NW Missouri Outlasts Grand Valley State for First Title in Five Tries

FLORENCE, AL—For four years, the Northwest Missouri State Bearcats have been the team that almost was.  For four consecutive years, Northwest Missouri reached the NCAA Division II football championship game, only to lose all four games by a combined 19 points.  Even worse, all of those loses came after the team held a lead in the fourth quarter.

The jokes were everywhere.  Hearkening back to the Buffalo Bills' four straight Super Bowl losses in the early 1990s, the team was dubbed the "Billcats."  Head coach Mel Tjeerdsma was jokingly called Marv (Levy, Buffalo head coach) by his friends.  Other teams and their fans dubbed the team's football stadium "the Ralph" after Buffalo's Ralph Wilson Stadium.

The monkey, or buffalo, is finally off the Bearcats' collective back.

Just as it seemed as if they might just let another championship lead slip away, Blake Bolles found Jake Soy in the corner of the end zone to put the Bearcats up 30-20 in the fourth quarter.

Northwest Missouri led Grand Valley State 21-0 at halftime, only to see the Lakers cut the seemingly safe lead to three points at the beginning of the fourth quarter.  With Grand Vally State energized, trailing 23-20, and facing a 4th-and-4 deep in Laker territory, Coach Tjeerdsma knew his kicking game wasn't up to snuff. 

The Bearcats suffered through a woefully bad kicking game all season so he put the game in the hands of his junior quarterback, who checked to the fade to Soy.

The touchdown put the game nearly out of reach for the Lakers, who never seemed to go away until a failed 4th-and-15 pass by senior QB Brad Iciek fell incomplete with under a minute left in the game.

When the Bearcats exhaled, the final score showed 30-23.  It was time to celebrate...finally.

"They did a great job coming back," Tjeerdsma said of Grand Valley.  "They took all the momentum [in the second half]."

"It was a total team effort," Tjeerdsma said of his Bearcats. "That's what this football team is about.  I'm thrilled for these guys and for the Bearcats.  We worked so hard for this."

"Our common theme this year is we are a different team that those [past Bearcats] teams were," said Soy.

In the end, they were different—one more win, and a National Championship Trophy to take back to Maryville, Missouri.

It was fitting that these two teams would meet in the National Championship game to end the decade.  By far, Northwest Missouri and Grand Valley have been the top two programs since 2000.  Grand Valley was making its sixth title game appearance this decade, and Northwest Missouri its fifth. 

Grand Valley has four title game wins (including two over Northwest Missouri), and Northwest Missouri now has a championship win of their own over the Lakers.  They are also one-two in terms of overall records this decade, respectively.

Years from now, it may be Grand Valley who historians write up as the team of the decade, but it's Northwest Missouri who had the last word—and trophy—of the decade after a very impressive five-year span of championship runs.