I told Colonel Mustard to rush four and count to three. Three sacks on 42 dropbacks, all three from the front without a fifth rusher, two and a half of them Tyler King's, and Treynor Cleeland finished at 4.89 net yards a dropback after coming in as an 8.7-yard passer from a clean pocket. Two of the three came on third down. We have a star in Tyler King (thank you, Central Washington).

I said attack the middle, their nickel and backers can't cover, and the cheat sheet for Coach Pease said leave #11 alone. We threw to the tight ends, nine targets, seven catches, 49 yards and a touchdown. Four of our five explosive completions came on throws under fifteen air yards; the first four games had two of those combined. My Last Call said there was a window ten to nineteen yards downfield over the middle with nobody standing in it. Saturday that band went 6 of 7 for 99. Somebody went and stood there.

I said punt away from Zach Jones. One return, zero yards, and a muff. Everett O'Donnell's 46-yarder came down at the UC Davis 31, Jones put it on the ground, and Tanner Huff, who is my distant cousin, grabbed it above his head without looking. That was a hell of a recovery. Fifty-seven seconds later it was 14-0.

I said we would win in the trenches, and that the middle was where that defense had been best, 2.66 a carry on seventy-one tries. Montana ran at it thirty times for 276 yards, 9.20 a carry. We went right at their strength and made it a weakness. Eli broke out for 64 and 58 on the way to 275, past Yohance Humphery's 265 from 2001, with four rushing touchdowns, tying a mark six men held, the last of them Keali'i Ah Yat in 2024. Eli refuses to leave any line in the record book untouched.

I do love a good data visualization. Here's one chart for offense and one for defense, defining the a** to belt we saw Saturday night. First, the offense.

Eleven explosive plays to their five, and ten trips inside the UC Davis 40 turned into ten scores, 6.20 points a trip, against six trips and three scores for them. One last brag: I said if we did not lose the big-play battle, we win.

Over the first fifty-four defensive snaps, the Mustardettes allowed success on 35.2 percent of plays and -0.043 expected points a play. The FCS median is 39.3. The last seventeen, most of them against our backups, went for 58.8 percent and plus 0.775.

Brint Wahlberg wrote Wednesday: "Davis wins it 38-24. Prove me wrong Griz!" At 12:49 Sunday morning, on his own page: "My dumbass picked Davis 38-24. The Griz scored that combined. My bad." I checked the arithmetic. He's right. He conceded inside ninety minutes, which is the best thing anybody on this list did all weekend.

Eleven people with a byline put a score on this game, the machines and the book put up five more, and the number closest to forty came from here. The heart at +17 is the number I wrote first. After Corvallis I didn't have the nerve to print it, and I didn't want to lose the readership. My moneyline bet had no such worries.

Mike Bush of the Davis Enterprise headlined his preview "Can Aggies beat the Grizzlies in Davis?" and never answered it, and by Sunday midday the Enterprise had no game story either. Lily-livered.

UC Davis put a number on the game too: 11,238, in a stadium that lists 10,743 seats. The telecast showed a building about half full at kickoff and emptying by the third quarter. I don't know where the extra 495 were sitting. I don't know where the first five thousand were sitting either.

Every seat is taken by those who saw he has been playing well all year. This week: 21 of 31 for 241 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions and no sacks, on the road, against the No. 10 team. His 7.77 net yards a dropback is the 81st percentile of every FCS game played this season, he has thrown 173 passes without an interception since the first snap of the year. One-hundred-seventy-three-in-a-row. No jinx worries here.

He also ran for two touchdowns, and on a third down he tried to scramble for the sticks, gave his body up to get there and took a huge hit. He looked healthy afterward. That hit is why I don't want him running more than he has to, close games, goal line, and the playoffs.

Provided without comment, for those complaining that Ah Yat is hurt or can't run this year.

The deep ball still wasn't there. One of four on throws twenty or more yards downfield, for 21 yards, and the one over the deep middle got broken up by Jeremiah Brown. He looked off on them. That is the one thing left to fix.

Eli Gillman told Frank Gogola at 406 MT Sports: "That's the confidence I've been waiting to see out of him. I know he's got it and all those tools. But that's the Keali'i Ah Yat I've been waiting for." All aboard the Yacht next week, we'll open up more seats for the rest of you then.

The Week 2 scouting report's heading was "The o-line has been superb." Friday's was "We will win in the trenches," over a chart with four Montana linemen graded 87.6 or better by PFN. Last Sunday, in a game we lost by thirty-five, this column had them at 3.53 line yards a carry and two stuffs in twenty-four tries, which is very good.

Saturday it was 4.08 line yards. Line yards is just the part of every run that gets credited to the blocking, the first four yards of it, and 4.08 means the five up front were handing Eli four yards before he did anything. For the season the stuff rate is 12.4 percent against 23.1 last year, line yards are 3.59 against 2.75, and the sack rate allowed is 2.2 against 4.5.

Watch the line on the third touchdown. They wash the d-line so far down that the designed cutback is really just up the center of the field, the tight end doesn't even have anybody to wham, and Eli runs through a ten-yard-wide hole and does the rest himself.

Same thing on the 58-yarder: washed down, every hat on a hat, and Eli is gone. He doesn't need much room, and the line was giving him more than enough.

And here. Every Aggie lineman who can tackle has a Griz hat on him, the back-end players we said couldn't tackle are out of position, and Eli is off to the races.

Bobby 3.0 after the game: "Kudos to the offensive line because they opened up some big holes." Austin Buehler, Torin Jeske, Jack D'Ambra, Dyllan Drummond, Lucas Freitas. Learn their names. Learn their numbers. Have your kids get their autographs next game.

Same quarterback, same coordinators, same five up front, same thin front on defense. The sky was falling in Corvallis, the team was amazing in Davis, and it is the same team.

Three people typed the same sentence Saturday night. BillingsMafia at 9:52: "where has this team been all season. sky is the limit baby". Da Boyz Mom at 10:21: "I have no idea where this Griz team has been all season." Stop_HammerTime69: "Where has this team been? This is incredible." It's been here. The signs have been there. The metrics were good. It all came together, like some of us (me) expected it would.

Our offense success rate has sat at or above the FCS single-game median in all five games, even against the Beavs, and the explosive rate has cleared it in three. Saturday was the first time both were well over the median, 52.6 percent and 14.5.

Before either team had kicked off Saturday, @GoCatsGo467 found a Griz thread and stayed two hours. At 6:38: "You thump your chest about the overall record against lower division MSU teams yet scowl when MSU fans bring up overall championships. Hypocrite much?" At 7:31, on geography: "Dillon, MT is about as Montana as it gets. Missoula has just as many transplants as Bozeman. Missoula just has more Portland hipsters." And at 8:08, the thesis.

My six college roommates from Dillon are going to be shocked to learn they are Cat fans.

A man's team is at home struggling to pull out wins against Central Connecticut State (with Lamson and Taco and Jones) and against Northern Arizona and he spends the pregame in our thread arguing about Dillon, his own kickoff in our thread complaining about his own secondary, and the postgame in a Griz fan's replies with the injury report attached. He has a key. Rent-free. The rev share is still at 32 Campus Drive, Missoula, MT 59812, and this week we are billing by the hour.

Speaking of those two home strugglefests:

Griz 0, on the road again, and nobody in Davis sang about anybody. The bylaws count what gets heard, and this week two witnesses heard it, one of them over the ESPN broadcast. RABIDAWG, eGriz, 9:04 p.m.: "Flipped to cat game to check score on ESPN and all I can hear is ESGGCG! So classless." Then a second witness, thirty-seven minutes later.

Both in the first half. During a close game. Against a team from Arizona. The team they were singing about was in California, up 17-0 during the first refrain and 31-8 by the second. Eyes on your own team Bozeman. I'm counting each chant as three to maybe help you learn your lesson. Cats 15, Griz 0. Mony Mony.

Decided at halftime. On Sept. 22 AZGrizFan wrote, "If we beat UCD, NAU, ISU, NCU, Idaho, EWU and PSU I'll be HAPPY to have been wrong." At the half Saturday, 31-8, retiredpopo quoted it back to him and asked how he was feeling. The answer: "It's one game, bro. Calm your tits." If he ain't happy winning by 40 on the road over the No. 10 team, he's never going to be happy.

Credit where I asked for it. RayWill had "ISU, UC Davis and MSU will all feast on this defense" on Sept. 19 and posted Sunday: "I tip my hat, I shut my mouth the team on the field last night could win it all." LivingstonNative was "a little nervous about this one" and called the result "a statement for all the non-believers. Including me being a little shaky." That is how it's done, and the forks go back in the drawer for both of them. Copper Griz, who wanted #2 in on Sept. 19, went another way: "Someone might want to call a priest… Something called a football coach possessed Bobby Kennedy." Twenty of the forty-four have not posted since kickoff. The crow keeps.

Montana's 2026 record book runs 1,247 lines, and the 2011 season is all through it: Jabin Sambrano's 1,963 all-purpose yards, the team's 1,133 kickoff-return yards, still listed as school records. No footnote on any of it. As it should be.

The case appears once. Career interceptions: Karl Stein 20, Mick Dennehy 16, Tim Hauck 15, and then Trumaine Johnson, 2008-11, thirteen, with a caret. "^Forfeited two interceptions due to NCAA infractions case, 2011."

Trumaine Johnson is one of the two players the case was about. A booster posted bail and a lawyer gave him $1,500 in free representation. The two picks he forfeited came in the two vacated playoff wins, Central Arkansas and Northern Iowa. The two picks cost him the tie with Hauck, and the wins went away anyway.

So the department has already been through 2011 and decided most of it counts. All of it, except 6 wins and 2 balls Trumaine caught. Give us the six back. Give Tru his picks back.

Keali'i Ah Yat passed John Edwards on Montana's career passing list in the third quarter Saturday, and he needs seven yards to claim sixth place.

The man currently in sixth was a Lewiston, ID kid who picked Montana over Idaho, and said so. He played from 1989 to 1992. Four hundred eighty-nine yards against Nevada in a double-overtime loss. At Idaho, 411 and five touchdowns in a 35-34 overtime win, Montana's first there in ten years. At Washington State he lined up across from a Cougar named Drew Bledsoe. He is our Bledsoe, too. His final regular-season game was 410 yards on the Cats, and the next fall the job went to a kid from Great Falls. Bledsoe lost the job to Brady on a hit. Our guy handed his to Dickenson by running out of eligibility.

He left with 6,717 yards, and thirty-four years later he is sixth, by six. Next Saturday it's seventh. This week it's still his.

Brad Lebo. That guy rocked.

Next week is Homecoming, Northern Colorado, Saturday at 2 p.m., and after two late night kickoffs in a row, an afternoon game is its own reward. Bobby 3.0 played four seasons of quarterback at Northern Colorado and has never coached against the school. That makes two weeks in a row a Montana coach lines up across from his alma mater; Colonel Mustard has the UC Davis psych degree, and his defense was in fact in the Aggies' heads all night. Bobby 3.0 has a political science degree.

Bobby 3.0, on the second half: "I kind of took a deep breath and I said, 'Okay, we have this one [in] hand.'" Last Sunday I prescribed the same deep breath to the rest of you. Eli's version was shorter. "We say foot on their throat." Deep breaths for us, no breaths for them. Homecoming, two o'clock. I'll try to stop saying I told you so.

Go Griz.