Cyclones Get Jilted Again, Bash Gene Chizik, Wonder Who's Coming Next

For Iowa State, their next football coach was obvious. All they needed to do was send a dump truck full of money to Turner Gill's office in Buffalo and the former Nebraska quarterback would be Iowa-bound. It didn't work out that way, though, as Gill signed a contract extension with Buffalo on Tuesday.

That makes ISU athletic director Jamie Pollard's job about 30% harder, which means it's now Impossible + 30%. You can tell the stress is getting to him. He hasn't yet started calling Gene Chizik "a great big lying poopy-pants" but it sure seems like he wants to. And now he the obvious guy is off the market.

Of course, if Pollard's got a sense of humor at all, he's already been in contact with Tommy Tuberville's agent. Tubs might not like Ames winters, but he's known to have a mean streak. What better way to get back at Auburn than to take Gene Chizik's players and put up a better record than the Golden Boy? All he has to do is win four games to exceed Chizik's best season.

While that would be triple-distilled awesome, I don't expect it to happen. But where will Iowa State find its next coach?

So far only one person has publicly expressed an interest in the job: St. Louis Rams offensive line coach Steve Loney. Now, if I were on the Rams' coaching staff, I'd probably be trying to line up a job for next season as well. Loney has some strong connections to ISU, however. He was Dan McCarney's first offensive coordinator and spent 2007 at the interim coach at Drake University, which is only 30 miles away from Ames in Des Moines. Loney went 6-5 at Drake, which was his second go-around as a head coach after a forgettable three-year stint at Morehead State in the early 1980s.

Another possibility is the coach they almost hired last time around, Oklahoma's offensive co-coordinator/wide receivers coach Jay Norvell. Norvell is from Madison, Wisconsin, played at Iowa, and was also on McCarney's original staff. Norvell has also worked at Nebraska, where they loved him, and has NFL coaching experience as well. Not only that, but the dude can really rock the stache.

And, of course, several of the usual suspects have been trotted out: Dennis Franchione, Gary Patterson, Chris Peterson, etc., etc. Can we stop mentioning Patterson and Peterson for every open coaching job, please? If those guys wanted to go anywhere else, they already would have; it's not like they haven't been considered anywhere else. Franchione is a maybe, but ISU might not want his baggage.

ISU would be remiss not to consider one under-the-radar candidate, however: Montana State's Rob Ash. Ash was the coach at Drake before Steve Loney and posted a winning record in 15 of his 18 seasons there. Ash is also a Des Moines native and is probably still on a first-name basis with 90% of the high school football coaches in Iowa. He may not want to come back, but Jamie Pollard would be nuts not to put out a feeler.

Iowa State may have acquired a reputation as a place where careers go to die, but as of now, it's the only BCS-conference job left open, so somebody will take it. It's not like the Big 12 North is a Murderer's Row, either; a quick turnaround of ISU's fortunes is not an impossible dream. But the clock is ticking.