The UND Football team lost their Big Sky Conference opener 29-18 to Montana State on Saturday out in Bozeman, MT.  It was obviously a much better showing vs. the Cats this year compared to last year, when MSU thrashed UND 63-20.

  • The UND offense ended up with a season-high 293 yards of total offense.  
  • A positive stat for UND offensively and defensively:  Third down conversions – UND 8-18  MSU 3-13.
  • The UND offense started out slow again but really came on in the second half.  They actually got into a nice rhythm for the first time this season.  OC Paul Rudolph did a nice job mixing up the run and play-action pass to keep MSU off balance.  
  • UND ran a jet sweep first play of the game.  Something tells me that was a way to appease the “change it up” crowd.  
  • QB Joe Mollberg had his best game of the year thus far.  Even though we hated the pick-six, which should not have been thrown, he still seemed to lead the offense well on Saturday after the slow start.  He was hitting all the intermediate throws in the second half and seemed to really be in a rhythm.  
  • One minor request of Joe:  put some more juice on those “out” and comeback routes.  QB’s have to zip those out routes, they cannot be finesse passes.  He almost had two more picked off that were thrown to the outside of the hashes.  Minor thing, yes, but easily correctable because Joe has the arm strength.  
  • UND defense played alright for most of the game.  MSU came into the game with a highly-ranked offense that was averaging 480 yards/game and 41 pts/game.  UND held them to 329 yards and 29 points, 7 of which were scored by the MSU defense.
  • As improved as the UND defense looks compared to the last few seasons, they are still a long ways from where they need to be.  There are still way too many assignments missed by all, but some of those are getting covered up by the extraordinary effort that the 11 defenders are giving every game.  UND fans have not seen this level of constant intensity on defense in a number of years. 
  • An example of that effort was the hustle shown by ILB Ben Peters.  MSU threw a pass to WR Gates, who then broke it up the field.  Peters, who is not one of the faster UND LBs, kept hustling and caught Gates after a 67 yard gain.  Three plays later the UND defense held MSU to a field goal.   If Peters had given up on the play, Gates would have waltzed into the end zone for a TD.
  • The gap integrity by the front seven is improving every game.  MSU couldn’t get anything going on the ground and that was due to the UND defense being lined up right and executing the way it is designed.
  • MSU did most of their damage through the air, getting UND on a couple long passes off well-designed plays.  Prukop threw for 267 yards on Saturday.  
  • In our game preview, we said the key to the game was making Prukop hand the ball off.  UND did that and kept themselves in the game.  Prukop ended the game with -18 yards rushing. 
It was a step in the right direction for Bubba Schweigert and the UND Football program.  MSU was able to hit a few big plays, making a big pick-six and that was the difference in the game.  UND is not quite there yet with being able to make those big plays but what we do like is they cleaned up some mistakes from prior games and gave themselves a chance.