• Final Score: Colorado State 38, Western Illinois 13
• Line: Colorado State -13
• Venue: Canvas Stadium

Welcome to the winning portion of this countdown! It’s all confetti and champagne from here on out!

When I was ranking the wins, I broke them into tiers and this is the lowest tier: Wins Against Crappy FCS Teams.

We start with the 2019 victory over Western Illinois, the worst of all the Directional Illinoises. I honestly had never heard of them before we scheduled them. Rodney Harrison and Bryan Cox played there, so that’s pretty good.

The game wasn’t very competitive, Rams got up 28-6 in the 2nd quarter and coasted to the win.

There were a number of spectacular plays in this game: a 75 yard bomb to Dante Wright on the first play of the game, a 77 yard catch and run by Marvin Kinsey, EJ Scott and friends carrying the entire Western Illinois defense into the endzone, but the most spectacular play of the game came in the 2nd quarter with the Rams up 28-6:

LOL, eat shit Western Illinois! When you’re up 28-6 against a crap FCS team, you gotta go surprise onside.

The game was over when… the officials correctly overturned a fumble call and awarded EJ Scott a touchdown on this play:

The score was 14-6 and the Rams had already fumbled and missed a field goal. Another fumble and another Leatherneck score could have given them confidence and sent the game into a different direction. Instead, the refs correctly reversed the fumble call and awarded a touchdown, giving the Rams an insurmountable 21-6 lead.

Behind Enemy Lines:

(This is a new section of these game reviews now that we’re into the wins. There’s nothing I like more than lurking on opponent’s message boards after a Ram win and basking in the saltiness and schadenfreude. I will post a screenshot of my favorite post from the opponent’s message board.)

There wasn’t too much saltiness from the Leatherneck faithful because they only have about five fans and none of them really seem to care too much. The Leatherneck fan above pretty much nailed the remainder of the 2019 season. CSU only won three more games against the dregs of the Mountain West and fired their coach while Western Illinois went 1-11.

A condensed version of the game is here: