October 17, 2004 in Sports

No sideshow can outshine the game itself

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Cheney can go back to sleep now, though probably not without the help of sedatives.

After a week of working itself into a tizzy over the idea of a public assembly of 10,000 at the old normal school – although there have probably been some student house parties that seemed as big – the little town pulled through with only a few spilled cocktails and some minor traffic disruption.

Yes, Cheney has traffic. Sheesh.

In fact, for most of the week you’d have thought this spectacle was all about tickets, tailgating and all those temporary bleachers at Eastern Washington’s Woodward Field.

Good thing someone remembered to bring a football on Saturday, since it turned out to be terrific game, as well.

That the distinguished guests from Montana escaped with a 31-28 victory over the Eagles on the strength of a field goal attempt snuffed by Shane McIntyre with 18 seconds to play will make it something less than a keepsake for the locals, who must instead console themselves with whatever shekels the caravan from Missoula may have dropped on gas, beer and chew.

In the end, the jury-rigged stadium did not sell out – the rain and chilly winds holding the hard count to 10,754. And you could have gone away wondering whether Eastern did, either.

Not that both teams’ tanks weren’t on “E” after this one. Montana came back from an 18-yard first quarter; Eastern came to life 10 points down with less than six minutes to play.

But given the way the Eagles slashed down the field in the final two minutes, a winning touchdown seemed not only fitting but inevitable.

A field-goal attempt – and overtime – felt, well, inappropriate.

Yet that’s what the Eagles found themselves settling for, after another tentative display inside the Montana 10-yard line.

You could almost see the Eagles out-thinking themselves. Two other sure-thing sixes had turned to threes when Eastern’s “jumbo” short-yardage formation was short-circuited by holding calls on the 1-yard line. There was the doubt, as EWU coach Paul Wulff articulated it, of not wanting to leave Montana’s offense a full minute to get something done. There was the heavy obligation on Eagles quarterback Erik Meyer not to throw an interception and blow the fallback position of a field goal.

And, of course, there was Montana’s defense raising just enough hell. Like another coach in these parts likes to say, the other guys are on scholarship, too.

“We felt that, as the clock wound down, it was time to be aggressive down there,” said UM coach Bobby Hauck, explaining the Grizzlies’ rather relentless blitzes. “If we were going to give up a play, then leave some time on the clock. If not, then make a play and get them down.”

Not that the Griz – and Eastern – hadn’t seen the flip side of reckless aggression. Before the Eagles’ last drive, UM QB Craig Ochs – on third-and-5 – looked off a wide-open Tate Hancock in the right flat and launched a rocket downfield to a wider-open Jefferson Heidelberger, overthrowing him by a yard.

“Craig saw the game-winner over the top,” shrugged Hauck. “We left a couple out there – a couple of plays that would have ended the game. We had to make it interesting.”

Never more so than in the third quarter, when the Eastern seemed on the verge of regaining the momentum it had squandered in the first half. With the Grizzlies facing third-and-9 at midfield, Ochs misplayed a shotgun snap that scooted 10 yards behind him.

An Eastern blitzer would have made him eat it, but there was no such pressure this play – not until Ochs had scooped up the football and resumed the hunt for a receiver. If he actually saw one, it was only for a second before being leveled by a crushing hit as the ball left his hand.

Some 40 yards downfield was Montana receiver Levander Segars who “just saw the ball kind of flutter up there.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to get to this ball, I’ve got to get to it,’ ” he recalled. “And luckily, it seemed to hang up there just so I could.”

Segars came back probably 15 yards to turn what should have been a catastrophe into clover; four plays later, UM was in the end zone again. The Grizzlies did that often enough, sometimes abetted by the helpful Eastern penalty.

The “new” Woodward witnessed a game keeping in the best tradition of this series – which, while interrupted by the odd blowout, has been mostly sensational for nearly two decades now, even as Montana has become Division I-AA royalty and EWU fritters around the fringes.

As such, it’s always assumed to be a huge date on the calendar for the Eagles – something Wulff did his best to mitigate.

“A win’s a win, a loss is a loss,” he said. “Each week, we’ve got to play and move on. You get too wrapped up in one game, you lose sight of what you want to accomplish.”

His example. A year ago, upstart Idaho State was 3-1 and atop the Big Sky after knocking off the Grizzlies in double overtime – the Bengals first win over UM in 10 years.

The next week, they got crushed by Weber State, the beginning of their tumble to fourth place.

“Everything we want to accomplish is still ahead of us,” Wulff insisted.

Yes, but now it won’t come without outside help. Maybe this wasn’t a must-win game for Eastern, but now all of them are.

Something suggests none of them will be as much fun.

“Every year, they make it like this,” Segars said of the Eagles. “If you’re in a fight, you don’t want to fight anybody who doesn’t want to fight back. And they definitely bring the fight.”

On Saturday, they brought their little town a spectacle, too – even if they left an IOU on the scoreboard.

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