South Dakota State eyes higher standard as Chase Mason returns for 2026 run

South Dakota State did not leave spring ball talking like a team satisfied with a respectable season. The Jackrabbits finished 9-5 in 2025 and fell 50-29 to Montana in the second round of the FCS playoffs, but the standard in Brookings is still the one built by back-to-back national championships in 2022 and 2023. That is why Chase Mason’s return matters so much. It gives Dan Jackson’s second team a proven centerpiece, and it gives the program a chance to measure its spring progress against a simple August question: does this roster look like a contender again?

Mason is the kind of quarterback who can make that conversation real. The 6-foot-4, 240-pound graduate student from Hurley, South Dakota finished 2025 with 2,005 passing yards and 15 touchdowns, and in 2024 he showed the kind of dual-threat punch that changes a defense’s math, rushing for 161 yards against Youngstown State for the most by a Jackrabbit quarterback in the Division I era. Around him, South Dakota State has the receiver and tight end depth that championship teams usually need. Grahm Goering scored the program’s first touchdown of the 2025 season on a 23-yard overtime catch at North Dakota and also earned Academic All-District honors. Jack Smith, Lofton O’Groske, Greyton Gannon and Coleman Kuntz give Mason a target group with size and production, and Kuntz arrived with 25 catches for 191 yards and two scores from Sacramento State after Gannon returned from injury to hit Incarnate Word for a 41-yard touchdown in 2024.

The other change that stood out this spring was the depth behind Mason and along the offensive front. Ramon McKinney Jr., a junior transfer from Northeastern State, drew attention for his playmaking in the spring game, where the offense erased a 17-0 deficit and beat the defense 24-17 in an offense-versus-defense format. Jackson’s addition of 17 mid-year transfers on Feb. 4, including McKinney, Cooper Starks, Jae’Shaun Thomas, Carter Sitzman and Ashton Sayre, gave the roster a different look than it had a year ago, when stability was harder to find. Jackson said the group was ready to work because “the roster is set.”

The line remains one of the clearest reasons for optimism. Quinten Christensen, a 6-5, 300-pound senior from Wessington Springs, started all 15 games at left tackle in 2024 and helped SDSU average 236.1 rushing yards per game while allowing only eight sacks. Four linemen who started multiple games last year are back, and the added bulk matters because South Dakota State knows what happened when protection and coverage broke down at Montana. Keali’i Ah Yat threw for 360 yards and four touchdowns in that 50-29 loss, Montana piled up 556 yards to SDSU’s 417, and the Grizzlies scored 30 straight points to take control.

Defensively, that memory is the pressure point. Dawson Ripperda, Reis Kirschenman, Logan Green and Jace Sifore return up front, and the linebacking corps looks deep, but the secondary still has the most proving to do. The Jackrabbits made their 14th straight playoff appearance in 2025. By August, the only way back to the top is to look less like a team with pieces and more like the one that once owned the FCS standard.