VERMILLION — The University of South Dakota football team learned its FCS Playoff seeding fate on selection Sunday.
It was announced that the Coyotes would be the No. 4 seed in the 2024 FCS Playoffs. USD finished the season with a 9-2 mark following a dramatic comeback victory on Saturday over top-ranked North Dakota State. Montana State, NDSU and South Dakota State rounded out the top four seeds.
Head coach Bob Nielson didn’t go into specifically whether he felt the No. 4 seed was where the Coyotes deserved to be, but expressed his excitement for the position USD is in.
“Obviously, to be one of the top four seeds means you're home at least to the semifinals,” Nielson said. “And I didn't know how it was going to shake out. Honestly, I figured we'd be in the top four somewhere, but I didn't know how the committee was going to do that. The team’s played well, worked hard and we’re certainly excited to get going.”
“I think we were ready for wherever they were going to put us,” Aidan Bouman said of USD’s placement. “We have the road map down in front of us, and now we're ready to roll.”
The Coyotes will pay close attention to the matchup that will decide who they will play next. In that game, 13th-seeded Tarleton State battles unseeded Drake, who USD defeated earlier in the season 42-3.
But plenty of other strong teams are on USD’s side of the bracket. It starts with top-seeded and undefeated Montana State at the top. If both the Coyotes and the Bobcats were to make the semifinals, it would set up a matchup between the two in Bozeman, Montana in an outdoor game in late December.
However, to get there, USD would possibly have to through fifth-seeded UC Davis. The Aggies finished the season 10-2 and in second place in the Big Sky. They also took the Bobcats to the wire in the second-to-last game of the season a few weeks ago where Montana State snuck out of California with a 30-28 victory.
For now, though, Nielson isn’t worried about what happens later and is solely focused on what is directly in front of this team.
“I’ve been in the playoffs enough that you just worry about one game at a time,” Nielson said. “When you're talking about a 24-team field, there's going to be a lot of really, really good teams. Every week you're going to have to play your best football. We talk about that all the time in the valley and that's why playing in this league is a really playoff-ready kind of schedule. We’ll sit this week to determine who we're going to play. At the same time, it gives us a chance to get some guys back to full health and also a chance to do a little bit of advanced prep work.”
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