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YSU's 2011 loss to MSU still lingers
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Missouri State safety Mike Crutcher (20) tackles YSU running back Jamaine Cook as teammate Christian Bryan (2) looks on. A week after defeating eventual national champion North Dakota State, Youngstown State lost its 2011 finale to the Bears, falling out of the playoff hunt.
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
If you want to know why the Missouri Valley Football Conference hasn’t had more playoff teams over the last few years, you can blame conspiracy theories, the playoff committee or East Coast bias.
Or you can just blame Missouri State.
“We were the demise for the league in only getting two teams in a couple times,” Bears coach Terry Allen said Tuesday. “We lost [our] non-conference games and then we beat some people in the league that knocked them out of the playoffs.”
Last year, the Bears went just 5-7, but their win over Southern Illinois in Week 10 probably cost the Salukis a playoff berth.
More famously (at least in Youngstown), a one-win Missouri State team rallied from a 17-point deficit to beat Youngstown State in the 2011 finale, knocking the Penguins out of the playoffs and costing defensive coordinator Rick Kravitz his job.
Both years, the MVFC sent just two teams to the postseason.
“I don’t really want to recall it,” YSU coach Eric Wolford said of the 2011 game. “I don’t like to live in the past. It was a bad day for us, obviously.
“We had some opportunities to win the game, had some opportunities to seize it, and we came up short.”
Jelani Berassa was a starting wide receiver in that game, catching seven passes for 91 yards and a touchdown just before halftime that gave the Penguins a 27-10 lead. YSU was coming off a win at eventual national champion North Dakota State and still led by 10 points with 10 minutes remaining.
But Missouri State drove 64 yards in the final two minutes, scoring the game-winning touchdown with 10 seconds left.
“I remember we needed to win that game to go to the playoffs and they only had one win at the time,” Berassa said. “It was a tough game. They drove down and beat us in the end of the game. It was a heartbreaking game.”
On Saturday, Youngstown State will play the Bears for the first time since that 2011 meeting, a gap that has cooled off any revenge talk this week.
Berassa is one of three returning starters from that game for YSU and the others, senior WR Christian Bryan and senior LB Travis Williams, aren’t expected to start.
“I’m not holding any grudge against them for that,” Berassa said. “We just gonna go out there with the intensity that it’s a conference game and we’ll let that drive us.”
Missouri State (3-1) is off to its best start in seven years and is ranked 23rd in the FCS coaches poll, its first ranking since 1997. Youngstown State (3-1) is ranked 12th in the coaches poll and 18th in The Sports Network poll. Coincidentally, the last time two ranked teams played at Plaster Field was in 1996, when then 23rd-ranked YSU beat sixth-ranked MSU 17-13.
Youngstown State is 4-0 in conference openers under Wolford.
“Everything gets more important now at this point of the season,” Berassa said. “All the games now really go into the playoffs [hunt], so there’s more urgency this week than weeks past.”
Wolford is 0-2 against the Bears — South Dakota State, which is 4-0 against Wolford, is the only other Valley team he hasn’t beat — and the Penguins have lost four straight against MSU.
The Bears already have cost Wolford one playoff spot.
He doesn’t want to give them a chance to make it two.
“You don’t know — this game could be the determining factor at the end of the year maybe of a [playoff] tiebreaker,” Wolford said. “What game is that going to be [in the conference]?
“You just don’t know.”