By Tiffany Williams –
Iowa State isn’t just winning. The Cyclones are steamrolling everything in sight, and five games into the 2025-26 season they look less like a rising Big 12 contender and more like a fully operational wrecking crew. The latest demolition came Sunday afternoon inside Hilton Coliseum, where No. 16 Iowa State smashed Norfolk State 98-52 and kept its record spotless at 5-0. What looked like a routine non-conference matchup instead turned into a program-history afternoon headlined by a stat line that only exists in the territory of legends, not mid-November blowouts.
Addy Brown stamped her name into Cyclone lore by recording just the fourth triple-double in school history and the first of her career. Eleven points, ten rebounds, ten assists—delivered in 26 minutes, delivered without hesitation, delivered with a command of the floor that made Norfolk State look like it showed up uninvited to the wrong gym on the wrong night. Audi Crooks didn’t bother missing a shot, going a perfect 8-for-8 with 19 points and 10 boards. Alisa Williams added her own double-double in just 14 minutes. When a team is stacking double-doubles like spare boxes in a storage closet, it isn’t playing well. It’s suffocating people.
The game itself was over before most fans finished sitting down. Brown started the scoring, Norfolk State fired back briefly, and then Iowa State dropped the hammer—an 8-0 burst, then a 19-4 sprint, then an avalanche that took the score to 26-11 after one. The Cyclones moved like they were motion-capped for a highlight reel: threes from Hare and Jackson, back-to-back bombs from Sydney Harris, clean defensive rotations, and an energy level Norfolk State couldn’t match for a single possession. By halftime, the scoreboard read 53-25 and the only drama left was how gaudy the final numbers would be.
The second half was simply Iowa State showing off. Four of the first five shots dropped. Hare’s fourth three of the night detonated whatever hope the Spartans might have held. Then Brown opened the fourth quarter by notching the final piece of her triple-double—rebound, bucket, history. Hilton Coliseum erupted, and the Cyclones slammed the door on a 46-point victory that felt even bigger than that.
This is a program operating at full firepower. Iowa State has now held all five of its opponents under 60 points, a defensive identity that goes back decades and turns every game into a math problem opponents can’t solve. Under Bill Fennelly, the Cyclones are 363-31 when their opponent fails to hit that benchmark, and this year’s group looks determined to keep stacking those numbers. The all-time program record climbs to 876-678, Fennelly’s personal record to 805-378, and Hilton Coliseum remains one of the most vicious home-court fortresses in America at 401-84 in his era.
Crooks, as usual, put her fingerprints all over the milestone section. Her double-figure scoring streak hits 72 games. She hasn’t failed to score in double digits since her college debut in 2023. She shot 100 percent from the field for the first time since Kristin Scott’s legendary 11-for-11 performance in 2019. She passed Lindsey Wilson for sixth on the Cyclones’ all-time field-goal list. She logged her 20th career double-double. She made it all look routine.
Brown’s triple-double was the program’s first in more than a decade, the first since Nikki Moody in 2014, and it places Brown among the extremely small club of NCAA players to hit that mark this season. Williams delivered her first career double-double. Brown, Crooks and Williams became the first Cyclone trio with double-doubles in the same game since 2022.
If Sunday was the exclamation point, the body of work leading up to it has been just as ferocious. The exhibition opener? Iowa State handled UW-Oshkosh 84-53 behind Crooks’ 24 points and Brown’s 17. The official season opener? An 85-36 blitzing of St. Thomas, where the Cyclones went on a 19-0 run in the first half and never allowed the Tommies to breathe. Two days later, Southern tried to keep pace early before Harris ripped the game open with back-to-back threes and Crooks went for 29 and 14. Sacred Heart got buried 99-34 as the Cyclones forced 25 turnovers, scored 33 points off them, and held the Pioneers to a single made basket in the second quarter. Then came Valparaiso, and everything Iowa State had shown early in the season exploded into one of the most dominant individual performances in school history: Crooks pouring in a program-record 43 points in 20 minutes while Brown hit her 1,000th career point and Jada Williams dished a career-high 10 assists.
Every game has been a new chapter in a story that’s picking up speed like a runaway train. Crooks extends her scoring streak nightly. Brown climbs every statistical list she touches. Williams settles into her role with more control each week. The defense tightens. The margins grow. The crowd gets louder. The numbers get wilder. The wins pile up.
And now comes the first road test of the season: at Drake on Thursday night, 6 p.m., a chance to see how this steamroller handles unfamiliar territory. If the first two weeks are any indication, Iowa State isn’t interested in slowing down for anyone.
A team that was supposed to be good looks frighteningly better than that. A team that was supposed to be competitive looks unstoppable. A program that has built decades of consistency suddenly looks like it’s stepping into an even higher tier. The dominance is real, the pace is blistering, the depth is overwhelming, and the resume already reads like something built in February, not mid-November.
Iowa State isn’t just off to a hot start. The Cyclones are detonating scoreboards, rewriting record books, and making one message clear to the rest of the country: If you step on the court with them this season, you are stepping into a storm you probably aren’t prepared for.
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