Northern Iowa Football Makes FCS Playoffs

It was a great weekend for Northern Iowa Panther athletics.  On Saturday, the Panther basketball team upset the number one team in the country, the North Carolina Tar Heels.  The Tar Heels came for Marcus Paige as his homecoming game, a great tradition for North Carolina Basketball started by Dean Smith and continued on by head coach Roy Williams.  Paige is a senior from Linn-Mar High School in Marion, but broke his hand and could not play.
But, I'm digressing a little.  The Panther football team beat the now 3-8 Southern Illinois Salukis by a score of 49-28.  With that win, the Panthers were a 7-4 football team. A 7-4 record is usually a pretty 50-50 proposition to advance into the field of 24 with 14 at-large bids.  But, playing in the Missouri Valley Football Conference, or just the MVFC, the toughest conference by far on the FCS level, almost guarantees that a 7-4 team will get in.  The schedule the Panthers played also helped them a ton, and gave them their second straight at-large bid.  Their losses included @ Iowa State, @ #3 seed North Dakota State, @ #2 seed Illinois State , and Western Illinois.  All three FCS teams made it into the Playoffs, and Iowa State is an FBS schools.  They had wins against Eastern Washington, Cal Poly, and the big one was an ugly 10-7 victory at South Dakota State.  So they didn't have any eye-popping wins, only one against a playoff team (SDSU), but they also beat who they needed to.
So now they will face the Eastern Illinois Panthers, and they earned home field advantage.  The EIU Panthers were one of the last four teams in, as they were 7-4 from the Ohio Valley Conference, or the OVC.  The EIU Panthers have been a familiar team in the FCS Playoffs scene, but are best known for being the team that Dallas Cowboys quarterback and undrafted free agent Tony Romo.  Last week, they forced seven turnovers and beat the Eastern Kentucky Colonials at home 21-7 in a virtual play-in game.  The OVC only produced two playoff teams this year, but the other one is the Jacksonville State Gamecocks, who went 10-1 and pushed the SEC's Auburn Tigers to overtime, where they suffered their only loss of the season.  So, basically their record is 10-0.  The Gamecocks were number one almost the whole season, replacing the Bison from North Dakota State after they lost to Montana.  The OVC only had four winning records, and an 0-11 Austin Peay Governors team.  The MVFC had five, and Missouri State was an awful one win team.
The biggest controversy was the 6-5 Western Illinois Leathernecks getting in over a 7-4 North Dakota or a 9-2 Bethune- Cookman team from the non-automatic MEAC conference.  But, WIU had a lost at FBS Illinois, so they were really 6-4.  With the tough schedule and wins such as at Northern Iowa, the Leathernecks deserved a bid in my opinion.
Another story line was The Citadel.  They beat the SEC East's South Carolina Gamecocks last week, and I think that put them in for sure.