MISSOULA, Montana – Death by 1,000 cuts?
How about death by 1,000 slants.
The Griz died a slow death on Saturday afternoon, and on an anniversary with hundreds of brethren on hand to witness it, in a rivalry game, to boot.
For the first time since 2022, the host Grizzlies have lost two in a row. And this time around, it’s strangely reminiscent of 2024 when the Griz defense uncharacteristically couldn’t find an answer to much of anything.
And the perplexity of the Idaho Vandals season continues as the second win of the campaign and the sixth win of the last two seasons gave UI its second win over a Top 8 FCS team in the last three weeks.
Joshua Wood threw for 335 yards and three touchdowns, and the Griz managed nary a stop as Idaho reclaimed the Little Brown Stein with a 42-35 win on the 40th anniversary of Washington-Grizzly Stadium. It’s the Vandals’ first Stein win since 2022 and just their second this century.
“Obviously, being able to beat two top 10 teams in the same season, I don’t think our program has beat both Montana schools in the same season for quite some time. So it’s quite a feat for everyone in the program,” Idaho head coach Thomas Ford said, referring to his team’s 35-34 win over then-No. 1 Montana State two weeks ago. “It’s been a little while since it’s been in Moscow. I’ve been a part of bringing it home from here, watching the Griz take it back, watching them keep it, and then finally getting it back to Moscow, where it will be for at least 365 days.”
So much of Idaho’s high points this season have been spurred on by Wood, a former Washington Gatorade Player of the Year and Fresno State transfer who looked like the best player on the field on Saturday for definitive stretches.
“He is the best quarterback in this league, and I would stand on 10 tables about it,” Ford said.
Wood and the Vandals offense took control from the outset, turning a crazy opening sequence that saw Wood throw an interception that in turn was fumbled by Griz interceptor Chris Johnson II and ultimately resulted in a long gain for the visitors.
That missed opportunity for the Griz and that stroke of good fortune for the Vandals led to Wood and the UI offense doing whatever it wanted offensively for the rest of the afternoon. Wood completed 28 of his first 31 passes on the way to finishing 30 for 38 for 335 yards. The Vandals converted 32 first downs in 74 plays, including earning first downs 11 times in 14 third-down tries.
Wood and the Vandal offense particularly exploited the spiraling Griz defense with quick pass after quick pass to the middle of the field. It seemed like Wood completed 1,000 passes on slant routes as nine Vandals caught passes, including eight with at least three catches.
“Just the preparation that Coach Ford and Coach Shoemaker put in front of me, just allowing me to understand what the defense was going to give me throughout the game, and just specific parts of the field they were going to give me, and just to attack the middle of the field,” Wood said. “That was the key part, and that’s what we did … Just attacking the middle of the field, attacking the safeties, the linebackers, just trying to find that weakness in the defense in the middle of the field.”
For Montana, the last five weeks have been a wild roller coaster. Oregon State drilled Montana 52-17 in an obvious FBS vs FCS mismatch to hand UM first-year head coach Bobby Kennedy his first career loss. Despite the disparity in talent, Montana looked unorganized and out of sorts.
Those notions disappeared, however, when the Griz went to UC Davis and thrashed the then 10th-ranked Aggies 62-22.
UM followed that with an assumed-to-win 36-14 win over Northern Colorado in which quarterback Keali’i Ah Yat threw five touchdowns.
The Griz senior signal caller has thrown 12 TDs the last three weeks, but it has only resulted in a win over a UNC program that has only had one winning record in its 20 years as a Division I program.
Since that win over the Bears on homecoming, Montana’s offense has been sizzling and the defense has been porous at best, non-functional at worst.
The Griz defense has allowed opponents to score touchdowns on 12 of their last 19 possessions. The seven “stops” include NAU running out the clock in the first half of its 49-44 win over UM in Flagstaff last weekend, NAU taking an intentional safety on its last offensive possession, Idaho running out the clock in the first half with 67 seconds left and Idaho taking a knee to burn the last minute of the clock to secure their first win in Missoula since 2022, the fifth win for the Vandals ever in Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
In other words, opponents are scoring touchdowns at a 75 percent possession rate against Montana as UM is now 5-3 and have lost three of their its last five after the Vandals earned their second win of the season with 175+ UM football alumns on hand for the 40th anniversary of Washington-Griz.
“(They’ve) got a good quarterback, and they got good receivers too. So they’re finding their threats, and we all got to be on the same page as a defense,” Montana linebacker Peyton Wing said. “And when we’re on the same page, we stop them, get off the field.”
The final result was a seven-point margin. But the Vandals went up 7-0, then 14-0 and never trailed. The Griz were playing chase the entire game. The last time Idaho won in Missoula in 2022, former head coach Jason Eck employed a similar strategy when it came to possessing the ball and keeping the Griz off the field.
“The best way to beat that offense is to have them on the sideline,” Ford said. “Those guys are a scary group. They can move it in a number of ways.”
Ford said that mindset drove his decision to go for it on fourth-and-1 from his own 33 early in the second quarter, leading 14-7.
“You’re not going to beat that team giving their offense a bunch of possessions,” Ford said. “In a game like this, you cannot be conservative. A lot of people would say that I’m a little bit of a gambler when it comes to that stuff, and they’d be right, because I just know how good that team is. And if you play conservative or you sit on your hands, you will lose the football game.”
That 2022 loss to Idaho was the first of what became a three-game losing streak that turned into a five-loss season, one of the worst records under former head coach Bobby Hauck and one of the worst marks of the modern era for the Griz.
It’s been since then that Montana has lost two in a row. And UM certainly enters its bye week licking its wounds, both literally and figuratively. The defensive front is down three expected stalwarts. The secondary has had 11 different players serve as starters and remains banged up. And the Griz enter next week’s bye searching for answers.
“My priorities are to get healthy. I’ve never used and I never will use injuries as an excuse,” Kennedy said. “We have to stay together as a team, and we can’t moan and complain about what we didn’t do. We got to fix what we didn’t do and get better. There’s still a lot of season left.”
“When we were sitting there at 5-1, and everybody (was saying) you’re doing a great job, you’re doing this, you’re doing that — this game can change quick,” Kennedy added. “I’ve been around a long time, and you think you have the right answers, and when those answers aren’t right, then you got to go back to the drawing board, and you have to tweak some things and get them fixed, because that’s my responsibility in the chair that I sit in.”
