FRISCO, Texas — For the first time here, particularly against a Big Sky Conference opponent, the Bison of North Dakota State seemed vulnerable.
After a thorough, edgy effort led by stellar senior quarterback Cam Miller, however, the Bison continue to reign supreme. And the Big Sky’s best continue to wonder what it will take to get over the top against the mighty powerhouse from Fargo after NDSU led from stem to stern to earn a 35-32 win in front of 18,005 fans here on a chilly Monday evening.
“A pretty incredible journey started with a group of seniors that decided after a team meeting to get together and just what are we going to do? They chose to stay. And once again, there’s a lot of evidence with our program, we’re running a football program, but those that stayed will be champions,” North Dakota State head coach Tim Polasek said after finishing his first season at 14-2. “I’m not sure if any other program would have what we’ve got. I’m so honored to be the head football coach and just to be part of it.”
NDSU had a first-year head coach in Polasek, a man who had been an assistant during four national championship runs, but had never been a head coach in the FCS title game at Toyota Stadium.
The North Dakota State program has been the subject of much tumult, from getting poached by Power 5 programs in the NCAA transfer portal to the perception that the standard had slipped. And how could that perception not creep in for a team that went 142-9 during the fall seasons between 2011 and 2021?
That run that included nine consecutive fall national championships and three undefeated seasons, including a 15-0 year in 2018 under Chris Klieman and a 16-0 season in 2019 in the first year under former head coach Matt Entz. It also included four new head coaches.
The standard seems so impossible, it was only a matter of time before it started to slip a little bit. And that resulted in NDSU losing to rival South Dakota in the regular-season finale to give the Yotes a share of their first-ever Missouri Valley Football Conference title.
But NDSU bounced back from that loss to win in Fargo as has been the customary trait, including ending South Dakota State’s reign as the only other program other than James Madison in 2016 to win an FCS title since NDSU’s supremacy began. The Bison dispatched of the two-time defending champion Jackrabbits, essentially ending the Jimmy Rogers era in Brookings. After two years, Rogers took the head coaching job at Washington State.
“The standard here has been the same for 15 years now, and it’s a national championship. It’s to get up on that stage in Frisco,” NDSU junior linebacker Logan Kopp said following the win. “The past two years, we have fallen short, and we’ve worked our butts off, 365 days, 24 hours a day, to get back up here. The adversity we faced, the extra hours we put in on the field after practice, up in the offices in the film room. It really does pay off.
The group of guys in this locker room, the relationship, we’ve formed is second to none. I love these guys so much.”
Montana State entered the much-hyped, much-publicized week as the decided favorites. MSU opened at 3.5-point favorites in Vegas and that’s where the line stayed, that is until late money came pouring in on the ‘Cats to move it to 5.5 points.
The Bobcats came to Frisco with an unblemished record and a run of excellence that had seem them dispatch of every single opponent save one by multiple touchdowns, including No. 4 South Dakota in the FCS semifinals to punch a ticket back here, the place where 2021’s magical yet unlikely run came to a crashing halt when the freshman version of Tommy Mellott suffered a game-ending injury on MSU’s first possession of the game. The Bison rolled to a 28-0 halftime lead and cruised to a 38-10 win.
But this Bobcat team seemed different, not just than the MSU teams before it but different than the other Big Sky teams who had tried their hand against the unbelievably dominant Missouri Valley champions who’s name ends in “Dakota State”.
MSU has one of the best offenses the subdivision has seen, a freight train running attack that averaged more than 300 yards per contest entering Monday night. The Bobcats finally had a quarterback, a Montana-made work horse from Butte, America who had blossomed into one of the best dual threats in college football in Tommy Mellott. MSU brought a salty defense to Toyota Stadium that had a penchant for getting off the field on third downs. And MSU had a few of the best special teams specialists in all the land in 6-foot-9 senior punter Brendan Hall and superstar sophomore punt returner Taco Dowler.
On Monday night, although the Bobcats nearly rallied for a comeback for the ages, instead, the story remained the same.
And as the final punt of the evening settled to the turf and after the final seconds ticked off the clock, a sea of green and gold flooded the field.
“I think we came here with one expectation. I know it stings a lot for these guys, for these seniors in particular that have laid such a foundation for our program,” MSU head coach Brent Vigen said. “They’ve certainly built upon the seniors before them, but the success they’ve had, been through a lot of ups and some downs.
“Obviously this is a low point. You end up rattling off 15 victories and you can’t finish it off, this is not how we wanted this day to end. But I know the program’s much better for their efforts. I know they’re much better off for being part of Montana State’s football program. So I can’t thank them enough. We’re going to miss them, I know that.”
It didn’t matter that Montana State fans seemed to outnumber NDSU fans 2-to-1. It didn’t matter that Mellott went crazy in the second half, throwing two touchdowns and ripping off a 44-yard rushing score to cut what was a 21-3 halftime deficit to 28-25 with 11:25 left.
All that mattered were the Bison were the Bison. And the Bison had Cam Miller.
Less than 24 hours after Mellott earned the Walter Payton Award as the top offensive player in the Football Championship Subdivision, Miller took home the Most Outstanding Player of the FCS title game.
Miller rushed for nearly 100 yards in the first half alone, scoring a tone-setting short touchdown on a play where he got hit so hard his helmet came flying off and then ripping off another 64-yard score that broke the game open before Montana State even got a chance to find its footing.
The Bobcats adjusted after halftime, holding Miller’s legs in check. But the four-year starter made every clutch play possible, helping keep a hard-charging Bobcat team that cut the 18-point halftime lead to 21-18 just 11 minutes into the second half.
Miller finished the game 19-of-22 for 199 yards, winning his 45th game as the starter at NDSU in the process. He helped the Bison convert 8-of-12 on third downs and he spearheaded NDSU’s run game with 121 of the Bison’s 202 rushing yards.
“I think Cam is 1 of 1 for sure,” said NDSU sophomore wide receiver Bryce Lance, who continued his breakout season with nine catches for 107 yards and his FCS-best 17th touchdown of the season.
“Obviously he didn’t win that award that our whole team knows he should have, and I think he showed that today. I really don’t think you can compare the two people because it’s different journeys, but Cam is that guy.”
Miller himself took plenty of heat for not being the players that came before him. It’s a tough legacy to live up to when Brock Jensen, Carson Wentz, Easton Stick and Trey Lance all get picked in the NFL draft, including Wentz and Lance going in the top three overall picks. But during his career, Miller went from “game-manager” on a national championship team as a freshman to scapegoat when NDSU lost to SDSU in the title game in 2022 and fell in double overtime to Montana in the semifinals of last year’s playoffs to proud national champion following Monday’s outstanding performance.
“These guys mean the world to me. They’re a big part of the reason why I stayed at this program, and they believed in me when nobody else did,” Miller said, fighting back tears in the post game. “When things were bad, they were the first people to pick me up. I’m so damn honored to be a part of this program and to be one of
their friends and teammates.
“But I’ve always felt like I’ve been the underdog ever since I was a little kid. I was overlooked. I was overlooked out of high school, overlooked when I was young. This year it’s never been about proving people wrong, it’s about proving myself right and that I am the quarterback that people say that I am and the quarterback that I think that I am.”
Mellott can relate. The 6-foot burner from Butte didn’t have a quarterback coach growing up in the Mining City. He just learned how to compete by “going and playing”. Vigen embraced that creativity and also acknowledged how analytical Mellott can be.
Through patience, development and Mellott’s renewed commitment to stay healthy, it culminated in one of the great quarterback seasons in Big Sky and FCS history.
In the first half, Mellott found no flow as dropped passes and non-conversions thwarted MSU’s offensive efforts. In the second half, he took control of the game, engineering a swift 11-play drive right out of the halftime locker room to cut the deficit.
After a quick stop, Mellott hit senior tight end Ryan Lonergan for a 54-yard gain inside the 10, then fellow tight end Rohan Jones for a five-yard touchdown. When Lonergan, a sixth-year senior who was one of 15 Bozeman products playing in the game for the ‘Cats, caught a two-point conversion (MSU’s first of the season), a game that looked destined for a blowout turned into a tight affair in an instant.
“I think that our offense was a little bit stagnant there from the first half, unfortunately, and came up short because of it,” Mellott said. “(Offensive coordinator) Coach Walker got us going, players are making plays, guys kept fighting. It’s very easy, 21-3, to quit in a national
championship game, it is, and we came back out there ,and we had a group of guys that fought for this team, fought for the seniors, and just came up short.”
But Miller and the Bison always seemed to find a way to answer. Miller’s third down bomb to Lance down to the one-yard line helped set up a Josh Stoffel TD catch that put the advantage back to 10.
Mellott’s 44-yard scoring burst showed his prodigious speed and cut the lead back to three. But NDSU’s nine-play, 66-yard drive capped by CharMar (Marty) Brown’s short touchdown run proved to be the final dagger.
“I think them embracing the message about how me sharing past experiences that I learned here from Coach (Craig) Bohl and Chris Klieman specifically, and then all those senior leaders. The way we’ve gotten this done is just remaining humble and hungry,” Polasek said. “You have to put that chip back on your shoulder. Any team in the past that has done stuff really is not relevant to how our season is going to go.
“This all started with a group of seniors that decided to stay. We’re doing some wonderful things to try to get as many kids as much as possible, but they made a collective effort to say, we need to stay here. Again, it’s just evidence that at North Dakota State those who stay will be champions.”
If North Dakota State can experience as much adversity as anyone in the country — case and point, star safety Cole Wisniewski missed the regular season with an injury, then entered the portal right before the playoffs to chase lofty NIL dollars at Texas Tech — and the Bison lose a game here or there in the regular season, yet they still stand on the stage in Frisco year after year, what’s next for the Big Sky?
How does the league get over the top? The last time a Big Sky team won a national championship came in 2010 when Eastern Washington beat an upstart NDSU team that had not yet completed its ascent.
The last time a team from Montana won the national title game was when the Grizzlies won in 2001, a title that seems to drift further and further in the past because, well, none of the players in college football soon will have even been alive in 2001.
And for Montana State, one of if not the best teams in school history came up short again. MSU had not made it to the Final Four of the FCS playoffs in 35 years when Jeff Choate led MSU that far in 2019. That Bobcat team, just like the one before it and the one after that and the one last year and the one this year, all met their demise at the hands of the Bison.
None of the losses have been the same. In 2018 and 2019, it was an underdog sent to slaughter in Fargo. In 2021, Mellott’s injury colored the entire game. Last season, MSU had NDSU dead to rights before a blocked extra point in overtime abruptly ended Montana State’s season.
And on Saturday, MSU had plenty of what-ifs (LINK TO TOM STORY). What if Vigen had not elected to go for it on fourth down from midfield, allowing NDSU to turn a 14-3 lead into a 21-3 gap at the break? What if Rohan Jones had not had a few uncharacteristic drops? What if the Bobcats had not started slow? What if there wasn’t a busted defensive assignment on Miller’s long touchdown run?
All of those questions, along with the bigger picture ones, will have to wait for satisfying answers.
“This was just a summation of an entire career playing for Montana State, it’s just been a pleasure and an honor and something that has grown me into the man I am today,” Mellott said after finishing with 195 yards passing and 135 yards rushing. “And I certainly wouldn’t trade it for anything, the early mornings, the late nights, all the work. So many guys that I’ve met that I’ve built relationships that I’ll hold forever.
“Certainly this year was very special. Hat’s off to North Dakota State for beating us today. Unfortunately, I think the better team lost. That’s how it goes sometimes. That’s football. That’s why they play the game.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez, Blake Hempstead and Jason Bacaj. All Rights Reserved.
