Jon Newlee didn’t pull any punches when asked about Idaho’s late-season matchup with Idaho State.
“It’s night and day, right? You know, we’re trying to play pure basketball, these guys are playing WWE,” Newlee said.
Between the smirking sort-of truth and the wrestling metaphor, it was a telling quote.
For much of the last half-decade or so, the rivalry between Newlee’s run-and-gun Vandals and Seton Sobolewski’s grind-it-out Idaho State Bengals has been so good – and so entertaining – Jerry Lawler might as well have been announcing the starting lineups.
Along with enmity and stakes, styles make fights, on the hardwood as much as in the ring – and Vandals vs. Bengals has had that in spades. It was the last 20 years of college football laid out on the basketball court – offense against defense, run-and-shoot against three yards and a cloud of dust, five-wide hurry-up against something that felt like it should have a fullback.
Since 2015-16, Idaho State has had the league’s best defense five times in eight seasons (including this year), and finished second twice and third once.
Idaho has been the highest-scoring team in the league twice in that stretch, with three other appearances in the top three and only one year outside the top five.
In both 2018-19 and 2020-21, Idaho finished first in the league in scoring while Idaho State finished first in defense.
“With Seton, every time it’s going to be an absolute war,” Montana head coach Brian Holsinger said. “They’re going to defend the right way, they’re going to push you to your weaknesses and they play really hard, no matter what. … Jon is kind of the opposite of Seton, which is funny. His teams are so offensively oriented. He’s such an innovative mind on offense and has been doing the five-out stuff way before it’s become popular. And has tons of sets and always loves shooting, which is hard to guard, right?”
That high-profile contrast, though, also revealed plenty of similarities between the two foils. Newlee and Sobolewski are two of the longest-tenured coaches in the league. In fact, they started in their current jobs less than two months apart from each other in 2008, when Idaho hired Newlee away from Idaho State on April 15 and Sobolewski was announced as his replacement on May 27.
They’ve been around forever, they know basketball and, consequently, they’ve been hard to get out of the Big Sky tournament, particularly since it went to a neutral site.
In 2015-16, the first year of the neutral-site tournaments in Reno, Idaho State won three games as the nine-seed, including a 52-50 victory over No. 1 Montana State, to make it to the title game, where they lost to…No. 3 Idaho, for Newlee’s only NCAA Tournament appearance with the Vandals coming out of the Big Sky. None of ISU’s four games in that run featured a team scoring over 70 points.
The next year, Sobolewski did it again, taking a No. 6 seed to the title game – despite not scoring more than 63 points in any of their three wins – before losing to Montana State.
A year after that, in 2017-18, the Bengals won two games to get to the semifinals as the No. 5 seed, while No. 2 Idaho scored 102 points in a semifinal win over Portland State before losing to Northern Colorado in the championship game.
“I don’t think there’s any secret,” Sobolewski said. “We don’t try to do anything different. We don’t try to put anything new in for a conference tournament. We just try to do what we do at the highest level possible and focus on that.”
A year ago in 2021-2022, ISU won a second-straight regular season title – but the Bengals, as the No. 1 seed, dropped a 72-54 shocker to Northern Colorado in their first game at the conference tournament.
Idaho, the No. 6 seed, put together an old-school Reno run with a couple wins before being bounced by eventual tournament champion Montana State in the semifinals.
This year, neither finished in the top half of the conference standings in the regular season – an unenviable position for most teams, but one that only raises an interesting question for Newlee and Sobolewski: Can the Kings of Reno make magic happen again?
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As with all potential dynasties, it took Idaho State’s years to come together – Estefania Ors, who was named Big Sky tournament MVP in 2021 after hitting 8 of 9 shots in the title-game rout of Idaho, got to Pocatello in 2016 – and much less time to end.
After one of the great years in recent Big Sky history – not just the 22-4 overall record or title-game statement, but a late first-half lead against Kentucky in an eventual 71-63 loss in the first round of the NCAA Tournament – the Bengals brought almost everybody back and grinded out another regular-season title in 2021-22.
In last year’s tournament loss to Northern Colorado, though, the Bengals looked like a team that was burned out and ready to get things over with, getting outscored by 18 in the second half.
After the season, Ors and Dora Goles, eligibility finally expired, started their coaching careers. Almost all of what was supposed to be the next generation instead hit the transfer portal – Diaba Konate to UC-Irvine, Montana Oltrogge to Northern Arizona and Tomekia Whitman to Southern Utah (all three are in line for at least a share of the conference title at their new schools).
That left Callie Bourne as the only remaining piece of ISU’s title teams – appropriate, as the lefty Australian’s old-man game feels a relic of a bygone era. Surrounded by freshmen without Big Sky experience, she’s moved back to point guard and tried to keep the Bengals’ offense afloat as they’ve leaned all the way into a slow-paced, physical, defensive identity. She earned second-team All-Big Sky honors for her efforts.
ISU finished the regular season with by far the best defense (57.8 points allowed per game) and worst offense (55.7) in the league. The only reason they scored even that much is Bourne, averaging 15.7 points per game on a steady diet of shuffling stepback line-drive jumpers and crafty reverse-pivoting finishes in the lane, cracking open slivers of space with her physicality and footwork and slinging the ball off her hip before the defense can close the space.
With Finley Garnett lost for the season in January, Bourne, who’s third in the league in minutes and just set ISU’s all-time assists record, took 20 or more shots in five of ISU’s last seven regular-season games.
“I don’t think it’s her innate personality to play like this,” Sobolewski said. “I’m sure she does (get tired). But she doesn’t let it show, or she doesn’t tell me.”
ISU also has sophomore post Laura Bello from Allen, Texas, who Sobolewski has called one of the best athletes he’s ever coached (she’s averaging 10.6 points and 9.4 rebounds per game) and a bevy of youngsters trying to fit in as best they can by hitting outside shots to keep the spacing from completely collapsing around Bourne and Bello and being pests on defense. It’s an identity that’s caused other coaches around the league to talk about the Bengals with extremely grudging respect, usually after taking a loss.
“They’re gonna muck it up, they’re going to be physical, they’re going to grab, they’re going to punch,” Holsinger said after a 55-54 home loss on February 9 in which ISU shot under 40 percent and Bourne and Bello were the only Bengals to make more than one field goal. “They’re going to do everything they can to slow the game down and make it ugly because that’s what they do and that’s what their chance is. You can’t give a team like that a chance at the end.”
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If ISU’s 6-12 conference record feels like a near-miracle given the talent on hand – a testament to Sobolewski instilling that identity – Idaho’s 9-9 mark is the opposite.
The Vandals were picked third in the preseason coaches poll – the only team other than Montana State to receive a first-place vote – and returned unanimous preseason all-conference selection Beyonce Bea.
“I probably never recruited anybody as hard as I recruited Beyonce, certainly up there with all the greats that I’ve had in this program, just because I thought she could become the player that she has,” Newlee said. “But it’s a credit to her. She works her tail off all summer long, in the fall, you know, she just never stops working.”
Bea, named unanimous first-team all-conference on Thursday, is still as smoothly dominant as ever – her 40-pointer in Missoula in the regular-season finale was a blur of unstoppable midrange pull-ups and pivoting post moves as the Lady Griz stubbornly didn’t double her until very late – but Idaho has struggled to score efficiently around her in an up-and-down season.
For a team that shoots the most 3s in the conference – at 793, the Vandals are one of only two teams to attempt more than 700 shots from behind the arc – Idaho doesn’t have many great 3-point shooters beyond former Kalispell Flathead and Sac State sniper Tiana Johnson, who’s just under 40 percent on big volume.
Point guard Sydney Gandy is a good passer (1.9 A/TO ratio) but has struggled shooting (31.5 FG%), and the Vandals have also had to integrate freshman like guards Rosa Smith and Asha Phillips, and posts Sarah Brans and Brooke Malone (who redshirted at Idaho State last season before transferring).
For as many as they take, the Vandals give up a ton of open 3s as well. Montana hit 11 of 25 triples in a rollicking 85-82 win in the regular-season finale in Missoula Monday, getting tons of good looks on pick-and-pops with Carmen Gfeller and Dani Bartsch or as Idaho players over-helped on cuts and lost shooters in the chaos of transition.
Opponents shot 33.8% on 3s against Idaho this year, the worst mark in the league and, although their overall numbers are skewed by the fast pace at which they play, the Vandals gave up 71.9 points per game, ninth in a 10-team league.
After sweeping the Montana schools to start the conference season, Idaho lost six in a row, but clawed back to .500 to take the No. 6 seed and the last bye in the conference tournament.
“He has a group of younger players that he’s playing with the exception of Beyonce and Johnson, so I think he’s going through a natural progression,” Sobolewski said. “Sometimes those losing streaks can really ignite something within your team, like, enough is enough, and we’ve got to fix this. … Sometimes you just get to a point where something snaps and you’re ready to play harder and take things to another level. And I think that’s what’s going on with them.”
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The funniest thing about the rivalry is each teams’ most recent tournament win over the other came using their rivals’ style.
In 2019-20, Idaho’s Klinker sisters – Lizzy and Natalie – bludgeoned ISU on the offensive boards and the Vandals completely ignored Idaho State point guard Diaba Konate in favor of clogging the paint in a 66-51 semifinal win.
The next year, the Bengals ran Idaho out of the gym in the conference title game with gorgeous flowing basketball, hitting 58% of their shots in an 84-49 rout that ranks as one of the great title-game performances in Big Sky history.
That leveled the scoreboard at one tournament championship apiece since Idaho re-joined the Big Sky in the mid-2010s.
The deadlock doesn’t look likely to be broken this season. Idaho State, the No. 8 seed, opens on Saturday against No. 7 Portland State. No. 6 Idaho plays No. 3 – and co-conference champion – Sac State on Monday.
These two coaches, though, know better than anyone that seeds are sometimes meaningless, and we’ve seen crazier things than the two ISU wins and one Idaho win needed for them to potentially meet in the semifinals.
“We’ve had years where we’ve lost three straight going into the conference tournament and then we made it to the conference tournament championship game,” Sobolewski said. “You know, last year, we won the league, and then lost in the first round. We’re gonna keep working on stuff, all the way up until the conference tournament, and just try to be the best team we can be going into it.”
