MISSOULA – Early-season Montana football home games promise plenty – sun in the sky, fun in the stands and pressure on the field that doesn’t match the laid-back party happening throughout campus: in the eyes of many, the Grizzlies need to not just win, but dominate.
It’s an unsolvable mandate for the Griz in games like Saturday’s season opener against non-scholarship Butler of the Pioneer League. The weaker the opponent, the more strongly that questions have to be answered – and the Montana team that walked into Washington-Grizzly Stadium on Saturday came with plenty of questions. Who would start at quarterback between transfers Sam Vidlak and Clifton McDowell? How would they replace three All-Americans on defense? What would the new schemes of two debutant coordinators – Brent Pease on offense and Ronnie Bradford on defense – look like?
And while those questions were technically answered (quickly and respectively: Vidlak, with depth, and pretty much the same as last year, particularly on defense), a surprisingly game Butler team and an uneven effort from the Griz left plenty more uncertainty swirling around, even after McDowell came into the game and led two second-half touchdown drives to help Montana pull out a 35-20 win.
Last year’s season opener for the Griz, a 47-0 laugher against Northwestern State, was never in doubt after Montana opened with touchdowns on two of its first three possessions, all while stifling the Demons’ offense.
This one very much was, particularly after Butler quarterback Bret Bushka tossed a 26-yard touchdown to Ryan Lezon on a fourth-and-2 play late in the third quarter to cap a flurry of two Butler touchdowns in two minutes, nine seconds and bring the Bulldogs to within 21-20 late in the third quarter.
McDowell, who played just two snaps in the first half – both ineffective quarterback keepers – trotted onto the field to start Montana’s next series. His first carry to start the drive went for 10 yards. His second went for 16. With Butler’s defense crashing down to stop him, he then handed the ball to redshirt freshman running back Eli Gillman, who bounced around left end and got to the pylon for a 24-yard touchdown run to put Montana up 28-20.
“That was our plan going into the game,” Montana head coach Bobby Hauck said about the switch to McDowell. “Speaking to him throughout the second half, he was on it in terms of the checks and all of the stuff that we wanted him to do. I thought he was really on top of things.”
McDowell went on to lead a 54-yard drive that ended on downs inside the Butler 10-yard line, as well as a nine-play, 63-yard scoring drive that he capped with his first Griz touchdown – a 1-yard sneak on fourth-and-goal – to provide the final margin of 35-10.
The Griz completely abandoned the pass game during that stretch – McDowell attempted just three passes in the 31 snaps he played, completing one for five yards – but gashed Butler anyway, with McDowell, Gillman and Xavier Harris running wild as the Bulldogs struggled with the introduction of the plus-one quarterback run game.
Gillman, the former Minnesota Gatorade Player of the Year making his first start after some late cameos last season, ran for 119 yards and a score on 19 carries, with 98 of those yards coming after halftime. Montana ended up outrushing the Bulldogs 230 to 41 thanks to Gillman, McDowell and a defense that held the visitors to 1.6 yards per carry.
“I think that’s the way, a little bit, in the run game,” Hauck said. “You have a chance to wear people down a little bit. I told (Gillman) at halftime, great job. He took care of the ball, he ran hard, got some yards after contact, and then in the second half, it was awesome.”
That all came after Vidlak led the Griz to a 21-6 lead at halftime. His second pass of the game, a short slant over the middle that Junior Bergen took 54 yards to the house, looked like the ideal of Pease’s new offense and an answer to Griz fan’s prayers – using space to isolate one of Montana’s shifty playmakers one-on-one, and letting him do the rest.
The teams traded two field goals apiece after that – including a 49-yard bomb that would have been good from well beyond 50 from new Griz kicker Grant Glasgow, a transfer from Kansas – before Vidlak led a seven-play, 68-yard drive just before halftime that ended with Xavier Harris scoring from 3 yards out to give the Griz (on the ensuing 2-point conversion) a 21-6 lead at halftime.
Vidlak, who transferred from Boise State, finished 15 of 25 for 180 yards, one touchdown and two interceptions.
His second pick, thrown to a diving Lucas Kozlowski as he scrambled right out of the pocket, came immediately after Bushka’s 32-yard touchdown throw to Jyran Mitchell up the right sideline to bring the Bulldogs to within 21-13, and set up Bushka’s second touchdown throw when Lezon snuck back across the grain of the play and won a race to the pylon to make it 21-20.
That triggered the switch to McDowell, which proved to be an effective adjustment for the Griz – a feather in the cap of, and an encouraging sign for, the newly re-shuffled Montana coaching staff.
Of course, home openers against pushovers – Montana was a 38.5-point favorite on SportsBet Montana – are not supposed to ever require sharp mid-game adjustments to the game plan, regardless of how plucky said pushover turns out to be or how well they work.
More worryingly, the Griz will run into the same problem over the next month as they play a succession of teams they’ll continue to be favored heavily over – Utah Tech, D-II Ferris State, and two Big Sky bottomfeeders in Northern Arizona and Idaho State. All should be wins. But as the Griz learned on Saturday, sometimes a win isn’t enough to answer lingering questions.
NOTES: Ryder Meyer, a Fairfield product, didn’t start at safety but led Montana with 12 tackles.
“Playing in this defense has been great,” Meyer said. “We’ve had a loaded safety group ever since I’ve been here, so I’ve had a great opportunity to learn from guys like Josh (Sandry), like Robby (Hauck), and then the safety group we have right now is just awesome dudes that I love playing with.”
– Defensive end Kale Edwards has 2.5 TFLs for Montana, and defensive tackle Alex Gubner had his first sack of the season.
– Griz safety Nash Fouch went moderately viral with his hit on Butler receiver Jack Bill in the fourth quarter. Fouch, screaming straight downhill, leveled Bill as he tried to get to the edge on a fly sweep.
– Neither team got the message that a season-opening non-conference game with a near-40-point spread is supposed to involve vanilla playcalling. Butler ran a reverse flea flicker with the ball ending up back in Bushka’s hands after a couple pitches for a big gain to Lezon on one of its early field-goal drives. Montana ran a fake punt with the snap going to defensive tackle Kellen Detrick in the second quarter. Detrick scampered around right end for 19 yards and the first down. The Griz got their 2-point conversion by lining up in an unbalanced formation and having the snap go to Meyer, who ran it in. And Montana’s longest pass play with McDowell in the game actually came from the former high school quarterback Junior Bergen, who took a jet sweep handoff running left, but then circled back around McDowell to the right, got a block from his QB and tossed it to a wide-open Keelan White for 26 yards.
– Gillman wasn’t the only Grizzly to impress in his first start. Cornerback Trevin Gradney, a Billings West alum, stayed step-for-step with the receiver on a deep ball as Butler tried to immediately answer Gillman’s third-quarter touchdown, and made an incredible flying catch for the interception. Gradney had another near-interception later in the game, getting two hands on a deep ball but not securing it.
– The game clock on the scoreboard didn’t work for much of the first half, meaning the referees keeping time on the field were the only ones aware of how much time was left.
“It was more a factor with the down and distance,” Hauck said. “Usually you can glance up there (at the scoreboard) and catch it.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved.
