BOISE, Idaho — One Montana State hoops squad has the most veteran head coach the Big Sky Conference has seen this side of Robin Selvig while the other Bobcat basketball team has a first-year head coach forced with the unenviable task of taking over for one of the Treasure State’s favorite sons.
One Bobcat basketball team has established itself as a perennial Big Sky contender under the longest-tenured coach in the league while the other had just proven it could win at an elite level after years of mediocrity that included a certain frustrating inferiority when it came to the rivalry against the hated Montana Grizzlies, only to see Danny Sprinkle walk out the door in Bozeman and walk on to the national college basketball stage.
One Bobcat basketball team had the daunting task of replacing perhaps the greatest point guard and certainly the most popular duo in program history when Darian White decided to play her final season at Nebraska and Kola Bad Bear decided to take the unlikely path from Division I to Division II so she could play her final campaign in her hometown of Billings.
The other Bobcat basketball team made the last head coaching hire in the entire country in Division I men’s hoops, forcing a first-year head coach with nothing but Division II and Division III experience to try to rebuild a decimated roster in short order. And some of the empty spots represented a few of the most devastating departures in program and league history.
Have you seen Raequan Battle tearing up the Big XII? Or Darius Brown II becoming the reincarnation of Mr. Clutch in the Mountain West? Or the evolution of Great Osobor into one of the dominant bigs in the country? Imagine if any of those guys were still Bobcats, let alone all three at the same time.
Yet in a most unlikely scenario, as the Big Sky Conference Tournaments here in Idaho’s capital city enter their fourth day and the final four in each bracket is set, both Bobcat basketball teams have proven they can overcome all those obstacles, reload and make another run at the Big Dance.
On the women’s side, 19th-year head coach Tricia Binford has been masterful in navigating a season filled with such a calamity of injuries and adversity, it’s bordered on a theater of the absurd.
And somehow, despite shooting 24 percent and missing 17 of its 19 3-point attempts, Montana State is back in the semifinals, a round farther than the Bobcat women advanced in White and Bad Bear’s last seasons with the program. This MSU squad has had injuries spread like a contagion and has employed a platoon of rookies who are still finding consistency when it comes to performing on the Big Sky’s biggest stage.
But Binford’s squad has never wavered. MSU is in the final four of this tournament yet again, while White is getting run on SportsCenter for guarding Iowa superstar Caitlyn Clark rather than captaining the Bobcats in a search for their third NCAA Tournament berth under Binford.
The Bobcat women have done it with a cohesive yet relentless and aggressive style that was on full display on Monday afternoon. The Bobcats force 26 turnovers and allowed Sac State to shoot 25 percent on the way to a gritty 47-44 win.
Despite seeing pretty much every starter miss time because of injuries, including the loss of star senior post Lexi Deden before Big Sky Conference play began to a season-ending knee injury, Montana State is knocking on the door of the tournament championship game again.
“When you add up the totality of the pivoting our team has done all season long, it’s been remarkable,” Binford said in the days leading up to the tournament. “Every week, it felt like a constant pivot of who’s in the lineup, who’s in the rotation, who do we need to make sure they have play calls in this position.
“It’s been like that all year long yet the effort of the kids and the mentality of the kids in sticking together has never waivered. It’s such a credit to the kids for who they decided they wanted to be last spring. We knew there would be a ton of change and they came up with the hashtag “United as one” for that reason. They’ve wanted to be all about the solutions and they have been pretty constant.
“I’ve really never seen anything like it. It’s been one of the most rewarding seasons of my entire career as a coach.”
On the Montana State men’s side of things, Bobcat basketball went from good but not great during the Mick Durham years to stuck in fourth place during the Brad Huse years to riding the Kingda Ka Six Flags roller coaster during five years under former coach Brian Fish.
And while big daddy Fish brought in exceptional talent like Tyler Hall, Harald Frey and Keljin Blevins, MSU never tasted the success of the Stu Starner Bobcats in the late 1980s or Mick Durham the mid-1990s until the prodigal’s son returned.
Danny Sprinkle once hit seven 3-pointers in the Big Sky Tournament championship game to get the Bobcats to the NCAA Tournament for the second time ever in 1996.
MSU did not return to the Big Dance until Sprinkle’s third year as the head coach of his alma mater 26 years later. After back-to-back trips to the NCAA Tournament, including last year’s head-turning performance against Kansas State in the first round, Sprinkle moved on and in turn moved into the national spotlight.
Last week, Utah State won its first outright Mountain West title ever and Sprinkle is a leading candidate for National Coach of the Year. A huge part of the Cinderella story has been the play of a pair of former Bobcats turned Aggies in MW all-conference selections in Brown and Osobor.
And while the Treasure State has collectively rallied around Sprinkle’s unbelievable success on the national stage and while Sprinkle is already one of the most prominent native Montanans to land on the Division I college basketball scene, the dominoes that fell after he took the head job in Logan could (and probably should) have cratered the MSU program.
Matt Logie was the last head coach hired among any Division I program in the United States. The former Point Loma (San Diego) skipper made last-ditch efforts to recruit a whole slew of posts to fill his roster, including Julius “Juice” Mims, a jumping jack power forward out of Billings who was committed to Idaho before Logie got the MSU job and stayed committed to first-year head coach Alex Pribble even after Logie got hired.
With Brown and Osobor playing for Sprinkle at Utah State along with superstar slashing forward Raequan Battle playing at West Virginia while former Big Sky MVP Jubrile Belo anchors the paint for the United Kingdom national team, it seemed like Logie would have an unenviable battle to be even competitive.
Then when Patirck McMahon, a young man from Alaska who both Sprinkle and Logie said had the talent to be Montana State’s best player, went down with a season-ending injury before the year began, no one would’ve blamed Logie’s ‘Cats for rolling over or fading to the back of the Big Sky race.
There’s certainly been moments for Logie’s scrappy, unorthodox and atypical group in which dark days seemed to be back for Bobcat basketball. But there’s also been incredible highs, including beating every one of the top four teams in the league at least once this season other than rival Montana. And after Monday’s wicked, mind-melting 91-82 destruction of Weber State in the quarterfinals of the Big Sky Tournament, Montana State is into the semifinals for the fourth year in a row.
“If anything, this win should give our guys confidence and proof of concept of what we’ve been preaching all year,” Logie said following his first Big Sky Tournament win as a head coach. “We’ve been moving all year toward March, from the beginning. We knew that in the long run, we were starting a lap behind some other programs because of the transition phase we went through. We had to play catch up throughout the year and ride that roller coaster and emerge from those valleys and be prepared to play our best basketball in March.
“And ultimately, if you are playing your best basketball this week, you can accomplish all your goals and dreams that we have for this program, the standard that’s been set for this program, so our guys have been winning toward that. We are just one game into that process. There’s no satisfaction at all. I’m just happy the guys have seen the proof in the pudding in sticking together and continuing to grow through those valleys we had earlier in the year.”
In his second game as the head coach, Logie led MSU to a 63-60 win over Cal. Yes, that Cal. Fourteen days later, Montana State lost at home to Rocky Mountain College. Yes, that Rocky, the Battlin’ Bears of the NAIA Frontier Conference.
An overtime win at Southern Utah was followed 11 days later with an 86-64 loss to Weber State in Ogden, Utah two days before the calendar flipped to 2024.
MSU won five of seven to start league play, the lone losses coming in the Purple Palace to Weber and to the Griz in Bozeman.
A blown lead in an eventual 94-91 loss at Portland State came five days before a 70-60 win over Eastern Washington, handing EWU its first league loss of the season and one of just five Big Sky losses over the last two years for EWU.
MSU lost five of its next six and six of its next eight overall, including an embarrassing 66-63 home loss to last-place Sac State that helped the Hornets end an 11-game losing streak.
Seven days later, a 108-104 overtime loss to Eastern Washington that helped the Eagles avenge one of just three of their Big Sky losses and help the champs carry the momentum of claiming the Big Sky banner two nights earlier could have derailed the Bobcats.
Instead, MSU bounced back for a 76-64 win over Weber State in the regular-season finale for both teams. And seven days after that thorough win, Montana State ripped Weber’s collective faces off at Idaho Central Arena. At one point on Monday night in the quarterfinal matchup that pitted MSU and WSU against one another for the third postseason in a row, Montana State made 14 consecutive field goal attempts.
The Bobcats scored 66 points after halftime, nailing 10 triples in the second stanza alone to post a 91-82 win to move into the semifinals for the fourth straight season.
“We know we have a ton of momentum that we’ve been building off of despite the tough loss at Eastern Washington because we felt we played really well that entire game and a couple of things didn’t go our way,” MSU junior wing Patterson said. “We feel like we are playing really well and the best time to be playing well is in March. A few of us have made a run in this tournament before and we are trying to do it again.”
Binford has won 328 games in her 19 seasons at MSU and has four regular-season league title and two Big Sky tournament titles (all in the last nine years) on her resume. Yet this might be her best coaching job. She’s taken a team that not only lost White and Bad Bear to the transfer portal but also has lost point guard Dylan Phillip, a slated starter, along with Deden, a preseason all-conference forward, to season-ending injuries.
Senior wing Katelyn Limardo, senior post Taylor Janssen and junior center Lindsay Hein have all missed time. Binford has pulled multiple redshirts this season while rolling with a lineup that includes four freshmen and a sophomore amongst its top nine in the rotation.
Yet here the Bobcats are, bucking the notion that the Year (s) of the Bobcats have faded despite the massive overturn each program has endured over the last several months.
“We’ve been preparing them for the Big Sky Tournament and a lot of those games come down to really tight possessions and are not a team that are putting major points on the board. And that’s our normal,” Binford said. “Us being in the normal of us being in these adversities, in these situations, it should be a confidence booster for our kids.”
The Montana State women take on No. 1 seed Eastern Washington at noon on Tuesday. MSU won 61-60 in Cheney in January and lost on Jamie Loera’s unforgettable buzzer-beater 52-50 in Bozeman on March 2.
The Montana State men take on No. 10 Sac State on Tuesday evening. The Hornets became the first last-place and lowest seeded team in league history to topple the No. 1 seed. Sac posted a 74-69 win over EWU on Sunday night.
The Bobcats split with Sacramento State this season, the last loss looming large. But Montana State is still the defending champions in this tournament until they are not. And if Monday night was any indication, no Big Sky opponent will be excited to take on the surging Bobcats.
“It’s all come down to staying together and thinking about we can do whatever we put our minds to,” said Robert Ford III, Montana State’s first-team All-Big Sky point guard and the league’s Defensive MVP. “Coming back, it was a rebuild but our coaches don’t call it a rebuild, we call it a re load because we feel like we have a lot of good pieces.
“Our mindset all year has been one at a time and doing that, you can keep pushing it forward. We have the confidence we can play with anybody in this league. We are very confident in ourselves.”
The Montana State women tip at noon
