The gist
- Emporia State (1-0) at No. 10 Pittsburg State (0-1), Saturday, Sept. 5, 7 p.m. CDT at Carnie Smith Stadium. MIAA opener for both.
- Pitt just got run off its own field — 42-14 at home to No. 1 Ferris State, and a six-spot fall from No. 4 to No. 10 in the AFCA poll.
- It's Family Day, which Pitt has sold out 15 straight times since 2010, averaging 10,355. It will be loud and it will be hostile.
- The MIAA message board has produced fifteen posts, roughly two of which were about football. We read all of them. That's the real story.
The actual football part
Emporia State is 1-0 after a 36-30 road win at Minot State on Aug. 27 — the Hornets' first road season-opener since 2021, per the athletics site. Linebacker Landon Boss then collected MIAA Defensive Player of the Week on Aug. 31, his third straight conference weekly honor going back into last season and his fourth career.
Pitt State had a different Thursday. By their own account, the Gorillas dropped a 42-14 home decision to top-ranked Ferris State and slid from No. 4 to No. 10. This is still a serious program — four straight D-II playoff trips, a share of the 2025 MIAA title, and Tom Anthony sitting on an 18-7 record in his third year. Nobody sane walks into Carnie Smith Stadium on Family Day expecting a quiet afternoon.
So: 1-0 unranked team, at 0-1 ranked team, both opening MIAA play, in front of a sellout. That's a real game. Which is why it's so funny that the message board immediately stopped discussing it.
The part the trash talk keeps skipping
The opponent-history page lists 16 meetings between 2000 and 2025 — not the full series, since a decade of seasons in that window aren't on it — and Pitt has the better of what is there. Fine. Own it.
Here's the part nobody in that thread mentioned: the last time the Hornets went to Pittsburg, they won. 24-21, in 2024. Be honest about the rest of it — the trip before that went 25-33 in 2023, and Pitt took last year's meeting in Emporia 29-42, so the Gorillas hold the recent edge. But "Emporia can't win in Pittsburg" is a take with a two-year-old counterexample sitting right on top of it.
Key to the game: whether Pitt's offensive line has recovered from Ferris State. Fourteen points at home is not a Gorillas number. If they're still rattled and Boss is live, this gets interesting fast.
The thread: a review
We want to be clear we did not go looking for this. We maintain a professional interest in the MIAA board the way a scientist maintains a professional interest in a volcano.
The tone was set two posts in, when a longtime Pitt-side poster opened with "Congrats to ESU on their upcoming win." Extremely efficient sentence. Sarcasm, hedge, and insurance policy all at once. If Emporia wins, he called it. If Pitt wins, he was obviously kidding.
He followed up explaining he hadn't watched the opener because he wasn't paying to see "the honeybee play a mid tier team from the NSIC" — a lot of words to admit you looked up the schedule. He also called Boss "a rampaging beast" and wondered aloud whether Pitt has any plan to neutralize him or will just run the same offense and find out. When the other side's most active poster describes your linebacker that way and then asks if anyone has a plan, that is not trash talk. That is a scouting report.
Another poster contributed the analysis "Pitt sucks ... but the bees suck more." Nine words, insults both teams, commits to nothing. Somebody get this man a podcast.
Then it stopped being about football entirely
Our own reloadmvp offered "We are going to have a field day in PITT… nothing more to say," and drew the most message-board reply in recorded history:
"A field day, like you're going to be doing track and field stuff during a football game? I would suggest focusing on playing football."
Someone read a common idiom, decided to take it literally, and posted it with a straight face under a signature that reads "I like turtles."
Then a Central Oklahoma fan — not Pitt, not Emporia, a man who simply saw a thread and felt called — declared the game "over by halftime." reloadmvp fired back that "UCO still can't hold our Jock," and got the line of the week in return: "Why would we want to hold your Jock? Jock holding seems like an Emporia thing."
And then a fourth poster arrived to fact-check the insult, noting the correct phrase is "he couldn't carry his jock," as said by the late Billy Martin on live TV. Two grown men trading schoolyard taunts and a third standing behind them with a citation. We love it here.
One correction, since we're all being pedantic
The thread's closer, offered as a laugh for Saturday, was that "Emporia's stadium is such a craphole that it is being shut down for safety reasons."
Close! What actually happened, per the athletics department on Sept. 2, is that the east-side stands at Francis G. Welch Stadium were closed to fans. The east side. Not the stadium. And the Hornets are 1-0 without having played at home yet, so the building hasn't been used in anger this season.
We won't pretend it's good news — losing home capacity in a rivalry-heavy stretch is a real cost. But it is a bold week to be workshopping stadium material when the last football played in yours ended 42-14 and cost you six spots in the poll.
Our take
The pick: Emporia State, and we know exactly how that sounds. We're taking a team that went 5-6 last year, on the road, into a top-10 program's sellout Family Day crowd. Here's the case anyway: the Hornets already have a road win, they won their last trip to Carnie Smith, and the conference handed their best defender a weekly award 96 hours ago. Pitt is better on paper and just got embarrassed in front of its own people, which cuts both ways — either they come out furious or they come out fragile.
When the other side's sharpest poster stops trash-talking mid-sentence to ask whether anybody has a plan for your linebacker, believe him.
Saturday, 7 p.m., Pittsburg. Hornets to walk out 2-0 — and that thread to reach 30 posts without a second one about football.