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YSU faces must-win game
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
When Youngstown State went 5-3 in the conference last year, Penguins coach Eric Wolford felt his team deserved a playoff berth.
This year’s no different.
“I think five [conference] wins gets any team in,” Wolford said Tuesday. “If it doesn’t, then there’s a problem.”
Thing is, if the Penguins (7-3, 4-2 Missouri Valley) don’t reach five wins this weekend, there might be a problem.
With a road game against three-time national champion North Dakota State looming in the regular-season finale, the pressure is on YSU to win Saturday against surprising Indiana State, which has already beaten a Mid-American Conference team (Ball State) and one of the Missouri Valley’s best teams (Northern Iowa).
“We’re striving to win out the season and finish really strong,” senior center Stephen Page said. “As long as we [do] our part, we’ll make it into the playoffs.”
The FCS playoffs expanded from 20 to 24 teams last year, with 11 conference champions earning automatic bids. The Penguins can’t earn that automatic bid after losing to Illinois State last weekend, but they’re very much in the hunt for one of the 13 at-large spots.
The MVFC has had four playoff teams just once — in 2004, when the league became the first in the FCS to advance that many — but it’s happened seven other times overall, including last season in the Big Sky.
The Colonial Athletic Association has even had five teams advance in 2007, 2008 and 2011. It also qualified four teams in 2004, 2009 and 2010.
Either North Dakota State (9-1, 5-1) or Illinois State (8-1, 5-1) will get the Missouri Valley’s automatic berth, while the other will earn an at-large bid.
Northern Iowa (6-4, 4-2) is two victories from joining those two in the postseason thanks to last week’s 23-3 win over the Bison, who entered the game on a 33-game win streak.
If Wolford is right — and considering the MVFC’s dominance on the field and in the polls this season, he probably is — that leaves four teams gunning for one spot: YSU, Southern Illinois (6-4, 3-3), South Dakota State (6-4, 3-3) and Indiana State (6-4, 3-3).
A win on Saturday would give the Penguins a tiebreaker with all three, since YSU has already beaten SIU and SDSU.
And if YSU can beat Indiana State and North Dakota State? Well, there’s no way a six-win MVFC team (with nine overall wins) will get left out.
“It’s a big game for us,” freshman quarterback Hunter Wells said. “I’m not really looking on toward North Dakota State. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you play North Dakota State in two weeks,’ but I’m not really worried about it right now. We’ve got to win this game first and after this game we’ll worry about North Dakota State.”
Of course, YSU could also lose its last two games, which means the Penguins would finish with a three-game losing streak for the second straight year. It would also be fatal playoff-wise for the Penguins, who have made the postseason just once (2006) since Jim Tressel left after the 2000 season.
“As everyone knows, we’ve been in this situation before,” Page said. But every year’s different. This is a brand-new team. Just on the O-line alone, we have four new starters, so there is not a lot of carryover.
“Right now this is a very calm football team. I don’t think it’s setting in because we know we have two games left and we have to play those to the best of our ability before we can even think about the playoffs.”