George Ferguson Column: Right now, Montana's big three in college football aren't that big

I walked out of Washington-Grizzly Stadium last Saturday a broken man. Yeah, I know that’s a little dramatic, but for any of you who saw the Montana Grizzlies’ loss to Portland State, you can understand that being broken might not be a stretch.

On the long journey from the stadium back to my traditional parking spot in downtown Missoula, I didn’t say maybe more than two words to my wife. But in my head I said a lot. In the 10-15 minutes it takes to slog back downtown, I basically wrote this column in my head. I was going to do it. I was going to pull a Skip Bayless and absolutely rip my alma mater to shreds for the loss.

But alas, I realized, I’m not Skip Bayless. I’m not a hatchet man. I think I’d be pretty good at it, but that’s not my style. So I shelved the column I had constructed in my head, and this is what I came up with instead.

A warning though: While I’m not the type of columnist to rip a team, a coach or a player limb for limb in a column, if you like college football in the state of Montana, you still may not like what I have to say.

That’s because the Grizzlies’ loss to the Vikings, a team whose only win at that point was against NAIA College of Idaho, got me thinking about the fact that right now, big time college football in Montana just isn’t as good as most of us have become accustomed too or would like it to be.

I mean really, if you’re being honest, you can’t disagree and I’ll give you three examples to support my case.

I’ll start with the Griz. I have given Montana the benefit of the doubt the last five or six years. The scandal that cost Robin Pflugrad his job, the NCAA probation, and the Bob Stitt experiment, I’ve tried really hard to stick with the mantra that, nothing lasts forever. At some point, the Griz were going to fall off, and when they did they fell hard. For many reasons, though, including a carousel of coaching changes, I’ve stayed patient with the Griz, even if my wife would respectfully disagree.

As tough as it was to watch the Griz lose to PSU last weekend, I’m going to stay patient for one reason, and that reason is they’re going through yet another coaching change. Yes, I’m aware that the new coach is Bobby Hauck, who is closing in on becoming the program’s all-time winningest coach. But just because Hauck led the Griz to amazing heights in his first stint as Griz’ coach, doesn’t mean he can just swoop back in and recreate that in less than one year’s time. Football, life, neither one of them work that way.

No, the fact of the matter is, the Griz haven’t won a national championship since 2001. They haven’t won a Big Sky Conference championship since 2009, and they have lost two in a row to the hated Montana State Bobcats. By Griz standards, those three accomplishments, or lack of, are not good enough in Griz Nation. And it is a glaring reminder that, for now, Montana football is kind of stuck in a mediocre position. It’s at present, no one’s fault, but that’s the way it is, and while I have no doubt it’s going to change, as evidenced by last Saturday’s disaster in Missoula, it’s going to take time for it to change.

And that leads me to the Bobcats. Montana State has had its own run of mediocrity of late. The Bobcats seemed to be on a high trajectory not too many years ago, under Rob Ash. But that trajectory wound up trending the wrong way, and in 2015 Ash was given his walking papers.

So like I’m giving the Grizzlies now, the Cats were going to get a pass from me when Jeff Choate was hired. No question, it was going to take time to build the program the way he wanted it, and it has. MSU has endured two straight losing seasons,. Even with the two huge wins over the Griz, the bottom line is, the first two years of the coaching change at MSU have been rough, and the Cats haven’t even threatened to return to Big Sky prominence.

Now however, I’m not so sure MSU should still be rebuilding. Choate has continuity in his staff, he has done an excellent job in recruiting, and optimism and support in Bobcat Nation has been high all the while. Still, to me, I just don’t feel as though MSU is ready to get over the hump. I know, the Cats have played two of the Top 5 teams in the FCS, and that’s a tough schedule. But they were blistered in both of those games, and while I don’t think MSU is going to suffer another losing season, the losses to South Dakota State and Eastern Washington show me the Cats, just like the Griz, are nowhere near ready to compete with the big boys of the FCS — and that’s the point. MSU, like Montana, should BE THE BIG BOYS of the FCS. That’s my expectation, and it bothers me when they aren’t.

In fact, they’re not even the big boys of the Big Sky right now.

And speaking of big boys, there’s one more that is no longer. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what happened to Carroll College. At one time, Carroll wasn’t the big boy of the Frontier, or the NAIA, no the Fighting Saints WERE the NAIA. Remember those days? Remember the Sports Illustrated cover?

Yes, what’s happened to Carroll is shocking. It’s shocking to me because unlike the Cats and Griz or the Big Sky, I cover Frontier football for a living. I study it, watch it and track it. And, with all due respect to Montana Tech, Rocky Mountain College and UM-Western, who have all built fine football programs in recent years, Carroll’s fall is something that I never, ever saw coming.

And with that fall, I don’t like to see what’s happened to Carroll head coach Mike Van Diest. He’s one of the greatest to ever stalk the sidelines, at any level and yet, maybe quietly, I know a faction of Carroll’s fanbase has been calling for his head. It may be the nature of the business, but for a coach who’s achieved as much as coach Van Diest has, I don’t like to see how things have turned. I mean be honest, could anyone who has ever followed Carroll football ever think that the Saints could possibly have four losing seasons in a row? If you’re answer is yes, you’re not being honest and, again, that’s no disrespect to the rest of the Frontier Conference, but there’s just no way Carroll should be struggling like they are right now.

And yet, the Saints are struggling. What that means is Montana’s three most identifiable college football programs, the three that have the most fans and the most coverage and have had the most success, for decades, are no longer those programs that so many of us have grown up with, followed or loved for so long.

For me, that’s depressing because I love college football, I love college football in the state of Montana, and even though I’m a Griz fan at heart, and also an alumni of MSU-Northern, I still have a healthy respect for MSU and Carroll, and I’d much rather those programs be the flagships they’ve been than see them going through what they have gone through in recent years.

In other words, none of the major players in the Montana college football scene, right now, are major players, and it really pains me to say that. While many of you probably don’t want to hear what I’ve just said, whether it’s Bobcat fans telling me how much better the Cats are getting, or Griz fans telling me that it’s all Bob Stitt’s fault, or Carroll fans telling me about all the quarterback injuries the Saints have had the last four years, the bottom line is, right now, on Oct. 10, 2018, I’m not wrong about any of those programs. I’m not wrong that the Griz, the Cats and the Saints are not the big boys they once were, and my point of all this is that on Saturday’s in the fall, the state of Montana was a lot more fun when all three of them were the big boys.