It was a completely different style of football from last season, but impressive all the same.

Northern State, which outscored opponents in high-scoring shootouts last season, put the clamps on Upper Iowa and rolled to 30-0 Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference football victory Thursday night at Dacotah Bank Stadium.

The Wolves dominated up front, made big plays in the secondary, and used a balanced attack on offense against the Peacocks.

“This is wining football when you can play complementary like this,” said Northern coach Mike Schmidt.

He said it’s difficult to quickly build a defense, but this is what he envisioned when he came to Northern a couple of years ago.

“It’s hard to do that in one year when you take over a program, but this is the next phase,” Schmidt said. “Because this is how you win big football games. You have a defense that plays like that.”

The Wolves held the visitors to 156 yards of total offense in the contest.

“Everybody executed extremely well from the D-Line to the linebackers to the DBs,” said Northern linebacker Brennan Kutterer. “Everybody did their job.”

Upper Iowa had no room to run in the middle as the Wolves dominated play on the line thanks in part to newcomer Ian Marshall who transferred from Oklahoma State. Marshall finished with 6 tackles, four for loss, and a pair of sacks.

“He’s insane. He’s awesome. He’s great. Even in practice he’s always getting after it. He’s always winning his one-on-one’s,” Kutterer said. “You saw he won a lot of one-on-one’s tonight against whoever tried to block him.”

Meanwhile, the other phases of NSU’s defense was solid as well, which included an interception by Ar’Shon Willis in the end zone that erased Upper Iowa’s best scoring opportunity on the night.

It was a team effort on offense as well as Michael Bonds found a variety of receivers and connected with three of them for touchdowns.

“I think we got the ball to 8-9 different guys tonight,” Bonds said.

The quarterback was quick to praise a revamped offensive line that allowed him to stay in the pocket and hit open teammates.

“I didn’t get touched all night. It was amazing,” Bonds said. “It just goes out to all the preparation we do during the week.”

The offensive line lost five members off it from a year ago due to graduation and transfers, but looked like a cohesive unit against the Peacocks.

“When you lose five upperclassmen in one class, that hard to do and replace,” Schmidt said. “We had a lot of young guys that played really well. That’s winning football right there.”

Bonds finished with 203 yards passing. One of his touchdown strikes went to former Northwestern standout Caleb Schentzel for 22 yards in the second quarter to extend the Wolves’ lead. Bonds hit Schentzel in stride and sophomore reeled it in despite having to look right into the fading sun to do it.

The Wolves take to the road for a contest on Saturday Sept. 10 at Wayne State. They will take with them some momentum from a season opener that showcased the team’s new-look defense.

“Coming from a season like last year when we kind of struggled a little bit, coming out here and shutting them out, having what we did against their run and then shutting down the pass game, that was huge for us,” Kutterer said. “That really instills that confidence in our team.”

To see complete statistics, click on the following link:

https://nsuwolves.com/sports/football/stats/2022/upper-iowa/boxscore/12760