EWU has ‘work cut out’ in make-or-break game against Sacramento State
When asked, Aaron Best had a lot to say about Sacramento State, a team that on Tuesday the Eastern Washington head football coach called “a juggernaut.”
The Hornets have four running backs that can break loose at any point, he said, and receivers who get by defensive backs “all the time.”
“They give you a ton of formations,” he said, “a ton of motions. They do everything. It’s not just the kitchen sink; it’s like the kitchen as a whole.”
Yet the Hornets, 4-4 overall and 2-2 in Big Sky play, have proven beatable, and finding their way to do that is the Eagles’ task on Saturday. Kickoff is set for 1 p.m. at Roos Field in Cheney.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us,” Best said.
Eastern is on a three-game winning streak, its first in four years, and has evened its record at 4-4 overall while improving to 3-1 in Big Sky play. The Eagles have already won as many league games this year as they have in any of the previous three, a testament to an improved defense and sound special teams play.
Just three Big Sky teams – Montana, UC Davis and Montana State – have more league wins, and no other team has three.
But the Eagles, whose 23-20 victory at Weber State last week was their first on the road this season, have hardly been a flawless team. Their offense, a battering ram of a unit in 2024, has been more like a bleating lamb in 2025, averaging 5 yards per play, third fewest in the 12-team league and 89th nationally.
Best identified the offense’s lack of achievement on first downs as the root of the group’s third-down conversion rate (28.3%) that ranks 119th among the 126 teams in the FCS.
“Our first-down productivity has been very mediocre at best,” he said, but that Eastern’s defense and special teams have “picked up that slack.”
“That’s kind of been the approach we’ve taken this year,” he said. “Where we may lack in one, we’re great in two.”
That has added up to some fine performances, particularly at the end of games. Eastern is now 3-1 in one-score games this season; from the start of 2022 to the end of 2024, the Eagles were 5-9 in such contests.
But the quality of those victories will not, at least at this point, impress anyone on the selection committee that determines at-large bids for the FCS playoffs. Portland State is 0-8. Idaho and Weber State have identical records of 3-5 overall and 1-3 in the Big Sky, and the Wildcats and Vandals picked up their lone conference victories against those winless Vikings.
Eastern’s losses to Incarnate Word (2-6) and Northern Iowa (2-6) aren’t looking great, either.
As for that 57-3 loss at Montana State? Well, the Eagles are trying to see that as just another loss, no different than the other three, the 51-14 loss at FBS Boise State included.
“The goal is always to go 1-0, and that week we went 0-1,” redshirt junior defensive end Ben Voigtlaender said. “We learned a lot from that game, and we’re not making the same mistakes we made that game. … We still have everything that we worked for in front of us.”
Indeed, if the Eagles’ three-game winning streak has done anything, it has instilled the team with two intangibles: confidence and belief.
“We believe in each other,” EWU senior punter Landon Ogles said on Tuesday. “We believe in ourselves, and we know that we can execute every time, every snap.”
And if the Eagles are indeed in need of quality wins, their next two opponents – Sacramento State and No. 3 Montana (8-0, 4-0) – provide them with opportunities to earn them. This first one comes, too, at Roos Field, where the Eagles have yet to lose this season.
“These three games, they’ve been huge for our confidence,” Voigtlaender said. “We haven’t lost at home, and that’s a big thing. We protect the Red. And winning at Weber (State), that added a huge level to our confidence, too, that we can win at home and away.”