EL PASO, Texas — In retrospect, you knew Middle Tennessee football was going to win on Saturday in the Sun Bowl when they punted the ball on fourth and six from the UTEP 44 with 9:13 left to play.
 
Punting is rarely, if ever, a flashy call for a team to make at any point in the game. Even at MTSU, where Grant Chadwick has quickly asserted himself as one of the best young punters in the entire country during his freshman campaign that's seen him place 15 punts inside the opponent's 20-yard line. Even really good punts, like Chadwick's 38-yard punt on the play that was fair caught at the UTEP 6, rarely get the headlines at the end of a 20-13 win.
 
But the decision to punt in no-man's land field position, facing a fourth down that's not prohibitively long enough you feel you had to punt, playing the field position game, tells you that Derek Mason trusted his defense to get the stop. He trusted his offense to march down the field when they got the ball back. And he trusted the special teams to pin the Miners deep enough in their own territory, as Chadwick and the punt unit did, to make sure the Blue Raiders had enough time to make it all happen.
 
"We knew that we were going to get our opportunity," Mason said. "That's why we punted the ball back, put ourselves in position to play defense and felt like, at the end of the day, we'd have an opportunity."
 
The Blue Raiders forced a three-and-out, highlighted by a sack from Damonte Smith on second down, eventually getting the ball back just three yards further from the end zone than where they punted. As the offense took the field, wide receiver Myles Butler oozed that same confidence Mason had on Saturday.
 
"It's just about having grit," Butler said. 'You've got to finish the game, just find the grit in you. It's mano a mano, who wants it the most? And that's what we did, we found a way to win."
 
The drive, like a lot of MTSU's play against UTEP, was not perfect. In the ten-play sequence, poised bursts down the field were sandwiched around short runs and a dropped pass. Two UTEP penalties that helped move the chains, including a third-down pass interference, helped just as much as MTSU's own offense. But after the two-minute timeout, with over five minutes already run off the clock on the drive, Nicholas Vattiato found space to get across the goaline from the UTEP 1, with help from tight end Evan Poticher acting as the full back pushing the line.
 
"We were going to run Nick four times if we had to, just to make them use timeouts if we didn't get it in," Mason said.
 
The Blue Raider defense, stout the entire afternoon, did not allow over 100 yards of passing until the Miners final drive of the game when MTSU dropped into a prevent defense in the two-minute drill. That strong pass defense, a product of doing a good job of making UTEP's third-string quarterback, freshman JP Pickles, fairly uncomfortable in the pocket, was paired with a much stronger effort against the run. MTSU held UTEP to just 3.8 yards per carry and only 160 yards overall on the ground, just one week after allowing Jacksonville State 283 rushing yards after contact.
 
"We've been working on it all day at practice, really, just getting knock back," defensive lineman Shakai Woods said, referring to the defensive line pushing the UTEP offensive line off the line of scrimmage. "That's all Coach Stew talked about, Coach Stew, Coach Hargraves, Coach Mason, knock back at the point of the attack."
 
That knock back allowed for the linebackers of MTSU to feast. Both Parker Hughes (14 tackles) and Jalen Davis (11 tackles), veterans in the MTSU second level, set new career highs on Saturday. So did Woods, who grabbed seven tackles on the afternoon, including 1.5 TFLs. Mason noted that the defensive line still had plenty of room to grow, but their mindset helped minimize the mistakes when they did happen.
 
"If we're going to mess it up, let's fix it, the next play is the only one that matters," Mason said. "I thought those guys played that way today. They didn't worry if we missed something. We tried to come back and not make the same mistake twice."
 
Mason highlighted that many names were called that Blue Raiders hadn't heard a lot from so far this season. Aidan Butts picked up his first career sack and pass breakup while rotating on the defensive line. Poticher and Taharin Sudderth stepped in at tight end to provide a threat both in the blocking game and the receiving game with Holden Willis out this week. Xavier Williams had made a name for himself on defense since transitioning to safety from quarterback but picked up a fourth down conversion when he checked in for a designed QB run in the second half.
 
And Myles Butler, who led the Blue Raiders with 101 yards receiving, got 61 of those yards on a touchdown pass in the first half, where he slipped between zones of the UTEP defense and made the safety miss for the explosive play. That catch alone surpassed Butler's previous best performance in receiving yards in a single game this season.
 
In the end, with great straining and great want-to, it still came down to just one play from 19 yards out, with eight Blue Raiders dropping in coverage on defense.
 
Who wanted it more? Jalen Davis, evidently, as he jumped the final pass of the afternoon to force a breakup, picking up MTSU's first road win since November 26, 2022. 
 

 
"It was just terrific to see, offense to defense to special teams, this group play with some confidence today," Mason said. "Not everything fell or went the way we wanted it to go, but again, I thought this group was resilient."