The odds appear to be stacked against unseeded Delaware when the Blue Hens travel west to face top-seeded South Dakota State in the Championship Subdivision playoffs this weekend.

Just over 18 months ago, when the pandemic pushed the FCS season into the spring, Delaware made the same trip in the national semifinals and was beaten 33-3.

This time, the Blue Hens (8-4) have Ryan Carty on their sideline. The first-year Delaware coach was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Sam Houston, which beat the Jackrabbits 23-21 to win the national title in May 2021.

“Not anything that happened 18 months ago or a national championship in the spring or any of that stuff — It’s not going to matter until we get out there and see how we perform and see how we rise to a challenge,” Carty said this week.

Carty does have one thing no South Dakota State player has ever been able to claim: The former quarterback won a national championship with Delaware as a player in 2003.

The Blue Hens advanced with a 56-17 victory against Saint Francis (Pa.) with Nolan Henderson throwing for four TDS and running for another, but they will be hardpressed to match those numbers against the nation’s No. 2 overall defense (255 yards per game), the No. 3 scoring defense (15.5 ppg) and the top rushing defense (71.4 ypg).

The Jackrabbits (10-1) haven’t played since Nov. 12, and coach John Stiegelmeier used the break to practice sparingly for two weeks and send his team home for Thanksgiving.

Also heading west

Richmond, like Delaware, is one of five teams from the Colonial Athletic Association that made the playoffs, and opened with a 41-0 victory over Davidson.

Their reward? A trip west to face second-seeded Sacramento State (11-0), the first team since Montana in 2006 to go 8-0 in the Big Sky Conference in back-to-back seasons. The Big Sky was also the only other league to get five teams in the playoff field.

The Hornets will pose ample challenges, Spiders coach Russ Huesman said, but the one that seemed to catch his eye most was running back Cameron Skattebo, the Big Sky’s offensive MVP whose 1,251 rushing yards include only seven yards in losses.