“Sometimes you don't necessarily get the win that you want. You get the win that you need.””

Derek Mason

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Derek Mason, as we all are, is many things to many people. To his players, he's the coach who makes practice hard, so the games feel easy. To his coaching staff, he's the boss who demands the whole package, coaching and recruiting, every single day, because the standard is best.

 But to himself, he's a realist.

 So, when the rain started to fall on Saturday afternoon and the lightning started to strike within a six-mile radius of Floyd Stadium, he felt those dark clouds coming back. The ones that nearly 10 years to the day on Saturday, on August 28, 2014, came during his first game at Vanderbilt, a 37-7 loss to Temple at home that had its 8 p.m. kickoff delayed nearly two hours due to severe weather in the Middle Tennessee area. Mason was feeling that sense of deja vu as his first game as a Blue Raider was pushed back due to the same clouds, the same lightning, the same danger.

 "You have to sit there and ask yourself that," Mason said. "Anybody who's a realist sits there and asks 'ok, hey, what type of thing is this going to be?' I'm human, I'm just a regular guy."

 It was his wife, LeighAnne, who snapped him out of that spiral, texting him in the locker room that this was 2024, not 2014. This was Middle Tennessee, not Vanderbilt. "Be confident," she said. "This ain't that."

 And while Mason's Blue Raiders' nail-biting 32-25 victory over Tennessee Tech wasn't what many expected when they drove up Greenland Drive on Saturday, the head coach knew that the feeling was completely different after walking off the field.

 "What I saw from this football team tonight was really incredible," Mason said. "First victory, we'll all remember it, that's for dang sure. We're all going to remember it."

 The game started as most expected, with Middle Tennessee racing out to a 21-0 lead on the strength of touchdowns on each of the team's first three drives. The Blue Raider offense was efficient, converting on all but one of its six third downs in the frame (and then getting the fourth down conversion the one time they didn't succeed on third down). The MTSU defense was aggressive, with John Howse IV picking off the Golden Eagles on their very first drive. They looked, in every way, the superior team on the field.

 But after another defensive stop by the Blue Raiders, Tennessee Tech found the spark they needed from their special teams, pinning MTSU at their own one-yard line. On the very next play, the Golden Eagle defensive line capitalized, stuffing a run for a safety to get Tennessee Tech on the board. And on the drive earned from the ensuing free kick, the Golden Eagles got points again, making a field goal as time expired in the half to cut the lead to 21-5.

 The second half was anything but what folks expected. The Golden Eagles were confident, buoyed by the taste of success they found just before the break. The Blue Raiders were stagnant, unable to move the ball on offense, putting their defense in increasingly tougher spots as the two-hour and 40-minute weather delay had pushed the second half towards midnight.

 Wide receiver Myles Butler noted Tennessee Tech's adjustments, sitting on MTSU's routes and loading the box against the run.

 "That's how football goes," said Butler, who caught Vattiato's only touchdown pass of the evening in the first half. "You go into halftime, you're going to make adjustments, you ain't going to keep getting beat...we had to find another way to execute."

Nick Vattiato (11) finished 20/35 for 210 yards and 1 TD with 1 INT against TTU.

It took until the final 1:06 of the game, outside of a Zeke Rankin field goal midway through the fourth quarter, for MTSU to find that execution. Going down 25-24 to a longtime rival still in the FCS can spur those realizations. But even more specifically, it took until the Blue Raiders' final two plays from scrimmage as an offense, a fourth-and-five completion to Omari Kelly for 26 yards, setting up the hero moment Frank Peasant had been waiting his whole MTSU career for.

 "Once I heard the playcall, I realized the past few plays, they wasn't even covering me, for one," Peasant said. "And two, they were slanting outside. So, once I got the call, we already knew what I was fixin' to do. Once the hole opened up, I hit it and did what I did."

 The 30-yard run, accentuated by a dive over the pylon, pushed the lead to 30-25, 32-25 after the two-point conversion from Vattiato to Kellen Stewart. And with just 16 seconds on the clock and 75 yards to go after the kickoff, the Golden Eagles' Cinderella clock had finally struck midnight, just a few minutes past the actual hour Sunday morning.

 "Sometimes you don't necessarily get the win that you want," Mason said. "You get the win that you need. And that was the win that we needed, in my opinion. We needed to learn how to win tough. That was a tough way to win one, for sure."

 There's a laundry list of things Mason wants to get fixed as the season goes forward. As soon as next week, when the Blue Raiders travel to No. 6 Ole Miss, would be the most ideal time to help keep Vattiato upright more often, to miss fewer tackles on the perimeter, to use more of the perimeter of the offense when teams stack the box, among many other corrections Mason mentioned in his postgame press conference.

 Even with those corrections to make, Mason feels his team has already learned a lot on Saturday night. The concentration needed to play with a lead. The guts and guile needed to play from behind. The ability to handle uncontrollable adversity like a two hour and 40-minute rain delay. And how Mason learned those dark clouds from his past will never be the same.

 "This game itself, regardless of what other people say, I know what it looked like down there on the sideline," Mason said. "I know what happened when Omari caught the ball. I know what happened when Frank put it in the endzone. I saw the look in these guys' eyes."

 "That's confidence," he concluded. "That, a lot of people can't measure it, but I can."