Three years ago, Marcus Knight was a record-setting All-American running back for the Montana Grizzlies who looked poised to be a household name in Missoula for several seasons to come.
On Wednesday, after injuries took him from incipient stardom to the middle of the depth chart and eventually into the transfer portal, Knight announced an unprecedented move that will keep him in the Garden City but take him from the gridiron to another field. A former high school star in lacrosse as well as football, Knight plans to play for Montana’s lacrosse team this spring semester.
“I am a lacrosse player at the moment,” Knight told Skyline Sports’ Colter Nuanez during Wednesday’s Nuanez Now on ESPN 102.9 Missoula. “I played all through middle school, junior high, high school, and had some opportunities to play college lacrosse, but then I ultimately decided to play football. But it’s still always been in the back of my head, like, this is really what I want to do. So here we are now.”
Given the games’ similar dependence on size, strength and speed, it’s not uncommon to see former lacrosse stars make the transition to football. Jim Brown and John Mackey both played lacrosse as well as football at Syracuse, while former Bills and Patriots receiver Chris Hogan played lacrosse for four years at Penn State before taking a fifth year of eligibility to play football at Monmouth and making the NFL as an undrafted free agent. Jared Bernhardt won the Tewaaraton Award as the top college lacrosse player in the country at Maryland before quarterbacking Ferris State to a Division II national football title and making the Atlanta Falcons’ roster this year.
But examples of athletes making the switch in the other direction are few and far between – particularly when they’re as well-established on the gridiron as Knight.
After transferring from California JUCO Citrus College, Knight ran for 1,030 yards and a jaw-dropping 23 touchdowns for the Griz in 2019, his first year in Missoula. His rushing touchdown mark led all players in FCS that year and broke a school record set by Griz legend Chase Reynolds. Knight scored 25 total touchdowns, also a school record.
“This is big news,” said Tucker Sargent, head coach of Montana’s lacrosse team. “I’ve had messages from kids on the football team where, you know, maybe they played (lacrosse) for a year or two. They’re all great athletes and they think they can just pick it up. … (But with Knight), I realized this is not just a kid who’s played some, this is a very special, high-caliber player.”
Knight joins a team that made it to the national semifinals a year ago. The Grizzlies are not a varsity program, but play in Division II of the Men’s Collegiate Lacrosse Association, an organization that governs club-level lacrosse across the nation. After winning two games at the national tournament a year ago before falling to Rhode Island in the national semifinals, the Griz were ranked No. 4 in the final national poll. They were recently picked as the favorite to win their conference, the Pacific Northwest Collegiate Lacrosse League, in 2023, receiving six out of eight votes in the preseason poll.
“Whether (Knight) chose to play or not, I’m very comfortable with the team that we had,” Sargent said. “The impact players that were coming back, we added a lot of very talented freshmen that I’m super excited to see play this year. It’s just like one of those things, it’s like, alright, great. We just have one more friggin’ awesome weapon in our artillery.”
Knight grew up playing lacrosse even before football – “I wasn’t old enough to play football yet, and it was the only other sport that you could wear a helmet in and hit people,” he said – and was a high-level lacrosse recruit at St. Margarets High School in San Juan Capistrano, California, earning scholarship offers to play the sport at the full varsity level from Utah, among other schools.
He went the gridiron route instead, transferring to Montana after an all-state freshman year at Citrus. But between the COVID-19 pandemic and a bad knee injury, he could never replicate the magic of his scintillating sophomore season with the Griz.
After the 2020 season was canceled, he missed both games in Montana’s abbreviated spring 2021 season and then all of the 2021 fall season as the Griz returned to the FCS quarterfinals with freshmen Xavier Harris and Junior Bergen getting the bulk of the carries.
“You get separated from the team, you get separated from the community. It’s like you’re not even a part of anything anymore. It’s a lonely place,” Knight said. “A whole new group of guys came in, and everyone that I played with is now leaving. I was the outsider when I came back, right? Which is weird, because it was my team. But when you’re hurt, you’re not part of the team for a year, basically.”
Knight returned to play in nine games for Montana in 2022, running for 292 yards and four touchdowns on 73 carries, second-most on the team.
He entered the transfer portal in mid-November. Sargent, who stayed in touch with Knight throughout his football career, reached out around that time.
“I just kind of threw a Hail Mary text out there and said, ‘Hey, any chance you might want to play this spring?’” Sargent said. “And then the text back floored me, it just said, ‘Hold that thought coach, there’s a chance I might.’ Not at all what I was expecting.”
Because he un-enrolled from Montana when he entered the portal, there was necessary paperwork involved in getting Knight back on campus. An academic-All Big Sky selection in 2019, he’s studying criminology and sociology.
After experiencing some of the highest highs and lowest lows a football player can have, making the unorthodox move away from the gridiron gives him the chance to finish out that degree in the place he’s come to call home – while re-connecting with one of his first sports loves.
“Don’t get me wrong, football has been my passion my whole life,” Knight said. “But there’s a difference between lacrosse and football. Football is more of a work and work and work, and then hopefully we win and then we’ll be happy. But then lacrosse, it goes back to the roots of the game. The Native Americans, it’s a medicine game. … Lacrosse players talk about the stick being, you know, the paintbrush. And if you work on your craft enough, you become the artist.”
