There was a time earlier this season when the trajectory of the Northern Colorado football team was looking up.
After a season-opening 17-3 victory over Division II Chadron State, the Bears absorbed back-to-back one-score losses against Colorado State and South Dakota, followed by wins over Houston Christian and Idaho sandwiched around a loss to Idaho State.
That all added up to a 3-3 record and seemed to instill the program with some optimism.
But then came Northern Colorado’s current four-game losing streak with a dagger of a defeat in the middle: a 55-7 home loss to third-ranked Montana State.
“I did not realize how affected our team’s confidence was,” UNC third-year head coach Ed Lamb said Tuesday at his weekly news conference. “I think that started with the blowout loss to Montana State, and I feel like our team is broken.”
This is the current state of the Northern Colorado football team, which visits Roos Field on Saturday for a 1 p.m. kickoff against Eastern Washington.
“I was hesitant to acknowledge that to our team because it hurts,” Lamb continued. “But I think we have no chance to fix what’s ailing us if we don’t acknowledge that it’s broken first. And I think our confidence is in a bad state right now.”
That the Bears might lack confidence isn’t particularly new. This is a program that since joining the Big Sky Conference in 2006 has never won more than four league games in a single season. Eastern has defeated Northern Colorado all 14 times they’ve played in the last two decades, including a 43-15 victory in Greeley last year.
It’s been nearly 30 years since the Bears won the second of back-to-back Division II national titles in 1997.
But Lamb, who won the Big Sky as Southern Utah’s head coach in 2015, isn’t one to shirk from a challenge. It’s why he accepted the job in the first place.
“I’m unbreakable and optimistic through all adversity,” Lamb said. “That’s why I am here. I’m sure a lot of people turned down this job before they got to my name. And I’ve been in these jobs before, and these are the ones I love.
“To see a team pick themselves up, unbury themselves – to see a program do that, begin to compete, fight to compete, insist that other teams fight against them and then overcome at some point on that timeline – it’s an unknown timeline, but it is a timeline, and I’m confident in where we’re going.”
At 4-6 overall and 3-3 in Big Sky play, the Eagles are coming off a 29-24 loss at No. 2 Montana last week, a game in which they were in position for one final play before Jake Schakel fumbled the ball while attempting a clock-stopping spike play.
It was a sour ending to an impressive first start for the redshirt freshman quarterback.
“Jake stayed composed. He is so unassuming as a player,” EWU head coach Aaron Best said on Tuesday. “I think success breeds success … before you know it, momentum is real.”
Best and the Eagles want to roll that momentum into these last two games. One more victory would give the Eagles their best league record since they went 6-2 in 2021; two would get them back to .500 overall after going 4-8, 4-7 and 3-8 over the last three seasons.
“At the end of the day, (a 6-6 record) is better than what we had last year,” EWU sixth-year senior linebacker Trevor Thurman said Monday. “But we’re always going to yearn for more, always going to want more. I believe we are better than our record shows.”
Thurman said the Eagles aren’t where they want to be – they will miss the playoffs for the fourth straight season, the program’s longest streak since a six-year stretch from 1998 to 2003 – but that “morale is good.”
When Lamb looked at the Eagles this week, he said he saw a team that has continued to improve throughout the season, almost in a linear trajectory.
“I think their confidence is growing,” Lamb said. “The defense is rising to the occasion and getting better each week.”
Therein lie the Bears’ challenges: to play to the potential Lamb said they showed early in the season, and to beat an Eastern team that wants to develop momentum heading into the offseason.
“Playing a should-have-beat Colorado State game or (having) every opportunity to beat South Dakota on the road, (and) several other games that we played very good teams to very close or winnable outcomes,” Lamb said, “the cumulative effect of that when you just look at a 3-7 record is more painful than any one of those events, and I think that’s what our team has been struggling with.”