Roos Field has yet another date with destiny this week.
The Eastern Washington University football team will try to secure the 500th win in school history when fourth-ranked Montana State visits the third-ranked Eagles in an epic showdown in the Big Sky Conference. Kickoff Saturday (Nov. 9) at Roos Field in 12:10 p.m. Pacific time in a battle between a pair of 5-0 league teams.
The sold-out game will be televised live on ROOT Sports, as the Eagles will end the regular season with three-straight games on the regional network. The Eagles and Bobcats are each 7-2 on the season, and this is the first matchup between Big Sky teams ranked in the top five in the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision since 1994 when No. 1 Montana hosted No. 3 Idaho and won 45-21.
“It’s definitely a huge game,” said Eastern head coach Beau Baldwin. “It doesn’t matter who it is, it would be a huge game. We’re both undefeated coming into it so it makes it that much bigger.”
Both teams are on a roll, with EWU entering with a five-game winning streak after last week’s 55-34 victory over Idaho State. The Bobcats, meanwhile, knocked off Northern Colorado 35-28 and has also won five-in-a-row. In fact, the last losses for both schools came more than a month ago at the hands of Southland Conference schools – EWU 49-34 at Sam Houston State on Sept. 28 and MSU seven days earlier by a 52-38 score to Stephen F. Austin. Eastern’s other loss was 33-21 to NCAA Football Championship Subdivision foe Toledo, and MSU’s other loss was 31-30 at SMU, another FBS foe.
Thus far in the Big Sky Conference games, MSU has out-scored opponents 202-88, or an average score of 40-17. Eastern has defeated its five BSC foes by a 207-114 margin – a 41-22 average score.
“Once you get down to a game on that particular day, it’s its own game,” Baldwin said. “No matter what happened in the weeks prior to it, it can go a lot of different directions just on a few plays early.”
In last year’s meeting, the Eagles scored only one offensive touchdown and kicked two field goals in a 27-24 victory over the second-ranked Bobcats. Eastern, ranked sixth at the time, scored on a blocked punt by Dylan Zylstra that was recovered for a touchdown by Evan Day, and then Jordan Tonani returned an interception 21 yards for a touchdown to rally EWU from a 17-13 deficit entering the fourth quarter.
Tonani, who is redshirting this season after surgery to both hips, was just the first of a recent epidemic of injuries at safety. Most recently, free safety Tevin McDonald was lost with a broken fibula, leaving a converted cornerback (Miles Weatheroy) and a walk-on redshirt freshman (Zach Bruce) to take over those positions.
“We have to keep getting the next player up and ready to go,” said Baldwin. “We are definitely in a spot right now where we will be playing some young players and some guys might be moving position-wise. But that’s football. Certain years you have certain positions that get hit a lot harder by injuries. Other players have to step up and find a way. We’ll be fine.”
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