For the first time since Bill McCartney’s Buffaloes in 1990, Colorado—the state, not the university—could be home to a college football national champion by late Saturday afternoon.
The Golden-based School of Mines Orediggers meet the Bisons of Harding University (from Searcy, Arkansas) on Saturday for the Division II title. Both teams are 13-0
The game will be played in McKinney, Texas, in the 12,000-seat stadium of the McKinney Independent School District. McKinney is a Dallas suburb, about 40 minutes from downtown. McKinney has hosted the Byron Nelson Golf Tournament at TPC Craig Ranch since 2020.
McKinney is three-and-a-half hours north of Magnolia, hometown of Mines’ star quarterback, John Matocha. He won the Harlon Hill Trophy, D-II’s equivalent of the Heisman, last season, and deserves it again this year.
Division II football is a lot like major college football was 40 or 50 years ago, before television, a plethora of meaningless bowl games, the transfer portal and NIL corrupted the sport as we knew it. D-II players actually GRADUATE.
There are 162 football-playing colleges and universities in Division II. They must build their teams using a maximum equivalent of 36 full scholarships. This means most schools break those scholarships into partials of varying amounts so they can provide more student-athletes with at least some financial aid.
The Mines roster, which lists 137 players, is like one you’d expect to find at the Air Force Academy. Besides 49 players from Colorado, including six from perennial high school power Valor Christian, there are players from 18 other states. Texas leads with 44.
Unlike most major college programs, these guys are at Mines for the duration. Thirty-eight are seniors. There are more engineering specialties than one might imagine, including geological, mining, environmental, civil, mechanical, metallurgical-and-materials, chemical, electrical and petroleum.
If you wonder about something more exotic, two players are majoring in quantitative biosciences and one in additive manufacturing. There also are (of course) plenty of computer science majors, including star quarterback Matocha, and numerous varieties of management.
Words like “dynasty” and “powerhouse” have been used to describe the Orediggers of the 21st Century. But it wasn’t always that way.
I remember visiting with the late Marv Kay, for whom the 4,000-seat football stadium at Mines is named, shortly after I came to the Rocky Mountain News as executive sports editor in 1982. Mines was an afterthought then—coming off a 3-5-1 season and headed for 2-7.
Marv, an inductee into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame who also was mayor of Golden from 1988 to 1996, coached Mines for 27 seasons from 1969 through 1994. He believed in “developing the kids” who played for him, he told me. Winning was of secondary importance, as his .340 winning percentage indicates.
It wasn’t until Bob Stitt arrived as head coach in 2000 that victories regularly outnumbered defeats every season. In the last 24 years, the Orediggers have won 196 and lost 70, a .737 winning percentage.
Mines and Harding played one common opponent in 2023: four-time national champion Grand Valley State. Those Lakers opened the season losing to Mines 31-28 and ended it by going down to Harding 7-6 in the Division II Playoffs quarterfinals. In between, they went 11-0.
In the Mines game, GVSU rallied for 21 points in the fourth quarter to erase a 28-7 Mines lead, tying the score on a 20-yard run with 36 seconds left to play. But Mines then drove 51 yards in seven plays, and redshirt senior Hunter Pearson, a Computer Science major, kicked a 41-yard field goal with two seconds left.
How close was the game? The Lakers finished with 431 yards of total offense, to Mines’ 430. Until Mines’ final drive of 34 seconds, the two teams were dead even in time of possession at 29 minutes, 42 seconds.
When Harding played Grand Valley, the Lakers led 6-0 on two second-quarter field goals until 3:52 left in the game, when Harding capped an eight-minute 59-second, 15-play 73-yard drive with a one-yard touchdown run. Time of possession was lopsided, 39:14 to 19:31 in Harding’s favor, but Harding gained only three yards more, 225-222.
This should be a battle worthy of a championship.
Should you want to follow the Orediggers in their quest for a national championship Saturday, the game will be televised on ESPNU at 11 a.m.
Denny Dressman is a veteran of 43 years in the newspaper business, including 25 at the Rocky Mountain News, where he began as executive sports editor. He is the author of 15 books, nine of them sports-related. You can write to Denny at dennydressman@comcast.net.