The Montana Grizzlies have been looking for instant offensive line help all recruiting season.
They finally got some this week with the commitment of JUCO transfer Kordell Pillans, who announced his decision on Tuesday, and signed his National Letter of Intent with the opening of the early signing period on Wednesday.
“It felt great,” Pillans said. “A lot of stress off my shoulders, and just knowing where I’m going to be for this next semester is really great.”
Pillans is a massive lineman — 6-foot-6, 325 pounds — who’ll be expected to step in right away to help an offensive line that struggled in 2018.
He comes to the Griz after three years, including a medical redshirt, at Mesa Community College in Arizona, where he mostly played tackle.
“My O-line coach [at Mesa], he calls me a mauler,” Pillans said. “I play physical and just try to dominate. The biggest thing, what he likes to say about me is, I’m a bulldozer when I need to be, and I’m a technician when I need to be. I can play both ways.”
With veterans coming back at just about every other position on the field next season, Montana has focused mainly on transfers on the offensive line, players who can come in and play right away.
The Griz had secured a commitment from just one high school offensive lineman, Johnny Barthel from Bellevue, Washington before Wednesday but ended up signing four on Wednesday, including Barthel and Pillans. The Griz also signed Dumitru Salagor of Vancouver, Washington and preferred walk-on Dillon Botner from Whitefish, Montana.
Potential transfers Blake Bedier (Snow College) and Tommy Kennedy (Butler) signed elsewhere. Bedier signed with Baylor and Kennedy signed with Miami, making Pillans’ commitment even more important.
“Obviously part of being from junior college is you’re going to add some age to the group,” Pillans said. “That’s the goal. Especially me, I have two years to get in and hopefully play. I’m just going to be working my tail off to do it.”
The Griz beat out Missouri State, Youngstown State and Albany to get a commitment from Pillans, who offers an intriguing backstory along with his size and experience.
Before going to Mesa, he played his high school football at Kodiak High School on Kodiak Island, Alaska, which, despite being the second-largest island by landmass in the United States, is home to just over 13,000 people.
“It was really unique,” Pillans said. “We’d have our home games, and then our away games, it was too expensive to fly, so we’d get on a ferry. It’d be like a 12-, 13-hour ferry ride, we’d get on a bus, and go a couple hours bus ride, play, and then come back. It wasn’t some little short trip. We’d be leaving Wednesday night, Thursday night to get down for a Saturday game.”
The remoteness also made getting recruited challenging. There’s no college football in Alaska, and no coaches from the Lower 48 are making pilgrimages to Fairbanks or Anchorage, let alone Kodiak Island.
The best option Pillans had during high school was to send off his film and wait.
He was looking at JUCOs, and while California would be too expensive for an out-of-state student and Kansas was too far east, Arizona was the perfect fit.
“I got in contact with [Mesa head coach Ryan] Felker, I actually sent him an email, and he called me up the next day,” Pillans said. “From there, I just kind of showed up on campus, came down and got ready to start working.”
After a freshman year without much playing time and an injury in his sophomore year, Felker earned second-team all-conference honors in 2018 — and Pillans got the rare chance for an Alaska kid to move on and play Division-I football.
The Griz offered Pillans on December 7, about a month after Mesa’s season wrapped up.
He said that staying somewhat on the West Coast, plus Montana’s game day atmosphere, were the big draws for the Grizzlies over some of his other offers.
“Most of the schools were more East Coast programs, and coming from Alaska, I didn’t really want to go over there,” Pillans said. “That’s why when [Montana] offered me, I was pretty excited, I was pretty fired up about that. I actually got up there, and it was incredible. The city of Missoula is a really awesome town. … Just the atmosphere and the tradition of the University of Montana was really, really cool to me. I’ve looked up game day tapes and stuff like that, and the crowd that’s in the stadium, the place is absolutely packed.”
A stadium with 25,000 fans will be a far cry from the high school fields in Kodiak, but after chasing his dream thousands of miles to Mesa, Pillans isn’t about to give up on it now.
“Hopefully it inspires someone else to chase their dream from Alaska and maybe go to a junior college and try to fight to get that Division I offer, or if it’s an NAIA or a DII or whatever,” Pillans said. “Just try to get out and do it because it’s a way to get an education and get out of the state and experience the world.”
