McFeely: Bison get well against post-Petrino Bears

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — If Missouri State was capable of being a pain during the brief and entertaining Bobby Petrino era, the Bears are back to being a remedy for the Missouri Valley Football Conference.

It was fun while it lasted in Springfield, where a buzzing Plaster Stadium and competence on the field are distant memories. Petrino quit as head coach to become offensive coordinator at Texas A&M after last season and it appears hope followed him down the road.

The tailgate was mostly dead, the stadium mostly empty and the product on the field mostly not good Saturday. The fundraising and FBS hopes of school president Clif Smart and athletic director Kyle Moats are on hold, probably for a long time.

North Dakota State isn’t complaining. The bumbling Bears cured what ailed the Bison, at least temporarily, as NDSU rolled Missouri State 38-10.

It’s called a get-well game and the Bison were looking fit as a fiddle.

It’s exactly what they needed after last week’s clunker, the 24-19 loss to South Dakota at the Fargodome that had everyone wondering (present company included) if the Bison’s season was DOA.

Such are the standards when you win nine Football Championship Subdivision national titles.

“North Dakota State is a hell of a football team,” said first-year Missouri State coach Ryan Beard, who married Petrino’s daughter and replaced him as head coach. “They do a nice job year in and year out. They’re one of the best teams you’ll see. And, you know, I know they had a hard week. So we were going to see the best Bison team that we could possibly see. And sure enough, they came out and executed better than we did.”

It’s not like Missouri State was a powerhouse under Petrino, but there was juice that followed the longtime FBS and NFL coach. He was a name. He was a controversial hire, given his controversial past. There was some renegade to him. He had connections to get big-time transfers. Two of his teams made the playoffs, something that hadn’t happened here since George W. Bush was president.

Poor Beard, just 34 years old, was left with a shell of whatever Petrino built. These Bears are bad up front on both sides of the ball and are beginning to stack up more casualties than a Martin Scorcese movie. The Bears had four turnovers against the Bison, including three interceptions thrown by a backup quarterback because their starter is out for the year with an injured shoulder.

The question, how much of what the Bison did will translate to next week and beyond?

Up next is a road trip to Grand Forks to play North Dakota, surely not at South Dakota State’s elite level but surely much better than Missouri State. Maybe the Fighting Hawks are as good as South Dakota, and they’ll be playing in the madhouse that is the Alerus Center.

“We’re chasing progress,” NDSU head coach Matt Entz said, using this year’s cliche, when he was asked whether this was a needed get-well game. “I need to watch film. Off the top of my head, we had too many penalties. I didn’t say anything to the team because, well, we’ll address them Tuesday. We started to do some things at practice, Bison reminders, but we need a way to just be smarter in some situations.”

If this was supposed to be a coming out party for NDSU’s reworked offensive line, the running game didn’t show it. There were flashes, but the Bison’s running backs again didn’t rumble against a thin and oft-porous Missouri State defensive line. The passing game was back on track, with Cam Miller using all 6-foot-7 of receiver Zach Mathis to make big plays.

And the Bison defense? It’s not going to lock anybody down and the defensive line still has, shall we say, room for improvement. Jordan Pachot might’ve been the backup QB, but he was throwing it with ease when he wasn’t making bad decisions and throwing interceptions.

UND’s Tommy Schuster’s been starting for four years. He’s unlikely to make the same decisions as Pachot.

Pachot threw for 269 yards.

“You guys have heard me say, ‘If you give up 300 yards passing, you have a chance to win. You give up 300 yards rushing, you’re probably going to lose,’” Entz said. “We need to correct, we need to improve. Lets get to the film. But I’m excited about holding a team that was averaging 31 points to 10.”

The UND game will be huge, aside from the rivalry. An NDSU win means it will likely be 7-1 going to South Dakota State in November, since the Bison follow the Fighting Hawks with Western Illinois and Murray State. A Bison loss means there is a high probability they’ll be 6-3 after visiting Brookings, with tough Southern Illinois and Northern Iowa left.

Missouri State provided a soft landing spot after the loss to South Dakota. That’s a role the Bears were used to playing prior to Petrino. And apparently after him, too.

Mike McFeely is a columnist for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. He began working for The Forum in the 1980s while he was a student studying journalism at Minnesota State University Moorhead. He’s been with The Forum full time since 1990, minus a six-year hiatus when he hosted a local radio talk-show.