The first time Jamie Pollard hired a head football coach at Iowa State, the athletic director culled an extensive list of prospective candidates, so qualified that each and every one of them has since moved to better, higher-profile head coaching jobs. Including the man he eventually hired. The only problem was, the man he picked had his biggest success and made his name elsewhere. Pollard plucked vibrant, aggressive, iron-jawed defensive coordinator Gene Chizik -- who now coaches the fifth-ranked team in the country, 7-0 Auburn -- off Mack Brown's coaching staff late in 2006, fresh off Texas' national championship season. Pollard also considered Central Michigan's Brian Kelly (now at Notre Dame), San Diego's Jim Harbaugh (Stanford), Houston's Art Briles (Baylor) and Illinois offensive coordinator Mike Locksley (New Mexico). Pollard knows how to pick football coaches. Now he's got to figure out how to keep one. He's got a better shot of doing that now because he gave the job to Paul Rhoads, a smart, homegrown Iowan and the son of a legendary high school coach in the state who was an assistant on Dan McCarney's Iowa State staff. Rhoads, 43, plays well with his understated, regular-guy persona. Since he grew up in the state and coached for five seasons under McCarney, Rhoads knows the school receptionist as well as the waitress at Wallabys, and they know him. In his first season in Ames, Rhoads had the Cyclones all revved up. This year they'll lug a 3-4 record into Royal-Memorial Stadium to play 22nd-ranked Texas on Saturday, trying to recapture some of last year's momentum. He'd promised his players a bowl game and made good on the vow with the help of a 9-7 shocker over Nebraska in Lincoln, even though his star quarterback and running back were out with injuries. It became a seminal moment in ISU history thanks to an electric, two-minute video of the celebratory locker room scene -- so charged that CBS included it as one of college football's greatest moments in the last quarter century. 'When I first saw it, I thought this is a gold mine,' said associate athletics director Tom Kroeschell, who got e-mails from alumni as far away as Poland and Ghana. 'It was the Dead Sea scroll of Iowa State athletics.' Some 288,000-plus hits on YouTube and countless calls from admiring head coaches later, Rhoads has found it tough to produce a fitting encore. The Cyclones are getting ground up by a grueling schedule that has or will eventually pit ISU against seven teams in the current top 22 of the BCS standings. 'This is such a critical game for us, win or lose,' Rhoads said. 'We got beat by 41 points (by Utah), we got beat by 52 (by Oklahoma). We can't go down to Austin and get beat by 63. It would continue to spiral because it would be harder to bring the kids back.' Iowa State has players -- just never enough of them -- and has to compete in the Big 12 alongside Texas, which has triple the Cyclones' $45.8 million athletics budget. Such is the cyclical culture of the underdog Iowa State program that has to compete with Iowa and other raiding schools for as few as a dozen prospects annually. Iowa State has not been devoid of success. It has a 7-6 record in its last 13 games against state rival Iowa. Rhoads became the first ISU rookie coach since 1907 to win seven games in his first season, and directed the school's first win in Lincoln in 32 years. 'You can create your own history here,' Pollard said. 'I don't think we have a ceiling. We need to have people who have a chip on their shoulder and want to climb mountains other people are afraid to climb.' Mountains, Rhoads has got. But like Chizik before him, Rhoads has a definite plan. Rhoads looks for dual-threat quarterbacks who can run and throw on the run out of the spread, instead of drop-back passers who can operate out of power offenses. He has Austen Arnaud, who's second in school history with 6,134 career passing yards, and likes the skills set of backup Jerome Tiller and redshirting freshman Jared Barnett. Rhoads also has two quarterback commitments, one from Florida and the other from Reagan High School's JaQuarius Daniels, who pledged on Wednesday. Iowa State has constant trouble finding top defensive linemen and piling up depth. Rhoads has a pair of sophomore linebackers who have played every snap this season and worries about the toll such a grind will take. But he's not shying from the challenge of making Iowa State a winner. 'We went to the Insight Bowl and won it his first year,' Pollard said, 'and the last I checked, there are several bowls notches ahead of that. Whoever does it can become a legend in these parts.' Who knows? If Rhoads is that guy, Pollard might even be able to keep him. Kirk Bohls writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: kbohls@statesman.com. 