Totally agree on the outside hire part. It was absolutely necessary in this case.

North Dakota St -4.5 over JMU
South Dakota St -4.5 over Montana St.

Hopefully the games are as close as the spreads are.

South Dakota State is going to get the chance to eliminate three Big Sky teams if this result holds. Nice to see at least one of the teams make the semis.

Glad to finally see some actual ESPN games rather than ESPN+. Unfortunately, one of the two on ESPN2 is the North Dakota St game which is likely to be the worst game of the weekend.

Montana-JMU on Friday at 4 though.

JMU -6.5 over Montana
SDST -7.5 over Villanova
Sam Houston -5.5 over Montana St
NDSt -23.5 over East Tennessee

And there goes my cover. Ugh.

It was 24-3 at halfitme. This is the first time they've had the ball in the Sac St half in the 2nd half and it's because of an onside kick.

Only my SDSt -6 wager. Heck of a second half effort from Sac though. It looked like this was well on the way to being a 30 point blowout and yet they've still got an outside shot midway through the 4th.

Sac still hanging around. Only down 14 and getting the ball.

Though having a punt downed at the 2 doesn't help them much.

The margin of victory is definitely surprising but Sac was the underdog today. A couple years ago was actually an upset.

That first drive seemed pretty easy for SDSt. I didn't watch last week but I imagine that's what almost all their drives against us looked like.

I was thinking it might be rare for that to happen but in 2018 the 8 seeded teams all won their first game. 7 of 8 won their first game in 2014.

They came a foot short of having a chance to tie (or win with a 2 point conversion) with less than 10 seconds left.

For those who care about such things, the Sac line got bet down to SDSt -6 so lot of people betting on Sac.

That will definitely do it.

57 points on only 368 yards. How the heck does that happen?

That's one nice thing about playing in a one bid league. These games basically don't matter. I mean, you don't want to put up an 0fer or anything like that, but you've got the ability to try things out and give a bunch of players minutes to see what they can do.

You're correct on that front. Grad transfers don't need to sit out a year. IIRC there used to be a rule where the grad school program that you're enrolling in couldn't be offered at the school you were at but I'm not sure if that's still the case.

That's a hell of a win right there.

And not being able to throw the ball consistently doesn't help either. Much easier to run the ball when teams have to respect your passing game.

SIU might not have been after losing to Youngstown at home but they're still a good team. Seems like they probably should have swapped the SIU-SD pod with the Davidson-Kennesaw St pod. Then you'd have SIU-East Tennessee St and Kennesaw St-North Dakota State.

But that's what happens when you prioritize travel. SIU would have to fly either way. Davidson to East Tennessee St is less than a 3 hr drive while Kennesaw to ETSt is 4 1/2 hours.