Fargo
It was probably fitting that rain was falling on Monday when crews started site work on North Dakota State’s new indoor football facility, a behemoth of a structure that when all is said and done will probably take $35 to $40 million to finish. The weather isn’t always pretty in Fargo.
Ask former NDSU head coach Craig Bohl, who before the bubble over Dacotah Field was first installed in 2014 had to practice at a golf dome, a sports arena or outside in winter weather advisory conditions if the Fargodome wasn’t available.
The inflatable, portable bubble is serving its purpose. The new Nodak Insurance Football Performance Complex will take indoor workouts to stratospheric levels in the world of FCS football. And the Bison aren’t alone.
The Missouri Valley Football Conference is far and away the leader for practice facilities in the FCS, mainly due to the bigger budgets of its members and a northern location of most of its programs.
“To me, when you see success, usually there is investment and resources behind it and I think you’re seeing that in the Valley,” said NDSU athletic director Matt Larsen. “I think it shows the commitment and investment in the programs.”
Youngstown State was the first with its Watson and Tressel Training Site that opened in 2011, a project that began with a $1 million donation that included former head coach and current university president Jim Tressel. Total cost was $14 million.
South Dakota State and North Dakota built their complexes in recent years. The Sanford-Jackrabbit Athletic Complex at SDSU cost $32 million. UND’s High Performance Center cost $19.5 million.
The Youngstown, SDSU and UND facilities all include indoor tracks, something the NDSU facility will not have since the school already has the
Shelly Ellig Indoor Track and Field Facility.
In all, six of the Valley’s 11 members have access to indoor football. Four of those were ranked in the FCS top 25 poll this week.
Northern Iowa and South Dakota, both of whom have new outdoor turf practice areas, play and practice in the UNIDome and DakotaDome respectively. Both stadiums are on campus.
“Part of it has to do with the region that the league sits in,” said Bison head coach Matt Entz. “There is a winter here. It’s important for yeararound development.
I think it shows the importance of football but also the importance of intercollegiate athletics at all of the institutions that make up the Missouri Valley right now.”
Entz, however, pointed
out that indoor practice space alone does not necessarily translate to success. Schools will quickly point to recruiting advantages, but he said there’s more to wooing players than bricks and mortar.
“We do address it but I don’t think we labor over it,” Entz said. “There are a lot of other reasons why you want to be a Bison besides facilities but it is a positive. I think to see the support, the size and sheer magnitude of this facility when you’re talking about $35 to $40 million, especially working through a pandemic, I think it’s pretty unique and not very many athletic departments or universities could probably pull that off.”
The Big Sky Conference may be close to joining the Valley with almost half of its members having an
indoor facility of some type.
Three teams play in indoor stadiums in Northern Arizona, Idaho State and Idaho, but only Weber State has an indoor practice facility. It’s not big by any means at 60 yards in length but gets the job done when the weather turns south. The renovation of the building opened in 2013 at the cost of $9.2 million.
It’s possible, if not probable, that Montana and Montana State will join the indoor parade in the coming years.
The Bobcat Indoor Performance Facility is part of MSU’s master plan. Construction has already started on an $18 million Bobcat Athletic Complex addition to the north end of the stadium that will be home to the football program.
With Montana State being aggressive in its approach lately, expect Montana to do the same in the interest of the arm’s race of the two in-state Division I programs.
The chatter in Missoula lately is the Grizzlies’ win over the University of Washington two weeks ago sparked renewed interest in donors investing in the program. In the Colonial Athletic Association, James Madison, Delaware, Stony Brook and Maine have some sort of structures to get out of the elements.
Maine and Stony Brook are recent additions to the indoor club. The Mahaney Dome at Maine opened this year at a cost of $1 million and is very similar to NDSU’s bubble. Stony Brook’s new training facility is more extensive at a cost of $11 million and has a football field 80 yards long.
Delaware renovated its old fieldhouse with 100yard artificial turf. JMU’s Athletics Training Center with indoor turf is a small space that can be used for some aspects of practice.
Tennessee State of the Ohio Valley Conference has a 70-yard long structure that was built in 2011. It includes classroom space and the school’s ticket office.
But most of the FCS indoor structures pale in comparison to NDSU’s investment. The first building phase, which also includes a warehouse, is expected to be done in about a year. The cost is tabbed between $34 to $35 million. The outdoor practice fields are expected to be not far behind.
Seven overhead doors will connect the indoor to the outdoor fields when the weather is cooperative.
After that, Phase 2 will include a 10-12,000 square foot weight room with nutrition and fueling station, offices for strength and conditioning staff, a locker room, sports medicine, equipment room and recruiting area.
“It’s one of those things we’ve been talking about for four years,” Larsen said, “and now to walk out there and see them mobilizing and starting the demo of the field and new construction, there was a big smile on my face.”
Fargo
North Dakota State has its home run hitter and he’s 5-foot-5 and 161 pounds. Jalen Bussey packs a punch — as a running back for the Bison football team.
The sophomore has turned into a scoring machine with six touchdowns in just 59 career carries. That’s an outof-this-world ratio heading into Saturday’s first road test at Towson University (Md.).
“It’s not common that most people have the success that I’ve had,” Bussey said. “It’s definitely a blessing. I can’t take it for granted.”
It was a sign of things to come when his first two carries as a true freshman at the end of 2019 went for touchdowns. Last week, he went 72 yards for a TD, hiding behind the bigger offensive linemen for a bit before finding a hole.
Part of it is the formula in how NDSU and offensive coordinator Tyler Roehl employ Bussey. The Bison wait for the right time, usually in the second half.
“Coach Roehl knows what he’s doing,” Bussey said. “It’s just trusting the process and knowing that he knows what’s best for us.”
The formula starts with starting running back Dominic Gonnella and primary backups Kobe Johnson and TaMerik Williams. Gonnella and Williams are both more than 200 pounds and Johnson is a hard-running back at 188 pounds.
Then there’s fullback Hunter Luepke, who at 236 pounds has been used at tailback. Quarterback Quincy Patterson goes 6-3, 246.
“They take a lot of carries
and bruise defenses and tire them out,” Bussey said. “I’ll come in and hit a big one real quick.”
Towson plays
2 QBs in loss
Towson played two quarterbacks in last weekend’s 26-14 road loss at New Hampshire. Senior quarterback Chris Ferguson started and completed 6 of 16 passes for 51 yards with two interceptions.
Junior Jeff Miller also played and completed 12 of 27 passes for 147 yards with one touchdown and two interceptions. The 6-foot6, 235-pound Miller, who entered the game late in the first half, threw his lone TD pass in the fourth quarter to
cut the New Hampshire lead to 20-14 with 12 minutes, 21 seconds remaining.
“At the time, Chris wasn’t seeing it. It was good to take a different perspective, get him on the sidelines, talk about it with him,” Towson head coach Rob Ambrose said of changing quarterbacks. “Show him what we were doing, what we weren’t doing. I thought we had a chance to grow, but I thought Jeff did a great job of stepping in and leading. That bodes well for the future.”
The 6-foot-3, 230-pound Ferguson, a Liberty transfer who also played at Maine, is listed as the starter against NDSU.
“I think we will be prepared for if we do see two (quarterbacks),” Bison
head coach Matt Entz said.
“From watching the game earlier, I didn’t see a lot of difference in the skill set.
... From my understanding, it was more of a change because of performance, not because of a lack of skill set. That always creates a unique situation when you have two quarterbacks playing, but I think we’ll do a good job of coming up with a game plan.”
Ambrose raves about Rutkowski
Towson wide receiver
Ryan Rutkowski was the Tigers top target against New Hampshire. The 6-foot-2, 200-pound senior had four receptions for 74 yards, including a long catch of 31 yards.
“Ryan is the most intelligent, polished guy we got as a wideout,” Ambrose said. “He can play every single position. I feel like he’s been in college for like 13 years. He’s the ‘Van Wilder’ of wideouts. He’s a great guy. He’s one of those dudes who after he’s done playing, I’m going to say the virus of coaching will have him something. Just because he knows football that well. It loves him and he loves it.” Etc., etc., etc.
► Bison senior linebacker James Kaczor didn’t play against Valparaiso due to injury. “I think if it were a situation where we had to have him, I think he could have played in situational football, but I’m trying to buy him some time where we can get him healthy where he can be truly and impact,” said Bison head coach Matt Entz. “He is one of our best 11 players on defense.” Kaczor is listed as the starter against Towson.
► NDSU is 9-1 all-time against teams from the Colonial Athletic Association, with the only loss the 2016 defeat to James Madison in the 2016 FCS semifinals. Ironically, it’s only the second game for Towson against a Missouri Valley Football Conference team, with both against NDSU including the 2013 title-game loss in Frisco, Texas.
► The Missouri Valley is 10-1 against FCS teams with the only defeat Montana’s 42-7 win over Western Illinois in Missoula, Mont. The CAA is next at 11-2 against the rest of the FCS. The Big Sky Conference is 7-4, the Southern Conference 6-4 and the Southwestern Athletic Conference 4-3.
By Craig Haley Stats Perform
Fresh off posting thrilling wins, Jacksonville State and Missouri State were rewarded on Monday, Sept. 13, with the biggest jumps among ranked teams in the Stats
Perform FCS Top 25.
Both teams climbed six spots, Jacksonville State to No. 10 and Missouri State to No. 17 in the national media poll.
The former stunned Florida State 20-17 with a game-winning, 59-yard touchdown pass on the final play and the latter beat Central Arkansas 43-34 after a backand-forth finish in their matchup of ranked teams.
The moves of those two teams, which won conference titles and made the FCS playoffs this past spring, were the exception following a weekend of mostly lopsided scores among FCS teams. Jacksonville State replaced North Dakota in the Top 10, where Sam Houston remained No. 1 as one of seven 2-0 teams.
At No. 23, New Hampshire joined the Top 25 for the first time this season.
A national media panel selects the Stats Perform FCS Top 25. A first-place vote is worth 25 points, a second-place vote 24 points, all the way down to one point for a 25th-place vote.
Jacksonville State Gamecocks defensive lineman Mitchell Etheridge
after defeating the Florida State Seminoles at Doak S. Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee, Florida.
