BOZEMAN, Montana — Paul Brott will be the first to tell you that when he’s scouting a team, he turns on the film and watches a few clips.
“I usually turn it on, watch a few clips, then go on about my day until we have meetings again,” the Montana State senior defensive tackle said a week out from the FCS national championship game
But Illinois State’s offense, particularly emergent running back Victor Dawson, really caught Brott’s eye. It’s not that the No. 17 Redbirds are much different in complexion than the North Dakota State teams Montana State battled for the national title in 2021 and 2024.
The MSU defense has played several of the best running backs in the country over the last month, including playing All-American Eli Gillman of Montana twice in 28 days with a dose of Yale All-American senior Josh Pitsenberger in between.
Dawson, a former Cincinnati transfer, caught Brott’s eye right away in the preparation for this year’s national title game.
“Within the first few clips, and when we were watching them on TV, it’s like, ‘All right, let’s see what they are about.’ And just saw that dude get the ball and I just go, ‘WHOP’ and just smack the freaking hole. And I thought, wow, that’s going to be a good part of this game, that’s going to be fun.”
Dawson is a 5-foot-11, 220-pounder with Big XII talent. Since he took over as the primary ball carrier for the Redbirds, he’s been a durable and potent force. Since Dawson rushed for 101 yards and a touchdown on November 1 against Northern Iowa, the first of six games with at least 98 yards over the last eight games, ISU has lost just one time.
“Dawson is certainly a force,” MSU head coach Brent Vigen said. “He has had a couple of phenomenal games the last few weeks in particular. He keeps getting better the more opportunities he gets.”
In the playoffs, Dawson has been particularly prolific. He rushed for 137 yards and a touchdown, including a 69-yard TD rip, against North Dakota State. The following week, he gutted out 29 carries on the way to 148 yards against UC Davis. Last week, he had his best game, rushing for a career-high 155 yards on 34 carries and scored his fifth touchdown of the season against Villanova.
“Vic has been great this post-season run,” ISU quarterback Tommy Rittenhouse said. “Start of the year, moving parts up front, a few injuries. The group up front has meshed together and Vic has been really trusting it, being a little more patient, letting the holes develop. His vision has gotten better and once he hits that second level, it’s hard to bring him down. He’s a hard runner, big guy, squats about 600. He’s a hard guy to take down.”
Dawson enters the national title game with 1,251 yards on 249 carries. He has rushed for 852 yards on 169 carries since November 1 alone, including piling up 512 yards in the playoffs. He is averaging 128 yards per game and 5.2 yards per carry during ISU’s epic run.
“Eli Gillman, Josh Pitsenberger, he was a dog, too, gotta get after both of them and when you are trying to stop the four up front, it’s challenging,” Brott said. “And these backs are smart, they are savvy. It really brings it into perspective. We’ve had great backs to go against and now we have another one.”
Dawson’s emergence has been a microcosm of an ISU team that started 4-3 only to surge into the FCS playoffs for the sixth time under 16th-year head coach Brock Spack. It took the Redbirds half a season to find their footing but now they are one of the hottest teams the FCS playoffs has seen in the last 20 years. The last time a team ripped through the bracket and won so often on the road came in 2014…when Illinois State won at No. 4 Eastern Washington in the quarterfinals before toppling top-ranked New Hampshire in the semifinals before falling 29-27 to North Dakota State.
“You go back to what your staples are, and that’s what we did,” ISU head coach Brock Spack said. “We simplified. We did that in all phases of our team. And that’s paid off for us. More is not always better even if it’s fun to do that as a strategy. It’s not what we know, it’s what they know. It’s the guys who go out there with White helmets and the bird on the side of their heads. They have to know what they are doing, and they have to understand the system.”
“There hasn’t been a magic wand or pixie dust thrown over our heads that have led to this run. I told them toward the end of the season, the only thing I would tell them before they got on the bus was, ‘Just be us.’ That’s it. And they’ve embraced that philosophy.”
The Redbirds boast a big offensive line that averages 315 pounds across the board. The unit features three seniors, including first-team All-MVFC tackle Jake Pope (6-7, 300) a former Kentucky transfer.
“They’re physical up front. They play well together, they play fast, they play hard,” said Brott, who earned All-American honors earlier this season. “They run a lot of inside zone. Basically, all their looks are inside zone. It’s a lunch pail and hard hat type of day for me, and it’ll be fun to go against those guys.
“They’re a great front the running back hits a hole hard, and I know they’re gonna go out there and there’s some dogs, so it’s gonna be a great game”
Dawson’s rise has coincided with Rittenhouse getting on track. And the hot streak by senior wide receiver Daniel Sobkowicz has helped propel ISU to four consecutive road playoff wins, marking the first time that has ever occurred.
That duo has grown up together since their high school days on the West side of Chicago. They enrolled at ISU the same year and have put up some of the biggest numbers in Redbird’ history as their senior seasons are set to come to an end.
Rittenhouse will most likely go over 7,000 career passing yards and throw his 1,000th pass on Monday night. He has completed 636 of 986 passes for 6,806 yards with 56 touchdowns and 21 interceptions. Sobkowicz has 257 receptions for 3,497 yards and 40 touchdowns. This season Rittenhouse is 301-470-12 for 3,257 yards and 36 touchdowns and Sobkowicz is 78-1,089-18.
Aside from an anomalous five interception game against NDSU, Rittenhouse and Sobkowicz have been on an absolute tear throughout the playoffs. Rittenhouse has connected with Sobkowicz 29 times for 403 yards and seven touchdowns. The offense has averaged 418 yards per game and 5.6 yards per play with a high mark of 532 yards against UC Davis in a 42-31 win.
“They’ve had an impressive run through the playoffs now, going on the road four times and coming up on the right side,” Vigen said. “You can see them get better through this stretch. They have a really confident, high-powered offense right now and defensively, a group that is certainly playing its best football and really causing issues. You backtrack to their last regular-season game, the lost by 30 (37-7 to Southern Illinois). That probably hurt their positioning a little bit.
“It’s not that they found lightning in a bottle; they found a way to win in Fargo. Going down to Southeast Louisiana (a 21-3 win), I don’t think that was much of a shock they won that game. But going up to Fargo and finding a way to win, that can be a catalyst in so many different ways and especially the way they won. I don’t think that game could’ve been replayed that way once if you played it 100 times. It was such an odd game. But they won that game and took a huge amount of confidence out of that game.”
The Redbirds crisscrossed the United States leaving Hammond, Louisiana for Fargo, North Dakota, then Davis, California and finally Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“Going across country to play Davis, a team that beat them 42-10 the year before in the playoffs, that’s a really iimpressive follow up,” Vigen said. “Then to go across the country after beating Davis in California and go to Philadelphia and beat Villanova, beyond just who they have played, the travel, not letting that add up, it’s impressive. You should expect to play a really good team this time of year, a team that’s playing really well and that’s what we’ve got.”
Back in 2021, Montana State lost its rivalry game 37-7 at Montana only to rip off three straight playoff wins, including beating No. 1 Sam Houston 42-28 in Huntsville, Texas. Illinois State has gone on a similar run after losing their rivalry game 37-7 at home to No. 24 Southern Illinois. Vigen said “you probably scratch your head and wonder how they lost by 30 rather than wondering how they won four straight to get here.”
Rittenhouse, a starter since his sophomore year, said that the rivalry loss to SIU was embarrassing but that it seemed to awaken something within the Redbirds.
“Losing to SIU and losing a seed added motivation for us,” Rittenhouse said. “We knew that game wasn’t who we are. Once we saw our name up there against SELA, we knew we had a shot at playing more games and that’s all that mattered at that point. It didn’t matter what happened at SIU and it doesn’t matter now. But we definitely took that as fuel. We just have a really resilient group of guys who has the preparation that it takes each week to keep moving. You have to have that for a whole season but you have to take it up a notch during the post season, especially, because it’s win or go home.”
While ISU, which is located in Normal, Illinois, got a notable boost midway through the season when it moved Dawson into the starting lineup, but back in 2021 it got a linebacker right out of the school’s backyard. Normal High School’s Tye Niekamp, who’s dad, Travis, is the team’s defensive coordinator, signed with the Redbirds.
After his redshirt year in 2022, Niekamp, now a junior, has been the top dog for ISU in garnering All-America honors in each of his first three seasons. The list of honors he’s received over the years is mind-boggling. The 2023 national Freshman Defensive Player of the Year, 2023 Missouri Valley Football Conference Freshman of the Year, 2024 All-American and MVFC first team linebacker, and 2025 MVFC Defensive Player of the Year are at the top of the list.
Niekamp had been holding down the fort on defense as the team waited for a spark from the offense. Since Dawson’s debut as the starter at running back, ISU has won seven of eight games, including the earth-shattering win in Fargo, ND over mighty North Dakota State, a team the Redbirds had lost to at home 33-16 two months earlier.
“We knew the potential of our defense and the potential we could have,” Niekamp said. “We started playing to our potential the second half of the season. As soon as we started reaching our potential, we started playing really well. You look at the last nine games, we have eight wins and it’s been elite level defense. Now we are to the point where we are the defense we are supposed to be.”
That 29-28 win featured a comeback for the ages as the Redbirds rallied from a 28-14 deficit in the last three minutes of the game. The comebacks overwhelming nature put one of the best defensive efforts in FCS playoff history on the backburner. After the defense got the ball back with a strip sack on the NDSU 23-yard line, the Redbirds scored with :46 to play and converted the 2-point attempt to take the lead. Any chance of getting into field goal range was snuffed out eight plays later when the Bison turned the ball over on downs.
The ISU defense held NDSU to just 179 yards of total offense, which included a 78-yard touchdown pass on the Bison’ first play of the game, while withstanding five turnovers by its own offense. The 179 yards were 280 yards below NDSU’s season per game average and the 3.9 yards per play were nearly 4.0 yards below NDSU’s 2025 output. The Redbirds had four sacks, seven tackles for loss, and four pass breakups.
The win came two weeks after allowing 455 total yards and losing 37-7 at home to Southern Illinois, which didn’t get selected to the playoffs. It was followed by a 42-31 win over UC Davis where ISU allowed 533 yards.
“Defense played probably the best game I’ve ever seen and for the offense, stringing it together, everyone having my back over a rough full game, that shows how resilient this group is, how much we’ve been battle-tested,” Rittenhouse said. “We now know every game is winnable and it gives us all the confidence in the world.”
Montana State has had to deal with its fair share of adversity this season. After an 0-2 start the Bobcats rallied for 13 straight wins to advance to their second straight national title game and third in five years.
“My mind is on winning this game at all costs,” Brott said. “We’ve been in a lot of big games since I’ve been here. It’s been big game after big game. So this is the next big game,” Brott said. “Of course, the environment is different. I still remember it from last year, just the surroundings and everything and the energy in there. Being there before can give us an edge. But again, Illinois State, they’re going to work their butt off.”
The Bobcats have won 28 of their last 31 games over the past two seasons with all three losses coming in succession. MSU fell to NDSU in the 2024 national title game, then started 2025 with losses to FBS powerhouse Oregon and FCS powerhouse South Dakota State.
“I’m so proud of these guys,” Brott said. “It’s been a working mentality. Even when we lost those two games, we had a player led meeting in here, and we were talking about, hey, we’re still good. We just got to win all these games, and we got to lock down, do the little things.
“And, I mean, everyone was so dialed in. The tensions are high at practice. You can see people getting frustrated, even though they shouldn’t, but they care so much that they just work their butt off, and they just want to continue to stack and get better and get better. It seems like everyone on this team is hungry. No one’s complacent. Even when we’re going to this game, we’re not complacent. We still have a lot of work to do, and we want to get better each day. And so, I think that’s been the main thing of this team. You’ll get knocked down, but people just keep on getting back up, and we’re just trying to reach the best that we can be.”
All the talk will be over in short order as Montana State and Illinois State get set to settle it on the field Monday night at 5:30 in Nashville.
