As Bobby Hauck said last Saturday after the Montana Grizzlies’ narrow 26-23 win over Northern Iowa, all that really matters is that the Griz are 1-0.
This week, the task will be maintaining that momentum as the Grizzlies try to get to 2-0 in their home non-conference schedule.
The Griz take on Drake at 1 p.m. Saturday at Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
“It certainly was a fun night in our stadium on Saturday night,” Hauck said. “From a team and personal standpoint, it was just electric … and it was good to get on a winning track right out of the gate. … Now it’s on to Drake. They’re a good team. … We will have our hands full on Saturday.”
The Bulldogs, from Des Moines, Iowa, shouldn’t be as tough a test as Montana faced last week. Drake is non-scholarship for football and plays in the Pioneer Football League, which has only had an automatic playoff spot since 2014. That means that the Grizzlies, for one of just a few times this season, are going to be clear favorites heading into Saturday’s game.
“We know it’s going to be a tall task,” Drake coach Rick Fox said. “We’re going up against a great football team, as we saw last Saturday. … Montana’s just got a lot of athletes on both sides of the ball … a lot of people running around on defense and making plays. So when you look at it, it’s like, okay, where’s the weakness? And then the room’s silent.”
That’s rhetoric from an opposing coach that hearkens back to a decade ago, when Hauck’s Grizzlies were an FCS powerhouse, and not this year, when the consensus is that they’re a middling Big Sky team with a lot of weaknesses.
Regardless of what Fox says, the Bulldogs do have the ability to surprise Montana on Saturday if the Grizzlies look past them. Drake has won seven games in three of Fox’s four seasons at the helm, and finished second in the PFL last year with a 6-2 conference record. Pioneer League teams have beaten Big Sky Conference teams in the playoffs each of the last two seasons, with San Diego winning at Cal Poly in 2016 and at Northern Arizona last November.
Like Northern Iowa, the Bulldogs return an experienced quarterback in Grant Kraemer, who threw for 20 touchdowns in 11 games in 2017. His top wide receiver, Steven Doran, is also back from last year, and the duo could test a Montana defense that let Northern Iowa storm back into last week’s game through the air.
“[Kraemer] is in his third year starting for us,” Fox said. “We need him to play well, take care of the ball and make great decisions. He did that last year for us, and we need him to do that again this year.”
The Bulldogs’ Week 1 game against William Jewell was canceled because of weather after just a few plays, meaning Montana doesn’t have a great idea of what’s coming its way. Hauck didn’t comment much on Drake’s personnel and scheme in Monday’s press conference, demurring because he hadn’t seen any current film on the Bulldogs.
“They’ve got that advantage, which is significant, so we’ll be doing a lot of guessing this week as to what we’re going to see,” Hauck said. “We also know that they’ve got a very veteran team, with eight starters that are seniors on either side of the ball.”
As for Hauck’s own team, the Grizzlies answered a lot of questions in last Saturday’s win, and this week will be about seeing if those trends can continue.
Will Washington-Grizzly stay loud, rowdy and packed now that the first-game novelty has worn off?
Is Dalton Sneed as good as he looked in Week 1? What about the Griz defense?
It might take more than two weeks to answer some of these, but the next data point is Saturday and, regardless of the opponent, Hauck wants to see improvement from his team.
“We need to get better in a lot of areas,” Hauck said. “We need to run the ball better, we need to be better on third down on both sides of the ball. We need to attend to detail across the board. … That’s a pretty good start.”
Photos by Jason Bacaj and Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved.
