First: I have been told to tell you that our model has been updated to account for Friday and Saturday’s results, so if you’re looking for the spread on the FCS national championship or you’re curious how the Alfalfa Bowl affected our model’s season-to-date absolute error margin, that is something it is possible to check.
Now.
Let’s talk about Lincoln Riley and Matt Entz.
An explosive interview went around this week in which Jaden Davis said people around Oklahoma’s program thought Lincoln Riley’s play calling was odd in the 2022 edition of Bedlam, reigniting a theory I’d evidently missed. The theory holds that Lincoln Riley threw his last game at Oklahoma because he wanted to take the USC job and couldn’t conscience doing it with the Big 12 Championship and a trip to the College Football Playoff still in his sights.
Before we go further, I would like to say that I love the Griz. I do like NDSU as well, and I also like SDSU, and I like Montana State. I understand this rubs people the wrong way. I’m not a *fan* of any of them, though. I just like them. I don’t have a dog in the fight, and I love the dogs. Anyway, I started talking Griz to say: The atmosphere in Missoula on Saturday looked awesome, and that fanbase deserves the win it got. Those people support their football team better than a ton of FBS schools, and their team is better than a ton of FBS teams, and it just feels right to have Montana back in the national championship. It just feels right. (Also: The old-school, minor–league–baseball-style ads in the endzone at Washington-Grizzly Stadium? So much character.) You know where this post is going, because of its title, but I don’t want to take anything away from the Griz. The Griz rock.
With that settled.
Begrudging though this may be, we have to ask the question:
Did Matt Entz throw the game?
I’m pretty confident Entz did not call plays for NDSU’s offense, this year or ever. That, right away, snuffs the theory out. But an ember persists, because running a trick play on the second overtime two-point-conversion after gaining 12.5 yards per play on the last two possessions was a strange choice. I get it, the game had taken on that flavor, but given we’re speculating about Lincoln Riley throwing games to get to USC sooner, I think it’s our duty to speculate about Entz throwing a game to get to USC sooner. It would have been a complicated four weeks if he was still the acting head coach at NDSU heading into this national championship. There’s some theoretical precedent.
While we have you here:
It isn’t weird at all that Entz dropped to being a USC assistant after the last NDSU head coach landed a Power Five head coaching job. The guy achieved some great results, especially early in his time in Fargo, but he didn’t win as much as Chris Klieman did, and he didn’t launch the program into the stratosphere like Craig Bohl. NDSU has been falling off these last two years relative to the rest of the FCS, and it’s possible some of this is South Dakota State and Montana and others catching up, but it’d have to be a lot of teams catching up. I don’t think Chris Klieman’s NDSU would have lost to Arizona last year, even if that game was played in the middle of the night. So, yeah. He wasn’t getting a good FBS head coaching job. Unless someone was ready to do something kinda dumb. Nothing against the guy, and he was obviously a very successful coach during his time in the gig, but his NDSU, in the end, wasn’t the same as the NDSUs that preceded it. The NDSUs that preceded it wouldn’t have had to play a second overtime in Missoula. They wouldn’t have had a semifinal road game in the first place.
