It goes without saying – he is coaching for the national championship, after all – but Monday has the potential to be one of the greatest nights in Illinois State defensive coordinator Travis Niekamp’s life.
Becoming an FCS national champion would already put him among an elite fraternity. But how many people can say they’ve won the title while coaching at their alma mater…and with not one, but two of their sons on the team?
That’s what Niekamp, a former ISU player and assistant at Eastern Washington and Montana, is shooting for on Monday against Montana State in Nashville.
His oldest son, Tye Niekamp, is a stat-sheet-stuffing junior linebacker who’s been an All-American three times in three seasons with the Redbirds.
His younger son, Dexter Niekamp, is a pass rusher with a sky-high ceiling who was named a Freshman All-American this season in his redshirt freshman campaign.
“This has always been a special place, and being back in this community and being a part of a very good football program that coach (Brock) Spack has allowed me to be a part of, I’m very grateful for that,” Travis Niekamp said. “And it’s even more exciting now because I’ve got a couple of my boys playing.”
In addition to possibly writing the perfect ending to a football family fairytale, Niekamp (along with strength coach Matt Nicholson) is one of two former Montana Grizzlies assistants who have a chance to win the title by beating the Bobcats on Monday. Both have been critical pieces of a late-season run that’s made Illinois State the most unlikely title-game participant in recent memory.
Following a regular-season-ending 37-7 home loss to Southern Illinois in late November that put the Redbirds squarely on the playoff bubble at 8-4, they’ve won four straight road playoff games to put themselves on the cusp of history.
It’s been a validating month-plus for Travis Niekamp, who was a defensive lineman at Illinois State in the late 1990s and started his coaching career there. He also spent multiple years at Eastern Washington in the mid-2000s and was part of Bob Stitt’s staff for two years at Montana before returning to ISU in 2018.
“I’ve been around the block in the Big Sky,” Travis Niekamp said. “I was at Eastern Washington, and played Montana State four times there. Played them twice at Montana. … That is a ferocious rivalry. And I’ve been a part of the Army-Navy game. I was a part of the Apple Cup. I’ve been around some pretty big rivalries, but I would say that Montana-Montana State, that’s not brother versus brother. That’s hate versus hate.
“It might get really ugly, but it was fun. Those games are awesome.”
To get Monday’s matchup against Montana State, Niekamp’s defense has stepped up multiple times, most crucially in a second-round win over North Dakota State. In a shocking 29-28 upset of the subdivision’s eternal hegemon, the Redbirds overcame five interceptions by quarterback Tommy Rittenhouse by holding NDSU to just 179 yards and six first downs. After opening the game with a one-play, 78-yard touchdown strike to All-American receiver Bryce Lance, the Bison gained just 101 yards the rest of the way, scoring the rest of their points on a punt return, a pick-six and a 4-yard drive after Rittenhouse’s fifth interception of the day.
Given that it was in the Fargodome, where NDSU has lost one other playoff game in its entire Division-I history, that game has a claim as the greatest defensive performance ever in the FCS playoffs.
The Redbirds went on to hold UC Davis’s high-powered offense to 17 points until two late consolation TDs in a 42-31 win, and then zig-zagged back across the country to keep Villanova out of the end zone until another consolation score in a 30-14 semifinal victory.
“In the first half of the season, we would blow a coverage, we would miss a run fit, which would give up some really big plays,” Travis Niekamp said. “And since then we’ve kind of settled down, and we’ve probably done a better job of really becoming who we are.”
Tye Niekamp has been one of the best defensive players in the country, narrowly missing out on an invitation to the Buck Buchanan Award ceremony despite racking up 155 tackles, 14.5 tackles for loss and eight pass breakups.
Travis’s oldest son stepped onto campus in Normal, Illinois, as a tackling machine, racking up 74 stops as a freshman and 112 a year ago.
“Beyond the obvious, he’s the defensive coordinator’s son,” Montana State head coach Brent Vigen said about Tye Niekamp. “He’s like an extension of him in a lot of different ways. … He’s an aggressive force. And I think they’ve forced the action with him probably more than with any of their other defenders, as far as his downhill play. There’s absolutely a physical component to him leading the charge, but I’m sure the leadership and again, as an extension of his father, I think that probably is this really unique piece to what they have going on defense.”
After redshirting a year ago, Dexter Niekamp has 48 tackles and four sacks, including two against South Dakota State in the regular season and one in the semifinals against Villanova.
“I tell this to Tye all the time. It really pisses him off, but Dexter was always the better athlete, and potentially he still is the better athlete,” Travis Niekamp said. “Tye might be the better football player right now, but Dexter is a really good athlete. … And he’s got a really good feel for the game too. He is very coachable. He understands what he’s supposed to do. He probably doesn’t understand the defense as well as Tye does, but he understands his role and where he needs to be. And again, he plays his butt off.”
Meanwhile, Nicholson’s work behind the scenes has also proven hugely important to getting ISU to Nashville.
A 17-game schedule (12 in the regular season plus five in the playoffs because ISU didn’t get a first-round bye but still made it to the title game) that’s potentially unprecedented in college football history has made this season the greatest challenge of his career.
Not only that, the Redbirds have been on the road for five straight games, hitting all four points of the compass on their playoff journey by traveling south to Southeastern Louisiana, north to Fargo to play the Bison, west to UC Davis and east to Villanova.
“Southeastern Louisiana, we got stuck there overnight because we had, like, a couple feet of snow here,” Nicholson said. “So it’s been a little bit different. … And you know, you have to modify some things throughout the course of the season, or as things come up, but it’s really just the culture of the group. I mean, they come in, they work hard. Even if it’s late in the season, they’re fired up, they’re excited, and they’ve put in a lot of work to get to this point.”
Nicholson, a former Houston linebacker, followed Stitt from Colorado School of Mines to Montana in 2015 and stayed on staff in Missoula for five seasons before taking the job with the Redbirds.
“He’s done a good job with all angles and all facets of our strength and conditioning program,” ISU head coach Brock Spack said. “We’ve played 16 games going on 17, and we have to be in great condition. … One of the objectives is to be the best-conditioned team every Saturday. The teams that get this far, they’re well-conditioned and they’re strong. So you can’t say enough about our strength and conditioning staff.”
In his time at Montana, Nicholson only beat the Bobcats once – a 54-35 win in Bozeman in 2015, both his and Stitt’s first year with the Grizzlies.
Niekamp never tasted victory over MSU in his two seasons in Missoula.
Now, with the biggest win of their careers on the line, they’ll once again have to go through the team from Bozeman.
