By BILL LAMBERTY – MONTANA STATE SPORTS INFORMATION; Published in 2010
It was cold.
Ask anyone involved in Montana State’s 10-3 playoff win over North Dakota State 43 years ago to the day before this Saturday’s playoff game between the Bobcats and Bison, and the topic of the frigid conditions comes up early in the conversation.
“It was so cold,” laughs Arnie Sgalio, MSU’s Sports Information Director in 1976 and formerly an executive with ESPN Regional, who spent the week in Fargo advancing the ABC National Game of the Week. “Really cold. And snowy.”
“It was a miserable windy day,” recalls long-time MSU Athletic Trainer Chuck Karnop. “It started blowing hard (before the game) and blew the same way for three hours.”
But the game played in blustery conditions on hard Astroturf – “It was carpet, just like what we’re standing on now,” says one of that day’s standouts Tom Kostrba, now a middle school teacher in Bozeman – resonates with many of its participants as more than a football game. It stands as a symbol of how football used to be.
“It was the element of kids just beating the person in front of them,” Kostrba recalls over a third-of-a-century later. MSU scored 10 second half points, all by freshmen, to claim a 10-3 win which advanced the team to the 1976 NCAA Division II National Championship game. Seven days later MSU claimed its second national crown.
Karnop, who witnessed many of the 33 meetings between NDSU and the Bobcats, said by the time those teams met for the 28th time that December day in 1976 the game had become legendary for many involved in the series.
“I think it kind of got so it symbolized that it was going to be football, almost (old-time) Butte type of football. Our guys would start getting ready three weeks ahead of time just to go in there whacking.”
Kostrba was in on many of that day’s big plays, rushing for 106 yards and setting up both Bobcat scores. With the Bobcats trailing 3-0 at halftime, Kostrba gained 34 yards on seven carries on the first drive of the second half to move deep into Bison territory. On third-and-four from the NDSU five yard-line, sophomore quarterback Paul Dennehy found freshman tight end Butch Damberger in the end zone on a play Damberger said he will never forget.
“When the play was called I knew it was coming to my side, and my heart started pumping,” said the tight end from Cut Bank. “I released off the line and ran my route to the corner of the end zone – to this day I’m not sure I ran the right route – and Paul floated one in there over my shoulder and I caught it over the top in the corner of the end zone. I didn’t know if I was close to being out of bounds, so I just kind of slid down. I’ve had people tell me they could see the grin on my face when I was running back to the bench, and I’ll never forget that feeling. It was pretty exciting.”
On the eighth play of the fourth quarter, with the Bobcats tightening their grip on the game, freshman Jeff Muri from Miles City drilled a 34-yard field goal to give MSU a seven-point lead. The Bison gained only three first downs in the fourth quarter, one on a halfback pass, and when Butte’s Jim Janhunen ended NDSU’s only serious late-game threat with an interception in the final five minutes the win was all but sealed.
Kostrba said the frigid conditions – 21 degrees at kickoff, but windy throughout the game, according to reports – played to his strength. “It was a great battle, (in) the wind and the snow and the outdoor stadium. It was a hard surface, and it was pretty challenging. You had to be a north-south runner, and that’s what I was, so I had an advantage right off the bat.”
Kostrba said he knew from a conversation with All-America offensive lineman Jon Borchardt that the Bobcats had plenty of life in spite of being shut out for the first two quarters.
“At halftime I asked Jon, ‘How are you doing out there,’ and he goes, ‘I have been blocking my man, and I will continue blocking my man for the rest of the game.’ That’s how it was… we just had to overcome what they gave us.”
How meaningful was the MSU-NDSU rivalry in the 1970s? Montana State foreshadowed the 1976 playoff win by whipping the Bison 34-7 in that season’s second game. Two games into the 1977 season, the Bobcats won a 24-17 heart-stopper in Fargo. In the 1976 and ’77 seasons, NDSU compiled an 18-5-1 record. Three of those five losses were to the Bobcats.
The series lapsed after a 21-19 Bobcat win in 1980 when MSU moved to Division I with the rest of the Big Sky Conference, while NDSU stayed in Division II. But with the Bison transitioning to Division I football in 2005, the old rivals got together again. It was like the ’70s all over again, without the wide-collared leisure suits, as the Bobcats earned a hard-fought 20-17 victory.
Still, 34 years after that classic old-school playoff game, many of those who witnessed it from the Bobcat sideline don’t recall the stats, or even the final score, correctly. But they remember the nature of the game, and the nature of the series.
“That game was a hard-hitting son of a (gun),” Karnop said reverently. “The thing I remember about them is that the harder you popped them, the bigger their smiles got. And it was the same the other way. Like two teams that really just wanted to play football, and didn’t know any better.”
Photo courtesy of Montana Sports Information. All Rights Reserved.
