1. South Dakota St
2. Sacramento St
3. North Dakota St
4. Montana St

Rough for Sac. They must have not wanted to have two teams from the same conference on the same side of the bracket, though Sac and Mont St didn't play this year.

I'm already prepared to be annoyed when Montana gets in over us. If the Big Sky only gets 3 spots, fine. I can live with that.

It's on ESPNU so I would guess you can stream on ESPN.com or the ESPN app too.

The more I think about it the more I think how crazy it is for anyone to rank either Idaho or Montana ahead of us.

Montana went 7-4 against FCS. Lost to top-3 in conf plus Idaho. Didn't beat any winning teams. Trailed by 41 points in a game.
Idaho went 7-2 against FCS. Lost to Sac but missed Weber/Mont St. Beat Montana at Montana. Never trailed by 41 points in a game.
UCD went 6-4 against FCS. Lost to top-3 in conf plus a top-2 playoff seed. Beat Idaho at Idaho. Never trailed by 41 points in a game.

If you're comparing UCD vs. Montana... both lost close to Sac, both lost close to Weber. Montana lost to MSt by 34, UCD lost by 17. Montana lost at home to Idaho. UCD beat Idaho on the road by 18.

If you're comparing UCD vs. Idaho... both lost close to Sac. They lost two FBS games. We lost an FBS game, 2 games to the likely top-2 seeds an another game to a third potential seeded team. UCD won at Idaho by 18.

All three teams beat the objectively worse teams on their schedules.

There's basically nothing in their resume's that you can point to that would make you rank either of those other teams above us. We performed better against the good common opponents than Montana did. We played a tougher schedule than Idaho did, performed the same against the one common good opponent. Oh, and we beat them handily at their place.

If I'm taking 4 Big Sky teams, UCD is in. If I'm taking 5 Big Sky teams, UCD and Idaho are in.

I don't know if there is more than 1 other team to have done this but the answer to his question is yes, a team has played 3 of the top 4 seeds before.

The 2019 UC Davis Aggies faced:
1. North Dakota State
3. Weber State
4. Sacramento State

Oh and for good measure they also played
5. Montana State
6. Montana

They also faced an 8-5 Cal team.

Best pause I could get. The ball was spotted at the 42 which means the 32 is the line to gain. Pretty clear that the knee is down and the knee is well beyond the 32. The ball is directly above the knee therefore that should be a first down.

Would it have mattered? Probably not.

Would it have been nice to get a shot at the end zone for the win? Abso-effing-lutely.

Also we would have had a shot had 20 seconds not inexplicably run off after Sac got their false start penalty on the prior drive.

Northern Iowa got in at 6-5 in 2021 but beat 3 playoff teams including winning at Sac and at South Dakota St. UNI got in at 6-5 in 2018 but beat South Dakota St (#5 seed in the playoffs) that year also. We don’t have wins like that.

UNI did lose to a couple non playoff teams those years also and we don’t have losses like that either.

Will we get in? I don’t think so.

Should be get in? Probably.

Are we one of the best whatever number (don’t know how many auto-bids there are) of at large teams? Yes.

The two big plays that hurt us were the fake punt in the fourth quarter and Hastings missing an open WR for a TD early in the second half.

It really sounds like we’re not getting in but there’s no way that we’re not one of the 24 best teams in the country. I’m going to be annoyed if either Montana or Idaho gets in. At least we beat Idaho and Idaho beat Montana so Idaho and us have decent wins. Not to mention that neither us nor Idaho lost a game by 34 this year.

I was saying the same thing at the time. There’s absolutely no reason to run a play there. For one, you’re hurrying the play call. Get up there and spike it and you at least have a few seconds to think about the play you want to run. Plus like you said you can take 2 good shots at the end zone.

That should have been ruled a first down on the last play.

Why did the clock start after the false start? They were down to 7 on the play clock and then the clock started again when the play clock started. Cost us about 20 seconds.

Needed that stop on 3rd down there.

Yeah this result can only help us. If we lose to Sac close, I don’t know if either us or Montana gets in but we had better be ahead of them.

Guessing he just picked a random likely 3 point score. But he's probably thinking that UCD kicks a pair of FGs during the game.

And if they get a top-2 seed they lock up home field until the title game if they make it that far. Lose and they run the risk of dropping and facing a road game at Montana St or North Dakota St (depending on the results of other games and how the seeds shake out) in the semis if the teams advance that far.

Plus with the coaches/AD's voting they're going to be biased. Not just in favor of their own teams but in their own conference. If their opponents are ranked higher, their wins look better or losses not as bad.

As for Montana, it's definitely beneficial for them drawing 25K fans every game because they don't have to schedule an FBS game or two every year like we do. They have scheduled FBS teams in the past, just not each season.

Apologies if this was sarcasm but it’s all the preseason polls.

Montana was 3, UCD was 25 and Idaho was unranked. Then Montana started 5-0 against a crap schedule and even though Idaho beat them, they were only 4-2. Never mind those were both FBS losses.

Same thing happened to us in 2019. Started out #5 and didn’t fall out of the top 25 until we fell to 4-5.

You could even add Idaho in there too. Montana is 7-3 against FCS competition while Idaho is 6-2. Montana’s non-con was Northwestern St, South Dakota and Indiana St who are a combined 8-21. Lost to Sac, Weber and home to Idaho. Idaho lost to 2 FBS teams.

Definitely nothing there to justify them being 10 spots ahead of Idaho or UCD.

LOL at all the polls having Idaho over us. I mean, the coaches polls are always useless regardless of sport. Most of them don’t even vote anyway.

But we have the same record and we beat them by 18 at their place. And it wasn’t a “scored late to make it look worse than it was” type of game. We led by 10+ for the final 43 minutes and were up 31-7 at half. They stopped us from scoring one time (11 drives, 5 TD, 3 FG, 2 drives to end each half and 1 punt).

We’re both 6-4. Neither team has a bad loss. They’ve got 2 FBS losses but their loss to us is a worse loss than we have. Their best win is over a 7-3 Montana team by 7. Is that a better win than us beating them by 18? I don’t know. It’s probably even.

So if the two teams are pretty even as far as their resume goes and Team A beat the crap out of Team B on the road, you should probably rank Team A above Team B.