My Ouija Board is misplaced,

South Dakota led in the one committee ranking on Oct.26, and their record since then is undefeated with a win over the Number 1 team, there is no way Davis ranks higher by the committee, regardless of score of the Causeway.

If Sac plays to their average against conference teams, and Davis plays an at the level of the average Big Sky team, Davis will cover. Sac yielded 40 points per game while scoring 27.1

There is the option of another quarter of undergrad. Maybe satisfy another major’s requirements. Lots of student take extra time, particularly if they transferred or change majors.

They list by academic year mostly ignoring redshirt status. The exception to that are the upper classmen who had a redshirt year a few years ago already reflected in their bio, and some transfers.

But they also have a data entry problem, they officially submit a “Final Book” which the NCAA, Big Sky, and other entities use as the statistics source, and that “Final Book” contains errors. Then they have difficulty correcting the errors, as they don’t control the stats, the NCAA does. I think that is the issue with the guys who were listed as playing in five games in their red shirt year.

Its a mystery that Davis can’t list players eligibility kon the roster, it takes a glance to do so in most cases.
Another mystery is why we have multiple players who are listed as playing 5 games in what could be a redshirt year. Nava, Souriolle, Fisher. Can’t they count?

Meyer played in 10 or more games for three years at Cal Poly starting with 2021 fall, so he has no more eligibility

No story on the Causeway Classic on the website,
Gameday has the Montana State game notes.
Did they close for Thanksgiving already?

Any juniors announced for senior day this year? Last year that was the first indication Buchanan wasn’t coming back, although he was listed as a junior on the roster. I haven't seen a list if the seniors announced.

With so many standards of evaluation, each with no assigned weight, they can justify however they vote. I doubt they even reveal who committee members vote for. Decided in what they used to call a smoke filled room, by a small group according to their individual whims.

Chaz Davis is productive against the best competition, e.g., Cal, Oregon State, Idaho, Montana, Not always huge games but some big catches. I don’t know whether he improved his speed, that is hard to do,as it’s mostly a gift you have or not. But Chaz is a more fluid athlete than I thought he was initially.

If Montana fans travel so well they will travel elsewhere that needs attendance.. My impression is that Davis draws better than most of the FCS teams

Personally, and I suspect for most fans, it would be more interesting to play someone they didn’t play the prior month.

They need to order the selection, like a decision tree to limit subjectivity.
Say what counts most. Seed according to:
1) Record/strength of schedule
2) Head to head to chose between two teams if they played each other
3) A metric like Massey.
Sure it wouldn’t be perfect but it would not be subjective or political.

I don't think they' would set up the brackets so Davis' first game is in all likelihood a conference rival, especially since they said second round games are not regionalized.

It is a system where committee members discuss but ultimately vote based on their opinion using one or more of won loss record, quality wins, strength of schedule, head to head, common opponents, and ESPN metrics that aren’t published for FCS teams. Great transparency there.

No telling. As mentioned the polls don’t matter, its the vote by the committee, which don’t have the polls as a factor.
Maybe based on won loss record, maybe based on number of quality wins. If the score differential is enough to flip the Massey rating in Davis’ favor that would be an additional factor, but to do that South Dakota State would have to underperform the expected score and/or Davis would need to score more than Massey would predict.

As far as I can see the other metrics (fpi, kpi, sos) aren’t published for FCS ??

The selection committee’s process doesn’t use the polls although the committee members have no doubt seen them. From Hero Sports:

The playoff committee will no longer use the Stats Perform Media Poll and AFCA Coaches Poll on its list of data points that committee members can utilize. They can now consider rankings in the KPI, Massey Ratings, and ESPN’s Football Power Index, although each member can choose what to weigh the most when making selections (record, strength of schedule, quality wins, metrics, etc.)

“The committee was focused on expanding the use of metrics-based tools to replace the polls we had used in years past,” HERO Sports was told. “We were able to get those three on board to give us a good mix of both predictive (Massey & FPI) and results (KPI & SOS) based metrics.”
Link to source article:
https://herosports.com/fcs-notebook-playoff-committee-release-top-10-ranking-bzbz/

I wasn’t aware that playing Boise and Santa Clara were part of a longer running series.
I was at Davis for Biggs’ last year at QB, and Specks first year. Davis lost only one conference game those two years, to Hayward, won one and tied one against Santa Clara. in addition to the narrow loss to Boise, they lost games to Fullerton, Pacific, and UMass.