Congratulations to Eureka on a successful season in their last year in the UMAC! As UMAC champions, your reward is...you get to play one of the top teams in the nation: St. Thomas!
I'm going to be brutally honest in this preview, so be prepared. First of all, I will say this: the Eureka Red Devils season ends on Saturday. You guys did great, awesome job, go get your rings sized, yada yada yada. Let's be real and tell it how it is though; Eureka doesn't stand a chance against the MIAC powerhouse. Yes, you had a great season; in the UMAC, perennially ranked one of the worst divisions in NCAA DIII football. This is not a David versus Goliath situation; this is a David's smallest, dinkiest sheep versus Goliath situation. Let's break it down a little bit.
First of all, here's a history lesson for you: the UMAC conference champion, since gaining an automatic bid to the NCAA DIII playoffs in 2011, is 0-6. Four of these losses have been to MIAC (Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) opponents, while the other two were WIAC (Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) opponents. These two conferences are basically the closest in mileage to most UMAC members (save for those lucky Illinois folks), which really does not bode well for the UMAC. The MIAC and WIAC are well known in DIII football for boasting many ranked teams year after year, and often have representatives playing into the semifinals and finals. Because the UMAC is such a weak conference (statistically - this is a UMAC blog, after all), they are often "seeded" in the bottom 2-3 spots in the DIII playoffs. I write seeded in quotations, because according to D3football.com, the NCAA DIII playoff selection committee does not openly admit to actually seeding teams; but they do. So anyways, because the MIAC and WIAC teams are often "seeded" pretty high in the playoffs and the UMAC teams are "seeded" pretty low, it seems reasonable that they meet up. Plus, the NCAA has a rule that if teams need to travel further than 500 miles that the NCAA will pay for travel, so you can bet your heiney that the NCAA will avoid long-distance matchups as much as possible. This makes it a roughly 75-90% chance that the UMAC champ will end up facing a MIAC or WIAC foe just about every year. As much as I would love to see any UMAC team do well in the playoffs, I'm afraid it's just not in the cards.
The next thing we look at are common opponents. St. Thomas didn't play anybody in the UMAC this year (thank goodness), but they did face a few MIAC foes who did. Everybody remembers the dreaded 98-0 drubbing that St. Scholastica took from St. John's, who is also in the DIII playoffs; St. Thomas beat St. John's 20-17. Remember Augsburg, who beat Northwestern 42-7 in week one? St. Thomas kicked their butts, 57-25. Northwestern beat Eureka, and St. Scholastica gave them a run for their money. Hamline beat Crown 51-0 in week one, and Gustavus Adolphus beat Westminster 38-0 in week one; St. Thomas beat Hamline 84-0 and beat Gustavus 58-7 (while only allowing 1 yard of total offense). While Eureka handled Crown and Westminster with ease, the St. Thomas scores are still alarming. All right, all right, the common opponent thing is depressing, we get it; let's move on.
Now, onto the actual matchup. You could make the case that Eureka had the 14th ranked defense in the nation, which I will agree, is impressive and they should be commended for it. Only giving up 257.1 yards per game is a feat that not many can boast of. Now let's take a look at the St. Thomas defense: oh my. They only allow 147.1 yards per game, good for #1 in the nation. For those of you that struggle with math, that's 110 yards per game less than Eureka's defense. St. Thomas is literally destroying offenses, as shown by the 4 shutouts they've pitched this year. But, we have LeAnthony Reasnover. He's gotta count for something, right? The MIAC's equivalent to Reasnover is Concordia-Moorhead's Chad Johnson, who ran for 1,262 yards and 17 TDs this year. Not an exact match, I grant you, but Johnson was held to only 55 yards against St. Thomas' defense. In fact, the most yards St. Thomas' defense has allowed to a single rusher was only 68 yards, by JT DenHartog of UW-Eau Claire in the first game of the season. Hmmm...doesn't look like a great matchup on paper, when you consider that Reasnover consisted of 46% of Eureka's total offense this year. Well...maybe Eureka's defense can keep up with St. Thomas' offense, you say? Let's take a look here...oh nope, that's not gonna work either, the Tommies have the #10 ranked overall offense in the nation as well, gaining 493.2 yards per game. They've topped 600 yards three times this year, and have topped 500 in their last four. Well, I'd say Eureka will have their hands full on both sides of the ball. That's the understatement of the year right there.
All of this isn't even considering the disparities between Eureka's opponents and St. Thomas' opponents. St. Thomas faced 2 top-25 ranked opponents (who are actually in their conference) and defeated them both, and the team that they lost to (UW-Stout) was ranked in the top-25 for 4 weeks after they defeated St. Thomas. UMAC opponents outside of the UMAC: historically laughable. Since the inception of the UMAC, the members have been 133-229 against non-conference opponents, which is only a 0.367 winning percentage. This just goes to show that at the least, the area opponents (including the MIAC members) have been tougher than UMAC teams, and at the most, that the UMAC is just an overall weak DIII conference. I'm not a UMAC hater; I spend way too much time researching this junk for that. I'm just a guy who looks at the facts and accepts them.
To add to all this negativity, I will just give you a little taste of who St. Thomas is. They are the mean older brother of the MIAC, who constantly rags on everyone and nobody likes (except for St. Thomas fans). I mean, if there are no other MIAC teams to root for, I will begrudgingly root for St. Thomas, but get this: St. Thomas just got off a 97-0 win against a conference opponent in the St. Olaf Oles. They had clinched a share of the MIAC title and the MIAC automatic bid the week before, so they weren't playing for a playoff spot. They knew they were going to destroy the Oles, and didn't need to lay it on thick to earn the victory. Despite these facts, St. Thomas was relentless, converting on 5 4th downs and attempting 3 2-point conversions. They got the ball on St. Olaf's 18-yard line with 3 minutes to play, and instead of kneeling it to run out the clock, they tried 5 rushing attempts and scored on the last one with 7 seconds to play to make it 97-0. Now, I don't know what St. Olaf did to make St. Thomas so ticked, but I don't think there is any excuse for that display of poor sportsmanship. The only reasons I could think of were they might have wanted to get seniors more playing time, they might have wanted to match St. John's blowout, or maybe they wanted to show the MIAC that they were in charge; I don't know, and I don't think any of them are good excuses to do that kind of thing. The point is, St. Thomas will show no mercy to Eureka, especially since this is the playoffs. I'm expecting a blowout, it will not be a dignified end to Eureka's season. St. Thomas wins it, 70-0.
Yikes. I don't envy the bus ride home for the Red Devils. But hey, they can still hang their hats on a conference championship and their first ever trip to the DIII playoffs. Next year they will be competing in a slightly more competitive conference, but their program looks like it's on the up-and-up and if they keep doing things the way they have in recent years, they should do fine. Congrats to the 2017 UMAC champs the Eureka Red Devils, we will miss your competitiveness! Stay tuned for a season review of all the UMAC teams and a way-too-early preview of the 2018 season!
1 comment:
Well done.
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