UNLV Preview: Taking Our Show on the Road
It’s time for the trip I have been dreaming about for nearly a year-and-a-half.
The frustration, and also part of the beauty, of college football is how much is hurts when your team loses, especially to your rival, and especially early in a season where you have high hopes and expectations. But it’s over now. It’s time to move on. And what better way to move on than joining thousands of Cyclones fans on a road trip.
There’s something special about these experiences.
One of the best examples of this is when Iowa State fans take over Kansas City’s Power & Light District most years during the Big 12 men’s basketball tournament. Hilton South, as we call it. (Which hopefully will be around for a long time now that the Big 12 has expanded!). For years, I had heard stories of how much fun it was to go to the tournament. I would listen to the stories of people who were old enough to experience it as adults in the 1990s and 2000s, who saw Iowa State win it in 2000, who spent days and nights at Kelly’s losing track of how many drinks they’d consumed.
The age of social media brought this to life for me. When Iowa State started its men’s basketball resurgence in the early 2010s, right around the time the tournament moved back to Kansas City, I experienced a couple years of FOMO seeing the Facebook and Twitter posts of the Cardinal and Gold sea in the Power & Light District. In 2014, the Cyclones played Kansas in the semifinals. A couple of friends and I decided that if ISU won the game, we’d drive down the next day for the championship. Iowa State, led by Georges Niang, Melvin Ejim and others who would come to be remembered as Cyclone legends, defeated Kansas in the semifinals and earned a spot in the championship. My friends Chris, Charles and I decided to drive down on Saturday morning, along with hordes of other Cyclone fans who made the same decision, to take in the experience in person.
When we walked into the Power & Light District that afternoon, fresh off a filling meal at Jack Stack BBQ, it was everything I ever wanted. Cyclone fans everywhere. A sunny 70-degree day in March. My team playing for a championship. A festival-like atmosphere. It was like a giant tailgate for basketball.
There was something a little different in the air. I had been to many ISU football and basketball games, and had even traveled to road games and postseason games. There was an anticipation for this one I had never felt before. We had a chance to be champions. A chance to win a trophy. A chance to create an experience that we’d never forget, that would live on, and we were all there for it. It was the kind of day that we would all share stories about for the next twenty years. This was most crystalized for me when, during the pregame pep rally, organizers handed out band-aids that fans could wear above their eyes, a tribute to Niang who had received a cut above his eye the night before. It was an inside joke moment among ten thousand or so people, the kind of moment that only gets created when you are all part of something special.
Soaking up the warmth of early spring and the vibes of fellow Cyclone fans, it felt impossible that Iowa State could lose that evening. Indeed, the Cyclones won their first Big 12 Tournament championship in fourteen years. It didn’t matter that we were too cheap to buy tickets to the game; we watched with hundreds of others on the big screen outside the stadium. It didn’t matter that the temperature dropped and the sunny daytime sky turned into a snowy night. It didn’t matter that I was still wearing shorts and a t-shirt. What mattered was that we were champions. What mattered was that we had a memory that would last beyond that night.
There are still stories we tell from that night in 2014. It was a defining night in my life, the kind of night that other nights get compared to. “Did it live up to that first Big 12 championship in KC?” No other experience quite has.
As we head to Las Vegas, I think Iowa State’s game against UNLV will have many of the same feelings. We aren’t playing for a championship this weekend, and unfortunately the Iowa game left a little bit of a cloud over our emotions coming into this one. But this is still a special season in the most successful era in Iowa State football history. We still believe this team has a chance to create memories just like that 2014 Cyclone men’s basketball team did. In the same way we remember those feelings of traveling with fellow fans to watch Niang, Ejim and others, this weekend we get to travel to watch players like Brock Purdy, Breece Hall, Mike Rose and others who will likely ultimately be fondly remembered as Cyclone legends. Rare is the chance that we get to experience this type of in-season celebration.
When this game first came out on the schedule a few years ago, I really didn’t think much of it. OK, cool, a road game at UNLV. At some point it dawned on me that some Cyclone fans might be excited to take a trip to Vegas to see Iowa State play. Similar to stories you hear about prior tournaments in Kansas City, many people have fun memories of ISU’s football games at UNLV in 2000 and 2008. Still, it didn’t really rise to the point where I felt like I needed to, or even necessarily wanted to, attend.
Then the pandemic hit. In the early months of the era of social distancing, I found myself starting to dream of that next big trip I could take. In my mind, I started to imagine what it could be like in Las Vegas if Iowa State had a strong 2020 season (keeping in mind that at the time, we didn’t even know if there would be a 2020 season), and then we descended upon Vegas as the world opened up in 2021. As early as May or June 2020, I would go on walks around Gray’s Lake in Des Moines and daydream about that long weekend in Las Vegas with Cyclone fans.
In my daydreams, it always involved Iowa State coming off some sort of special season the year before. Maybe a Big 12 Championship game appearance. Maybe a major bowl victory. Whatever it was, it would set us up for an unprecedented level of excitement in 2021. We’d enter the UNLV game as a team with championship aspirations. Thousands — maybe even tens of thousands — of fans would be there. We’d take over the opposing team’s stadium. We’d be loud and proud. I can still see the bike path, and the bridge set against the late spring and early summer sun, and the downtown skyline — the images my eyes were actually seeing — while my imagination showed me pictures of Brock Purdy finding Charlie Kolar in the endzone and thousands of Cyclone fans cheering like we were the home team.
Rarely in life do things work out exactly as you hope they will in your wildest dreams. In my daydreams in 2020, I always imagined we would be taking this trip after a win against Iowa. It never fit into my plans to be coming off a disappointing loss in game two of the season. Sitting in Jack Trice Stadium last Saturday, watching the crowd slowly empty during the fourth quarter, I will admit that even my excitement level waned. To be honest, I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that it’s not quite going to feel like a Big 12 championship Saturday in Kansas City.
When I step back, I recognize it’s still a big deal, and still remarkably close to everything I dreamed of. Iowa State is still coming off a Fiesta Bowl win, is still a top fifteen team, and is still a Big 12 title contender. Last year, we didn’t get to experience taking over Phoenix for the Fiesta Bowl. This will feel like a bowl game, with the exception being that we still get the entire conference season to see what this team can become.
I’m also reminded the lengths I have taken to make this trip a reality. At some point early in 2021, it became clear that pandemic restrictions were going to be eased. Life would begin to get back to at least a semi-normal place. College football stadiums would be full in the fall.
People with money to make figured this out as well. Sensing the demand of Iowa State fans to attend this game, flight tickets from Des Moines to Las Vegas skyrocketed. At the same time, the UNLV athletics department began playing a game of chicken, declining to announce when single-game tickets would go on sale, or even how many tickets would go on sale in the stadium. The urgency of finding tickets increased.
As a result, a good number of Iowa State fans began buying season tickets to UNLV football games to guarantee they could get in. Early in the summer, UNLV released the allotment of 4,000 to Iowa State to sell to their fans. Prices for these tickets were higher than the lowest ticket package for season tickets (which by this point were sold out).
The travel industry also figured out quickly that there would be high demand for this trip, as flights approached $650 out of Des Moines. I thought I was going to need to strap myself to the airplane and just ride along.
For a little while, I thought I was going to be taking the trip by myself. The excitement my friends felt about going was tempered, understandably, by the cost. I myself questioned whether it was worth it, but I knew I couldn’t miss this experience.
The first major hurdle was passed after my friend James was able to secure tickets through his dad, who was high enough on the donor list to have a chance to purchase seats.
Then there was the hurdle of travel costs. This took some creative thinking. Since my friend Chris was originally from the Chicagoland area, we could look at flights out of O’Hare, which were in the $200 range. This would solve another potential challenge — since Chris and his wife Kaci have a soon-to-be-two-year-old son, they would need to find childcare for the long weekend. If we flew out of Chicago, the thinking went, he could stay with his grandparents. Problem solved.
So we booked tickets out of Chicago, meaning the trip would look something like this: Drive to Chicago from Des Moines, fly from Chicago to Las Vegas, fly back to Chicago from Las Vegas, and drive back to Des Moines from Chicago. Simple.
Whatever it takes to be there. Life only gives you so many opportunities to enjoy experiences like this one.
The game itself isn’t expected to be much of a game. With Iowa State’s style of play, you could always see it being closer than expected. But the thought of losing isn’t really crossing my mind. Maybe that’s a dangerous way of thinking, but I think this group of seniors and the coaching staff will be ready to prove something.
As I embark on the trip to Las Vegas, in my mind’s eye I’m envisioning a beautiful sunny day, surrounded by Cardinal and Gold, believing that there is nothing better in the world than being a Cyclone fan on this day. Maybe it will give me a touch of the feelings that I have felt on spring days in the Power & Light District, with new memories to be made as I cheer on the Cyclones.
