Missouri Valley Football Conference Week 13 Review
The regular season is over but four Missouri Valley Football Conference teams will be playing in the FCS postseason tournament. Two MVFC teams were seeded with North Dakota State getting the #1 seed and South Dakota State getting the #7 seed. Northern Iowa and Illinois State also received bids.
Those four teams were expected to get in but the one team to not get a bid was Southern Illinois. The Salukis did lose to NDSU but gave NDSU its third closest game of the season and the Salukis also had an FBS win on its resume (albeit against possibly the worst FBS team in Massachusetts).
Looking forward to this week, UNI hosts Pioneer League champion San Diego and Illinois State travels to Southeast Missouri State. In the second round, NDSU will play the winner of North Dakota and Nicholls in its second round match-up. SDSU will play the winner of UNI and San Diego.
The results from Week 13 were expected with two exceptions in Youngstown State defeating Illinois State and South Dakota State losing at South Dakota.
The Redbird loss likely cost the Redbirds a home playoff game. The result was a 21-3 win for the Penguins but the highlight came in the final minute of the game. Senior QB Nathan Mays came on the field less than three weeks following surgery after he suffered a career-ending injury against North Dakota State on Nov. 2. Mays left the Stambaugh Stadium turf that evening against the Bison on a golf cart. On Saturday, he put on his YSU uniform to be honored during Senior Day then sat on the bench for the next two-plus hours. With the Penguins’ win clinched over Illinois State, YSU called timeout with 10 seconds left. Mays was carried to the Penguins’ huddle by Myles Douglas and Matt Jones. He took a snap from Jones and with the assistance of two teammates took a knee as the clock ran out.
South Dakota defeated South Dakota State and did not cost SDSU a seed but likely a higher seed. The Coyotes won 24-21 in Vermillion.
Elsewhere, NDSU tied its own overall winning streak of 33 games with its 21-7 win at Southern Illinois. UNI handled Western Illinois and Indiana State ended its season with an easy win at Missouri State.
Below is the full 2019 Divisioin IFCS Playoff bracket.
Below are the full results from Week 13 with a game recap in the score and a video highlight from each game.
North Dakota State 21 Southern Illinois 7 (Carbondale, Ill.)
South Dakota 24 South Dakota State 21 (Vermillion, S.D.)
Youngstown State 23 Illinois State 3 (Youngstown, Ohio)
Northern Iowa 38 Western Illinois 7 (Cedar Falls, Iowa)
Indiana State 51 Missouri State 24 (Springfield, Mo.)
Originally from LaMoure, North Dakota, Kent is a 1996 graduate of North Dakota State University. His prior writing experience is over 15 years having previously worked with D2football.com, I-AA.org, and College Sporting News before coming to College Sports Journal in 2016. His main focus is college football is the Missouri Valley Football Conference within the Division I FCS. And in 2017, he began also to look at the FBS Group of Five conferences of the American Athletic, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West, and Sun Belt.
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