national championship caliber team...? It’s close

[BelligerentBobcat]

Almost without exception, not only do you have to be great and play well on the field, you have to be the beneficiary of good fortune during the course of the championship run. Perhaps the exceptions might be Alabama on the FBS level and NDSU at the FCS level. Those two seem to have the secret recipe.

Staying healthy and avoiding injury, getting the ball to bounce the right way a time or two, getting the benefit of a ref's call at that right time, and good post-season scheduling all play roles in getting that national title. I think we have the talent on the field to get the job done; we'll just see if everything else falls into place. If so, I definitely like our chances.

The secret recipe is having players who are a lot better than who you’re playing. They’re incredibly fundamentally sound, but they’re not running anything incredible schematically. People know what they’re doing, it just isn’t very stoppable all the time. They got the Jimmie’s and Joe’s.

[PortlandCat90]

The Horn (UT sports station) was discussing Kwiatkowski and even Choate this morning. The team has collapsed in the past 2 games. They did a great job of tracing field position and how that affected the defense - very interesting.

A great point was brought up: one illustrating factor in how well a team is coached is how many pre-snap penalties has the team had? UT - a ton. The Cats? Not many that I can remember.

The Big Sky stats shows MSU as the 2nd least penalized team and our opponents as least penalized. Weird stat. Strong run game stat? Must premote love in the pre-game handshake.

https://bigskyconf.com/stats.aspx?path= ... &year=2021
(a few times it listed only the first 10...we were omitted from both...)