With three weeks left in the regular season, attention from around the country is starting to narrow in on the FCS Playoffs. Who’ll be in the 24-team field when it’s selected at the end of the season, and who’ll be left out?
In his most recent bracket projection, Sam Herder of HERO Sports had two Big Sky Conference teams (Montana State and Eastern Washington) as seeds and three others (Sacramento State, UC Davis and Montana) in the field.
Herder also had Weber State as the first team on the wrong side of the bubble, which raises an interesting hypothetical. The Big Sky has never had six teams in the playoff field. The last time any conference did was the Colonial Athletic Association in 2018.
But on closer inspection, the Big Sky’s chances of putting six teams in this year’s playoff field are better than they seem. Here are three reasons why nearly half the conference could be playing in the postseason.
1. Barring upsets, the Big Sky will have six teams at 7-4 or better.
The consensus seems pretty clear — an 8-3 record, especially playing against a Big Sky schedule, will be good enough to make the playoffs. Going 7-4 gives a team a pretty strong chance, and 6-5 likely won’t be enough.
Well, the Big Sky’s top six teams should all hit the minimum benchmark of seven wins, provided they take care of business against the teams they should beat.
The conference’s three 7-1 teams — Montana State, Eastern Washington and UC Davis — are already in good shape, but each has one more game against a team in the bottom half of the conference.
Sacramento State and Montana are 6-2, but each has two games left against a team from the bottom half.
All five of those teams could conceivably reach 8-3, and all have at least a little leeway when it comes to dropping a game they shouldn’t and still reaching seven wins.
The interesting case is Weber State. The Wildcats, at just 4-4, are tied with Northern Arizona and Portland State.
All three teams could potentially finish the season on a three-game winning streak to get to 7-4 and the playoff bubble. Weber State is by far the most likely to do so, given that the Wildcats are not only better than the other two teams (they’ve beaten No. 5 Eastern Washington, and their losses are to FBS Utah, No. 3 James Madison, No. 4 Montana State and No. 8 UC Davis) but also have a much easier closing schedule.
Weber State hosts Portland State, plays at Southern Utah and hosts Northern Colorado to close the season, and will be heavily favored in all three games.
Northern Arizona is vs. UC Davis, vs. Montana and at Cal Poly. Portland State is at Weber State, at Sacramento State, and vs. Eastern Washington. If either of those teams run the table, they’ll be deserving of a playoff spot too. Good luck though.
2. “Barring upsets” has been an incredibly safe bet in the Big Sky this year.
Here’s the crux of the argument. Montana State, Eastern Washington and UC Davis each have one game left against the bottom half of the conference. Sac State and Montana each have two. Weber State has three.
That’s 10 chances for things to go wrong, for one of the league’s cellar-dwellers to trip up this beautiful dream of six Big Sky playoff teams (leaving aside that the top five teams would still be at 7-4, and at least on the bubble, even if they lost a game they weren’t supposed to).
In recent years, there would be a pretty fair chance of that happening. The Big Sky has always been a fairly deep conference, with a middle class always capable of pulling an upset.
In 2021, though? Odds are against it.
It’s helpful here to divide the conference into two tiers. The Superior Six are the six teams already mentioned here — Montana State, Eastern Washington, UC Davis, Sacramento State, Montana, Weber State. The Scuffling Seven is everybody else in the Big Sky.
In the 2021 fall season, the Superior Six has played the Scuffling Seven 20 times — and lost once. That was Idaho State’s 27-17 win over UC Davis on Oct. 9.
There were a couple close calls last week with Montana’s 20-19 win over Southern Utah and Sacramento State’s 27-24 win over Northern Colorado.
Other than those two games, Sac State’s 23-21 win over Idaho State on Sept. 25 and UC Davis’ 27-20 win over Idaho on Oct. 2 are the only other Superior Six wins by fewer than 10 points.
That’s a total record of 19-1, with only four of those wins coming by single digits and a whopping seven coming by 30 points or better.
The stratification between the top and bottom teams in the Big Sky this year has been well-documented. The league’s middle class has more or less been wiped out, leaving a conference of millionaires and beggars. And unless last weekend’s close losses by Southern Utah and Northern Colorado foreshadow a pauper’s revolt rather than just a couple random results, that shouldn’t change throughout the rest of the season.
3. The Big Sky’s potential 7-4 teams would have very strong resumes.
Even if a Big Sky frontrunner takes a couple bad losses and ends up at 7-4, most would still have strong cases to make.
Eastern Washington, Montana and UC Davis all have FBS wins. Sacramento State and Montana State don’t, but each only needs to go 1-2 in their next three games to get to 6-2 in conference play, and each has already booked a win over a fellow Big Sky powerhouse (Montana State over Weber State, Sacramento State over Montana).
And, if it won out, Weber State would be a very strong 7-4 team. As previously mentioned, the Wildcats have only lost to Utah and teams ranked in the FCS top 10, and hold a victory over top-five Eastern Washington. Quality losses don’t count as much as quality wins, but it could be hard to hold out the Wildcats if they’ve only lost to the best teams in the country, and also proved they can beat those teams by winning in Cheney.
Seven-win Big Sky teams have regularly been left out of the playoffs before, such as Eastern Washington in 2019 (although the Eagles were 7-5 because it was a 12-game season, and one of their wins was a non-counter against D-II Lindenwood).
In 2017, only Northern Arizona got in from a gaggle of four Big Sky teams that finished 7-4 in the regular season. Sacramento State and Montana both had non-counter wins that year. Eastern Washington’s snub is more of a cautionary tale, given the Eagles’ only losses that year were to Texas Tech, eventual national champion North Dakota State, Big Sky champion Southern Utah and 11-3 Weber State.
But Weber State’s win over Eastern this year is far better than any win the Eagles had that year. In their three remaining games, the best the Wildcats can do is put themselves on the bubble. But if they get there, it might be hard to keep them out of the postseason.
Photos by Brooks Nuanez, Jason Bacaj, Blake Hempstead. All Rights Reserved.
