BILLINGS — For all the plays quarterback Cam Miller made in North Dakota State's 35-32 FCS championship win over Montana State on Monday — and there were a bunch — one stands above the rest.
On third and 6 from the plus-21-yard line with 4:19 to go, Miller took a shotgun snap in an empty backfield and delivered a completion to RaJa Nelson for 7 yards and a crucial first down.
It wasn't a perfect pass. Nelson had to adjust his comeback rout to make the catch against coverage by MSU safety Rylan Ortt. But it was thrown to a spot that only Nelson could reach.
It was a completion. A huge completion.
Just think: If the Bison don't move the chains there and settle for a field goal, it's a completely different scenario. The Bobcats could have gotten the ball back with plenty of time to go down and potentially take the lead in the waning minutes.
Instead, three plays later NDSU running back CharMar Brown was in the end zone to make it a 10-point game. A Tommy Mellott TD pass to Taco Dowler with 1:15 left cut into the lead, but it wasn't enough and the clock eventually ran out on the Bobcats in defeat.
Miller completed 19 of 22 pass for 199 yards and two scores, and rushed for 195 yards and two other TDs. He was the best player on the field Monday night.
“A lot of credit goes to him,” Bobcats coach Brent Vigen said afterward. “Really impressed with what he’s become. He’s become an excellent quarterback.”
There surely wasn’t a talent discrepancy on the field between the teams, and their postgame stats were pretty even — as NDSU coach Tim Polasek noted after the game, calling it “even Steven.”
But there was an execution discrepancy when it mattered most.
Miller’s deep ball to wideout Bryce Lance for 38 yards on a third-and-5 play at the end of the third quarter — after a false-start penalty, mind you — was massive. It led to a short touchdown pass from Miller to Joe Soffel early in the fourth.
And then there was Miller’s 64-yard TD run on a well-timed draw play that put the Bison ahead by two scores in the opening quarter. Against the Bobcats’ spread-out defensive alignment, Miller easily ran untouched up the middle to the end zone.
“It didn’t feel real,” Miller said of the play. “Usually when we run draws you’ve got to make a few guys miss. There was nobody there.”
The Bobcats did have their chances. Down 14-0, MSU put together a promising drive but had to settle for a 32-yard field goal by Myles Sansted with 5:38 left before halftime.
That drive ate up 17 plays and 11:13 of the clock, so to only get three points was less than ideal.
Then late in the half, Vigen elected to go for it on fourth and 5 from the NDSU 44, but a Mellott pass was incomplete. That gave the Bison a short field and they took advantage.
Miller found Lance with a 1-yard TD pass with just 14 seconds remaining before intermission for a 21-3 lead.
The Bobcats seemed to play a better second half, as Mellott helped rally the offense to 29 points after the break.
A 44-yard touchdown run down the sideline by Mellott pulled MSU within 28-25 with 11:33 left in the game. The Bobcats’ defense then forced a three-and-out to get the ball back for the offense with a chance to go ahead.
But the Cats went three and out also, as Mellott’s third-down pass to Rohan Jones was low and fell incomplete.
That set up the fateful NDSU drive that produced Miller’s clutch throw to Nelson, and eventually Brown’s short TD run to go back up by 10 big points. And that made all the difference in the world.
Miller was runner-up to Mellott in the Walter Payton Award voting two nights earlier by a mere 16 votes. But Miller and the Bison came away with the most sought-after prize.
“Cam Miller was the best quarterback on the field, there was no doubt about it,” Polasek said. “Tommy’s a good football player. There’s no question about that either.
“But all year long these guys have answered the bell with complementary football, and (Monday) was just another case of us handling adversity, handling ups and downs, but that’s what we’re built for.”
It was the Bobcats’ sixth playoff loss to the Bison since 2010, and the fifth since 2018. That includes a loss to a much younger Miller and NDSU in the 2021 title game in Frisco.
With a 15-0 record entering Monday night, Montana State was on the doorstep of ending a 40-year championship drought. But there’s still progress to be made to get across the finish line.
“We’ll have to take bigger steps,” Vigen said. “We need to learn another lesson, I guess. I don’t know why, but we do. So here we go on to next year.”
