South Dakota State football escapes with 20-16 win over Montana State after late Bobcat touchdown overturned

Sep. 9—BROOKINGS — Rollercoaster, see-saw — name your amusement park metaphor — that's what No. 1 South Dakota State put a Dana J. Dykhouse crowd of 19,332 through on Saturday night in their rematch with No. 3 Montana State, their opponent in each of the last two FCS semifinals.

They're going to win. They're going to lose. They're going to win.

They lost.

They won.

That's how it went, and that's how it ended. The Jackrabbits escaped with a 20-16 win after a last-second, game-winning, 24-yard touchdown pass from Sean Chambers to Clevan Thomas was ruled incomplete after an official's review. Replays appeared to show that Thomas wasn't quite able to drag a foot in the back of the end zone after coming across to make the catch. After the referee announced they had overturned their initial call of a touchdown, a Montana State coach was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct for arguing, pushing the Bobcats back to the 39-yard line, forcing a Hail Mary attempt that fell incomplete.

It was a tense ending to a tense but sloppy football game, one that will surely have an impact on playoff seeding three months from now. For an SDSU team with plenty of players still haunted by the Hail Mary loss to rival South Dakota two years ago, the emotions were almost too much. But they walked off the stadium winners.

"My heart sank when I thought he was in," said Jacks safety Cale Reeder of the Bobcat touchdown that wasn't. "Then I saw the replay and it looked like an incompletion, so just had to trust the refs to make the correct call. It was very stressful."

Said coach Jimmy Rogers: "I hate for the game to come down to a review. But it's a huge win for the program. Montana State is a championship-level program and we'll take a win any way we can."

For the Bobcats, the loss couldn't have been more devastating. Trailing 13-10 after SDSU had scored back-to-back touchdowns to take the lead, the Bobcats used a pair of field goals to go back in front, and had spent much of the fourth quarter running quarterback power right at the SDSU defense and finding little resistance. Then when they found themselves trailing again in the final minute, Chambers got hot as a passer and led the Bobcats into scoring range.

Chambers almost ran straight to the locker room after Thomas came down with the ball, and still seemed to be in disbelief long after the review and final score.

"Heartbroken," Chambers said. "I wasn't really paying attention to the review. Just hoping the play would stand on the field. Unfortunately it didn't."

SDSU's offense and defense both looked sharp on their opening series. Then the Jacks went to sleep, and found themselves trailing 10-0 at halftime, the first time they failed to score a first-half point since 2015.

Considering the Jacks had built a 27-point lead on the Bobcats the last time they played them here, it was not what anyone was expecting.

The Jacks did bounce back, however. They took the second half kickoff and drove down and scored, using a 26-yard run from Amar Johnson on the first play from scrimmage as a spark and scoring on a 20-yard run by Mark Gronowski that was keyed by the blocking of center Gus Miller and guard Evan Beerntsen.

"Last year we had a bunch of games where we started out slow and came back and won those games," Gronowski said. "We knew we'd faced adversity before. We've done it, we can come back from it. We just had to believe in each other that we were gonna come back and win this game."

Meanwhile MSU drives kept stalling due to penalties. The Bobcats were flagged 12 times for 80 yards, and a whopping nine of those were false starts. The sell-out crowd certainly factored into it, something both coaches acknowledged.

"The fans were unbelievable tonight," Rogers said. "They made a huge impact in the game. To get them off-schedule like that, the credit goes to (the fans) to put (the Bobcats) in those situations."

SDSU took the lead early in the fourth on a Gronowski to Zach Heins 16-yard touchdown pass, but Hunter Dustman missed the extra point, leaving the lead at 13-10.

Later, the Bobcats blocked a Dustman punt and recovered it at the SDSU 1-yard line. The SDSU defense forced them to settle for a game-tying field goal, and when MSU got back into Jacks territory late in the fourth, another stop (aided by another false start) resulted in another field goal.

SDSU (2-0) got the ball back with 2:04 to go and needed just two plays to retake the lead. Gronowski hit Grahm Goering for a 40-yard gain, and on the very next play connected with freshman Griffin Wilde on a quick hitch, and he outran the defense 35 yards for what proved to be the decisive score.

"I heard the play called in the huddle and it was executed perfectly," Wilde said. "I think the O-line kicked out three or four guys and then all I had to do was run."

Gronowski was 13-of-22 for 184 yards with two touchdown passes. Isaiah Davis ran for 66 yards, most coming on the two scoring drives that got the Jacks back in the game.

The Bobcats, meanwhile, once again lost one of the members of their quarterback platoon to an injury. In last year's semifinal it was Chambers that went down, this time it was starter Tommy Mellott, who was 6-of-6 passing for 34 yards with 46 yards on the ground before exiting. Chambers picked up the slack, rushing for 90 yards on 20 attempts. He hadn't completed a pass all night when MSU (1-1) got the ball back with 90 seconds left trailing 20-16, but hit on three passes for 53 yards to put them in position for the game-winner.

And while the Bobcats and their fans will no doubt spend a lot of time replaying the ending in their heads, MSU coach Brent Vigen downplayed it, pointing out how many other opportunities his team had to win the game.

"They call it a touchdown, you hope it stands," Vigen said. "It comes down to a play at the end but there's so much more to it than that. Through the course of the game, field position, time of possession, the opportunities offensively that we didn't cash in on, it was apparent we needed more points on the board and we didn't get enough."