George Ferguson Column: Lights' rebuilding made more progress than meets the eye

Losing is hard. Rebuilding is hard. And while patience may be a virtue, patience is pretty nonexistent in the world of college football.

And yet, following last Saturday’s season finale between the Montana State University-Northern Lights and the College of Idaho Yotes, patience is something everybody needs to have when it comes to Lights’ football.

Yes, I write about the Lights every day, so I’m well aware of the numbers. I know exactly how many games they haven’t won, and I know all about the statistics, the Frontier Conference standings, and so on. In other words, I see all the negatives every day.

But I also get to see things that maybe people don’t notice. I see spring and fall practices. I know what the coaches do in their offices, I know how much the players lift and run in the offseason, how much film is studied, et cetera. That’s one of the great parts of my job. I get to see things from the inside.

And what I saw from the Lights this past season, and I really noticed on Saturday, is a team that wants to win, that wants to be good, that wants to be better. I saw a team with an attitude, a fight in them that never goes away.

Case in point, in the fourth quarter of Saturday’s game, Zach McKinley came out for a couple of plays and in came freshman running back BJ Peters. The Lights were losing, they weren’t going to come all the way back and, yet, Peters, on one of his few carries of the season, trucked C of I linebacker Chris Washburn flat on his back and kept on running. I was a solid 60 yards away from the play, but the sound was deafening. It was a violent collision, and it was one that personifies the Lights’ desire to be a better football team.

There’s an attitude with these Lights that,no matter how far behind, no matter how rough things get, they aren’t going to give up. In fact, they don’t just not give up, they believe they're a team that can win football games, that can compete every week in the rugged Frontier.

And that attitude has already carried the Lights a long way.

Yes, Northern only won one more game than they did last season. Yes, the Lights lost their last six after their triumph over Carroll College back in September. But this season was still different. Teams respected the Lights. They knew they had to play well to win. They didn’t just skip ahead to the next week and overlook Northern.

For some of last season, I don’t know if that was the case.

Something else that struck me week-in and week-out this season was that Northern didn’t get down to the point that it didn’t want to compete anymore. Practices were just as intense following every game, and the next game, the Lights competed at the highest level possible, led by the amazing and classy senior class that was honored before Saturday’s finale.

No, when you take a much deeper look into the Lights this season — a look that goes beyond the scoreboard — you will know they improved. And the direction they're going is the right one, though it may still take some time and patience to get there.

“I know we are a better football team this year than we were last year,” second-year head coach Aaron Christensen said. “I know we’re better today than we were back in August. I believe that. I think we’re better in all three phases. We want to win every game, and we didn’t get that done, but this team has come a long way from where it was at this time a year ago, and the goal is to keep moving forward. To keep getting better, and the guys in this program, they want to do that. So I really believe we’re going in the right direction.”

I believe it too, coach. I’ve seen it. I see things that go well beyond what the scoreboard says.

And so do your players.

“I believe this team is going to explode next year,” McKinley said after his final game in a Northern uniform. “There’s a lot of really good young kids in this program, and they are all in. They work hard and they want to get better. I believe this program is really going to take off in the future.”

Strong words from one of the most sincere, hard-working and most respected football players to ever put on a Lights’ helmet. And though I already believed what McKinley was saying before he said it, to me, he’s like E.F. Hutton. When Zach McKinley talks, I listen.

Yes, it was another tough season in the standings for the Lights. Yes, it was another year with a lot of painful losses. But that doesn’t mean progress wasn’t made. It doesn’t mean the Lights didn’t do things they couldn’t or weren’t able to do a season ago.

And while patience isn’t something that is readily accepted in the world of college football, or in the world of instant gratification, watching the Lights and the way they played one last time on Saturday, something tells me that if we all have a little patience, the Lights are one day, and probably soon, going to shine bright again.