CARBONDALE (WSIL) -- "You just don't in life get opportunities like this, on a beautiful day and 60 degrees and sunny and your families in the stands, you get an opportunity to knock off the number one team in the country and do something, leave a legacy. We talked about that and this game will be recognized for a long time," said SIU Head Coach Nick Hill.
An impressive win for sophomore Nick Baker, making his first collegiate start completing 17 of 23 passes for 254 yards.
"Now you can't describe it," said quarterback Nick Baker. "It's all the work that gets put into this stuff and all the long nights long days, training your mind. It makes it all worth it, that feeling at the end."
"I already knew Nick was a great quarterback. I mean, he was just waiting for his chance and he got in there and did his thing," said sophomore running back Romeir Ellliott.
Saturday's performance is a 180 from last week's over 20 point loss to North Dakota, a game where the Salukis had five costly turnovers, zero takeaways.
"Honestly, I don't know if we come out and play the way that we played today without taking the loss like we did last week," said Hill.
This week was just being real consistent," said Elliott. "I mean, last week it didn't go as planned. We had a lot of turnovers, but we knew that that wasn't ourselves. We know that if we eliminated the turnovers, we could play the best game. We can play and we can just give us give ourselves a chance. We did that today."
SIU was stifling on defense, a strip sack and interception were pivotal in crushing the Bison's few promising drives.
"Coach Hill stresses every week turnover margin. We always have to win the turnover margin and we need to hit hardest," said senior inside linebacker Bryce Notree. "So getting those two turnovers whenever we need it the most was really big for our defense and for our offense. We won the turnover margin today which led us to win the game."
While his team celebrated the win Saturday, head coach Nick Hill says it's back to business Sunday morning.
"For us to have this success in this season, we got to quickly come back and it's still a week two win. Tomorrow we got to do the same thing. We got to come in the building with the same type of attitude," said Hill.
SIU finished 38-14 over NDSU.
