Pollard has cleaned house at ISU. He ran off men’s basketball coach Wayne Morgan, but Wayne Morgan needed to go. It remains to be seen if Greg McDermott was the right hire for the ISU program. Pollard also elevated Cael Sanderson to become the head coach of the ISU wrestling program, though I’m really pretty very sure that Pollard only did that to prevent Iowa from hiring Sanderson to replace Jim Zalesky. After all, the last time Iowa hired a top-notch Cyclone wrestler as a head coach, it worked out pretty well. As in “fifteen national titles in twenty-one years” well. So I think there’s more than a touch of “Pollard wanted to get his guy in there” involved in this, though the fans were getting restive.

Now the real question is, “Who’s Pollard’s guy?”