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Despite losses, Penguins holding out hope
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Youngstown State quarterback Kurt Hess (12) throws a pass during Saturday’s loss to Western Illinois in Macomb, Ill.
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
The Penguins aren’t yet ready to play for pride.
Despite losing three straight games — and four overall — the YSU football team is still holding out hope of a playoff berth.
“We’re still in this thing,” said quarterback Kurt Hess. “[But] we’ve still got to take care of our business.”
In a normal year, such thoughts would be nothing more than wishful thinking but this hasn’t been a normal year in the Missouri Valley Football Conference.
All nine teams have at least one conference loss and six have at least two.
No MVFC team has ever won a conference title with three losses so the Penguins can forget about that. But since the FCS expanded the playoffs in 1986, 22 teams have made it with four losses, including conference member UNI in 1995.
Unfortunately for YSU, no league team with four losses has been selected for an at-large berth.
Fortunately for YSU, FCS expanded to 20 playoff teams this season so that could change.
“We can still finish in the top two in our conference and they’ve gotta take two from our conference, I’d assume,” said senior defensive tackle Torrance Nicholson.
Mathematically, only one of the MVFC’s one-loss teams can go unbeaten the rest of the season.
YSU still plays two of them — Northern Iowa and Indiana State — and will need to win its last four games and hope Western Illinois finishes first.
If the Penguins win out and get some help, that could be enough to sway the selection committee.
“Our mood is, we’re going to take it one game at a time, we’re going to win four, finish in second place and get in the playoffs,” said YSU coach Eric Wolford.
Realistically, this is a far-fetched plan but “We can still make the playoffs!” is a better rallying cry than, say, “Let’s finish above .500!” or “Let’s make recruiting easier on our coaching staff!”
“If we win the next four games, the committee will have something to think about come playoff time,” said Nicholson. “At the beginning of the year, we had goals of winning these last four games, no matter what, so right now we have the same goals.”
Since the league began in 1985, no league team has had four losses overall and earned an at-large playoff bid. (UNI was an automatic qualifier in 1995.) Southern Illinois, in 2006, was the first league team to have three conference losses and make the postseason.
Longtime NFL coach Bill Parcells has often said “You are what your record says you are” and, right now, the Penguins are a 3-4 team that has blown double digit leads in the past three games.
But other than the opener against Penn State, the Penguins have been in position to win every game and a four-game winning streak would leave YSU with a better record than last year by one game.
Wolford prefers to think of his team as one that is a few plays — and not a few years — away. To prove it, his team will need to prove it can win on the road and that starts this weekend at South Dakota State.
“Right now in my mind we should be 6-1. Period,” said Wolford. “And I’m not happy about it. And neither is our team. But we’re going to stick together and keep fighting it out and see what happens.
“But we’ve got to make it happen. The time is now.”