It was about one guy … and a team

Win and it’s every- body who wins. Lose and it might be one guy who beats you.

That’s the convenient way of looking at it, and maybe even the best way to remember the latest little NCAA Division I-AA drama that played out Saturday at Woodward Field – where the football remains interesting and not simply desperate, as it is at the state’s other major outposts.

Eastern Washington won again – not a must-win, to be honest, but a really, really, really want-to-win, and so psychologically just as important.

And Erik Meyer beat Cal Poly.

This is pretty much how it seemed to Mustangs coach Rich Ellerson, who eight days ago had himself an undefeated team and now hopes he has a good enough smile for the I-AA playoff judges so that they might pick him for something more meaningful than Miss Congeniality. Having just seen Meyer’s uncanny performance – 417 yards passing, four touchdowns and some borderline mystical moves – in EWU’s 38-21 victory, Ellerson’s evaluation was something less than a compound equation.

“He was a lot better,” Ellerson sighed.

Better than anybody playing the position in these parts at the moment.

Of course, it’s never that simple. If the Eagles’ offensive line – with two freshmen at guard, for heaven’s sake – doesn’t scrap the original protection plan and change on the fly, Meyer would have had to figure out a way to beat the Mustangs from the prone-and-in-extreme-pain position, generally not textbook football technique. And had the EWU defense not refused to panic in the face of a minor epidemic of Eagle turnovers, Meyer may have administered himself a concussion banging his head against a brick wall.

But – and this is certainly more the case at the I-AA level than it seems to be these days one flight up – Meyer reminded us just how much a quarterback can overwhelm an opponent, even one as good as the Mustangs.

This was a funny game, and the Eagles almost inevitably wind up in a couple of those – of varying sorts – every season.

The Mustangs, members of the fledgling Great West Conference (extra credit for naming all the lodge brothers), are ranked 11th in the latest Sports Network I-AA poll – higher than any other Woodward visitor other than Montana in the past five years. But this being a non-conference game, it of course had no bearing on Eastern’s Big Sky title prospects, and really none on the Eagles’ playoff aspirations.

If they’d lost, sure, they’d be out. But that’s almost certainly going to be the case if they happen to lose next week, too.

In other words, it was a real pain-in-the-ass game.

“We just play ‘em,” said Eastern coach Paul Wulff. “I don’t schedule ‘em.”

In fact, he tries to not even think about them. If he did, he might have spooked himself before the first kickoff. Consider that Eastern’s four non-Sky opponents – Nicholls State, Air Force, Central Washington and Cal Poly – are a combined 23-14 this year. Nicholls State, which creamed EWU in the season opener, has now beaten two ranked teams in the space of three weeks.

“Our non-conference schedule,” Wulff said, “became a lot tougher than we originally thought it would be. Even this game. I didn’t think much of it until the season got going and I realized how good they are.”

The timing, then – a week before what amounts to EWU’s championship date at Montana State – was problematic. Except that it was also an opportunity.

Since the calender struck 2000, the Eagles had never beaten a ranked opponent when they were ranked, too – a trivial matter, perhaps, but one that served as a minor knock on their ability to carpe the old diem, to rise to the occasion.

“That’s why this means a lot – they were 7-1, ranked 11th in the nation,” said Meyer. “This is a playoff-type of game. To beat them by 17, with the offense struggling with turnovers, makes a big statement. This is the kind of game we needed to win.”

They won it with a particular adept adjustment by the coaching staff – and carried out deftly by the offensive line – after Cal Poly’s blitzers had used Meyer for target practice. Having never allowed more than three sacks in any game this year, the Eagles saw Meyer flattened five times in the first quarter alone.

“We had a slide protection and they were doing a good job of reading it,” said Wulff, “and delay-blitzing us, which we didn’t anticipate them doing. They just hadn’t shown much of that.”

So a tweak was made to clean up those inside gaps, and Meyer was occasionally rolled to the edges to open up his line of sight. Voila – 516 yards of offense in the final three quarters, not just on the strength of Meyer’s arm but a running game that doubled the usual yardage Cal Poly allows. Even with all the sacks, Meyer wound up with positive rushing yardage.

“A slippery little guy,” mused Poly’s premier linebacker, Jordan Beck.

Hey, sometimes the big guys need to be slippery, too.

“You’re going to have ballgames when you come in with things that you’ve practiced and planned and it kind of goes out the window,” said EWU offensive coordinator Beau Baldwin. “Your kids have to be mature enough to handle those adjustments during the game. We can see what has to be done, but that have go do it, and that takes some poise and maturity.”

Same held true for the defense, which didn’t flinch after two third-quarter Eastern fumbles – and, indeed, produced three takeaways of its own.

“Expect sudden change,” Wulff said, repeating the mantra his staff tries to drill into the defense. “Get excited about it. Whoop and holler and then get after it.”

And now this sudden change: league-leader Montana State stumbling against bottom-feeder Sacramento State. It means little – Eastern still must win next weekend in Bozeman, but now a victory could, with some help, lead to an outright Big Sky championship, a circumstance that’s happened but once, and one that didn’t appear likely after EWU lost its psycho-showdown with Montana.

“But really, that was just another obstacle to overcome,” Meyer said. “We didn’t play our best game, but I’ve never been prouder of a team because of how we battled and how we’ve kept fighting since. Being a championship team means overcoming things like that.”

That’s one guy talking, but he’s speaking for them all.