Bye weeks lend themselves to reflection, contemplation and evaluation – except on the banks of the Clark Fork River.
“I’ve never really liked breaking up the routine when you’re on a roll, but that’s all just BS, us sitting here needing something to talk about,” Bobby Hauck said at his press conference this week as Montana returns to play against Idaho. “It’s there, so deal with it as best you can. They didn’t ask me if we could go ahead and play last weekend.”
It’s hard not to be brusquely confident when you’re sitting on top of the world, no matter how easy the climb has been.
Five games into the season, the Montana Grizzlies have been exactly as good as they appeared to be at the beginning of this unseasonably warm fall. With a 5-0 record and a 201-57 point differential, they’ve done nothing to lower opinions of their talent. But, playing five mediocre to bad teams in a row, they haven’t had the opportunity to raise them either.
New stars have emerged – San Diego State transfer Lucas Johnson, all understated skill and command, is one of the best quarterbacks in the country, former Missoula Big Sky all-stater Levi Janacaro is the newest head-banging member of the Grizzlies’ heavy-metal defensive ensemble – but to an outsider, Montana has barely appeared to progress at all. Win 49-14 one week, win 53-16 the next. There’s been excitement – refer back to the frantic final five minutes of the first half of that 53-16 win against Portland State – but no suspense.
That will be coming shortly, even if the Grizzlies are exactly as dominant as they’ve shown. Rarely has a bye week been so vivid a dividing line between halves of a season. This one was an intermission – the first act, all gentle sunshine and blowout wins, set things into motion. When the curtain rises again, the action will be darker and more serious.
The relative staidness of the Grizzlies has allowed other storylines to rise around them in the Big Sky Conference, nowhere more exhilaratingly than just over the Lolo Pass in Moscow. In his first year as Idaho head coach, former South Dakota State offensive coordinator Jason Eck built excitement to start the season with two encouragingly close losses to Power 5 teams, and kept it stoked with three straight wins after that. The Vandals are 3-2, 2-0 in conference play, receiving top-25 votes and feeling themselves.
“They’re playing hard. They look really physical, which is certainly like they’ve been,” Hauck said. “They look like they’re enjoying the game and having fun playing.”
Montana hasn’t lost to Idaho in three straight Battles for the Little Brown Stein since the Vandals rejoined the FCS in 2018. And the Grizzlies are double-digit favorites this week after the line opened at Montana -8.5. But unlike earlier this season – remember the debate around Portland State? – there’s no question about whether Idaho is the best opponent Montana has played so far this year.
If the Griz beat the Vandals – even if they run them off the field, send them slinking back to Moscow with their momentum halted and their early-season confidence punctured – the questions will keep on coming. The Idaho game is the first wave of a back half of the season that sees Montana play Sacramento State and Weber State in consecutive weeks, and has Montana State lurking at the end – the Bobcats no doubt ready to get revenge for last year’s 29-10 bloodletting in Missoula. All top-six teams in the country, all on the road. This is when the action really begins.
“Idaho is a huge game this weekend,” Hauck said. “It’s our second-oldest rival, in terms of games played, and they’ve got a very good team. I like where we’re at, I think they probably like where they’re at.”
It feels unkind to reduce the first five weeks of the season, full of violence and strife and desperate effort, to a prologue. That doesn’t make it any less true.
