CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Northern Iowa coach Mark Farley has been in charge of the Panthers since 2001. He’s taken them to 13 FCS playoff tournaments and seven conference championships in that time, and entering Saturday’s tilt with No. 1 defending national champion South Dakota State, one Farley state that felt particularly relevant was this one: In home games coming off of a bye week, Farley’s teams were 10-0. Overall, 17-5 after a bye.

Some stats are more coincidental or incidental than they are cause for concern, but there have been times throughout the SDSU/UNI rivalry that Farley, to his credit, has come up with a schematic wrinkle or two that have thrown the Jacks for a loop and contributed to an SDSU defeat.

Perhaps Panther fans felt good about their team’s chances, too. A crowd of 12,611 was on hand — the biggest UNI-Dome crowd since 2017.

Most of them were gone by the start of the fourth quarter though, as Farley had no answers for the Rabbits in Saturday’s Missouri Valley Football Conference opener for both teams.

SDSU players said they were prepared for something unexpected — a schematic adjustment here, a personnel change there — but it never really came. No, the Panthers decided to just be the same team that came in 2-2 with a pair of wins over non-scholarship Pioneer League teams and a pair of losses to FBS teams.

As it turned out, maybe they should’ve tried some sleight of hand.

“We were kind of relieved to see they wanted to be who they were this year,” said linebacker Adam Bock. “They stuck with what they’ve been doing. We’re always prepared for something but it’s nice to have a mindset of (what to expect) going into a game and then have that come to fruition.”

The Jackrabbits pounded the Panthers 41-3, and they punished them as much physically as they did on the scoreboard.

UNI (2-3) managed just 66 rushing yards in the game (they came in averaging 202) and committed four turnovers. They also thought about going for it on a first-half fourth down, called a timeout to think about it, decided to punt and saw the Jacks block the punt and return it for a back-breaking touchdown.

The SDSU offense, meanwhile, rolled up 390 yards behind quarterback Mark Gronowski’s best game of the season, and they hardly broke a sweat doing it, thanks in large part to the defense giving them short fields and never letting the Panthers get anything going in the way of momentum.

This was a rout in every sense, and that it came against a quality conference foe, on the road, only speaks to how good the Jacks are, even as they still seem to be finding their footing in a bid for a third straight national championship.

“Playing in this building I was kind of expecting a dogfight,” said Gronowski, who went 16-of-22 for 223 yards and three touchdown passes. “We knew we had to start fast to try to take the air out of the stadium quick.”

It didn’t happen right away. The Jacks (4-1) went 3-and-out on their opening series and led just 7-0 after a quarter. It was 10-0 in the second when Farley mulled over a 4th down conversion attempt, and the hesitation opened the door for the biggest play of the game.

“We had a gameplan (for a blocked punt) all week,” said Noah Thompson, a sophomore safety from Brandon who scooped up the blocked kick and ran it in 50 yards for his first career touchdown to make it 17-0. “We had a ’23’ call where Cullen (McShane) and I are coming from both sides. Brody Gormley blew up the shield and Cullen dove in and blocked it and I just picked it up and took it to the house. When they were second-guessing themselves there we knew we had ’em. We were already playing well and that kind of killed ’em right there.”

Only moments later a strip-sack by Jarod DePriest gave the Jacks a short field and Chase Mason’s touchdown run made it 24-0. It was pretty much over at that point, but the SDSU defense did not let up, extending their streak of consecutive games without allowing a touchdown to three. Since their 24-3 win over Division II Augustana the Jacks have sandwiched wins of 41-0 and 41-3 around their bye week.

“We spent a lot of time together during the bye week, whether it was outside of football, hanging out with each other, but on the field, too,” said Gronowski, whose team has won 31 in a row against FCS teams. “We were out there for 30 minutes after every practice getting routs and talking through some different things and even having meetings with the receivers to get everyone on the same page, and it seemed like we were today.”

Matt Zimmer is a Sioux Falls native and longtime sports writer. He graduated from Washington High School where he played football, legion baseball and developed his lifelong love of the Minnesota Twins and Vikings. After graduating from St. Cloud State University, he returned to Sioux Falls, and began a long career in amateur baseball and sports reporting. Email Matt at mzimmer@siouxfallslive.com.