To rebuild a football program, first a foundation must be poured.
One of the primary anchors for most foundations need a pillar to stabilize.
While Montana State senior left tackle Lewis Kidd certainly has provided essential stability for the Bobcats as MSU tries to mount another playoff run, it’s taken the affable giant from the Twin Cities more than half a decade to finally reach the outside of the Montana State offensive line.
And Kidd might’ve ended up playing for the rival Montana Grizzlies if Jeff Choate wouldn’t have once upon a time decided “two sticks of dynamite in a hole that only needs one” was a good idea.
Kidd, a first-team All-Big Sky Conference selection this fall as his sixth and final season at MSU reaches its completion, has seen his accomplishments sometimes overshadow his sacrifices. His achievements have been so consistent, sometimes Kidd’s transformation, both as a football player and as a man get less notice than deserved.
The 6-foot-6, now 325-pounder came to Bozeman as a towering defensive end who weighted about 75 pounds less than he does now. And no, his unforgettable mop of floppy, curly hair does not account for tipping the scales nearly as much as the diligence Kidd has had to maintain in the weight room and the kitchen throughout his standout career.
From defensive line to both sides of the offensive line as an offensive guard to getting bumped to the blind side for his final season, Kidd has carved out a role as a Bobcat captain both because of his steady sacrifices and his cheerful nature.
As Montana State prepares to play top-ranked and defending national champion Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas tonight, it’s hard to imagine the recent run of success that have paralleled Kidd’s career happening without the consistent stabilization the towering tackle has provided.
“You want to get older and stay older on the offensive line but that was not the reality when we first got here,” fifth-year Bobcat offensive line coach Brian Armstrong said. “We have been able to do that the last few years because we found guys like Lewis.
“This year has been a bit of a challenge, but we’ve always had that core duo of Lewis and (senior right guard) Taylor (Tuiasopopo) who have been steady eddy, set your clock by them guys. That has been so critical not just on the offensive line but for our football program in general.”
“The guys who have been through the good and been through the bad and know the difference between the two, that’s important. Those guys are crucial to any program.”
When former head coach Jeff Choate first took, his primary goal in recruiting centered upon fortifying the Bobcat fronts. The first two recruiting classes were flush with offensive linemen, including a tall, raw tackle out of Totino Grace High that new MSU defensive coordinator Ty Gregorak — he who spent 12 seasons as an assistant for the Griz — was bringing to the Bobcat recruiting fold.
Kidd had previously visited Montana’s campus. Choate mentioned Kidd had to de-commit from the Griz before ultimately signing with Montana State. Kidd leaves that detail out.
But the moment Kidd flipped to the Bobcats marked the moment Choate’s squad added a cheerful, positive personality to a group led by charismatic captain J.P. Flynn and emerging hard-ass Mitch Brott.
Kidd is a four-year starter and a two-time All-Big Sky performer. He has started 45 games and counting entering Saturday’s playoff contest in Huntsville. But it’s been his consistently personality that has added just as much to MSU’s resurgence as his ability to drive block defensive linemen.
“Lewis takes on this big brother type of role, ‘Hey, you are far from home, I know there are some things going on but it’s going to be OK. Embrace what we have here,” Choate remembered during an interview conducted in October. “That is a role he stepped into. He’s a really good leader, a really good person and a really good example of what can happen when you get the right mix of guys from some diverse places but they have similar values.
“Lewis is the same person every day and I think that consistency draws other people to him.”
Regardless of if Mike Kramer, Rob Ash or Choate was the head coach at Montana State, the left tackle position has been occupied by just a handful of Bobcats during the 21st century.
Brent Swaggert began the stalwart string, starting 48 straight games between 2000 and 2003 during the early Kramer years. Jeff Hansen, a Great Falls product who as an All-American as a junior and a senior in 2008 and 2009, was a multi-year starter at left tackle.
Mike Person started at both tackle spots during his four years pacing the Bobcat offensive line, culminating in 2010 with his captaining of MSU’s Big Sky Conference championship team, laying the foundation for a nearly decade-long NFL career.
John Weidenaar, a former Class B standout from nearby Manhattan, took over in 2012 and broke Swaggert’s record for career starts. He gave way to Dylan Mahoney, another Great Falls product who started for three years on the blind side.
When Mahoney graduated, Brott moved from right tackle to left tackle, surpassing the 50-start mark and breaking Weidenaar’s record before graduating in 2019.
With Brott’s graduation and former two-year starter Conner Wood’s abrupt entry into the NCAA Transfer Portal — Wood eventually ended up at Missouri of the SEC — plus a variety of injuries, Kidd had to move positions entering his senior year despite earning second-team All-Big Sky honors as a junior in 2019 as a key cog in a bruising rushing attack that averaged more than 260 yards per game on the ground and led the league in rushing for the second consecutive year.
“You take a guy like Lewis, he is probably playing a position that doesn’t best suit him,” Armstrong said after Kidd learned he had been named first-team all-conference as a senior at a position he’s only played for a year. “He would be better off playing inside no doubt but he made the move to left tackle. He has taken it and ran with it and grown steadily throughout it. It’s always great to see guys like that get rewarded.”
If Kidd earns All-American honors, he will join a distinct group of both homegrown and out of state products to achieve such decoration.
The list of out of state offensive linemen to earn first or second-team All-American honors includes Jon Borchardt, himself a Minneapolis native who played for Sonny Holland’s Bobcats in the late 1970s, and Swaggert, who hailed from Buffalo, Minnesota.
Borchardt, who played for nine seasons in the NFL, was a recent inductee to the Montana Football Hall of Fame. He attended the induction ceremony in Billings in June. Before his induction, the stoic Borchardt stopped in Bozeman to meet with Kidd and advise him on his future.
“He has the stature, the hand size and strength, and the experience,” Borchardt said about Kidd while displaying some of the offensive line drills his showed Kidd, emphasizing center of gravity and balance. “If he keeps working diligently, he will have a chance to keep playing football.”
Gregorak, who long recruited the Minneapolis-St. Paul area because his oldest son lives there, remembers the first time he saw Kidd at Totino-Grace High “when he was sophomore or junior and I remember thinking, ‘Man, that’s a good looking sucker right there.’”
The man most in the Big Sky call “Coach Ty” was coaching for the Grizzlies at the time he first met Kidd and his family. By the time Kidd was a senior, Gregorak was on his way to Montana State and the burgeoning defensive end was soon to follow.
“I told him during the recruiting process — and you have to watch what you say because kids want to hear what they want to hear — but I said ‘Listen, if you want a shot at tight end, you can have a shot at tight end. You want a shot at defensive end, that’s where he originally started out at, you can have a shot at that. But I believe you are going to be an All-American offensive tackle,” Gregorak said.
“Defensive linemen don’t want to hear that but I told him, ‘In the long run Lewis, you are going to be a fantastic right or left tackle and he’s proven to be just that. Bozeman just aligned with what he wanted to do athletically, academically, socially and the type of teammates he wanted to have.
“Awesome story, great young man. He’s well spoken. He’s well liked. He’s that type of guy, always in a good mood. He’s a very special young man. It’s neat to see.”
During his first year living almost 1,000 miles away from his family for the first time, Kidd shared a dorm room with offensive lineman Taylor Tuiasosopo. This was back when Kidd weighed 255 pounds and played opposite Tuisasopo daily in practice.
That first year away, Kidd’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. That provided one of the first bits of adversity during his long college career.
“That was one of the toughest transitions as a freshman was being away from family, especially for me because I’m pretty close to my family. We all live within a few minutes of each other so that was pretty weird being out here and being away from all that. But I learned to be on my own, develop my own relationships.”
With his Afro hair and his elite height, Kidd is hard to miss. But his approachable disposition belies the aggressive player on the football field. That’s helped him build quite the network throughout the Gallatin Valley.
“I’m so blessed with how many people I’ve been able to meet and build great relationships with,” Kidd said. “I have people here who are like family, who I can talk to all the time. My fiancé, her family, they love it here too.”
And Kidd’s mother, SueAnne, has been able to make it to every home game. She is “doing awesome and feeling good”, which “is a blessing for me for sure.”
Kidd spent the fall of 2016 redshirting and eating. He knew he needed mass if he wanted to play on the inside of the defensive line.
By the first winter break of his college career, he’d been moved to offensive line. So Kidd kicked it into overdrive in the kitchen and the weight room.
“I went home that first winter break and I came back at 285 pounds because I knew I had to switch to offensive line,” Kidd said with a chuckle.
“It’s been one of the best and worst things at the same time. It’s the worst when you are light and you just have to eat and eat and eat. But I had time to put it on slowing after that first big gain so once I got in that range, it wasn’t that bad.”
Kidd first broke into the starting lineup in 2017, Choate’s second year at the helm, alongside Tuiasosopo. Each showed well right away as starting guards for an offense that started to gain traction as one of the top power run games in the Big Sky.
“When he finally moved over, it was like, ‘It was about time,’” Tuiasosopo said with a laugh. “He’s one of the hardest working and nicest guys you will come across. We are very different characters with very different backgrounds, but to see that we both want to work hard and succeed as much as we can has always been fun for us.”
Kidd started five games as a freshman and all 13 as a sophomore in 2018 when the Troy Andersen-quarterbacked Bobcats made the first of two playoff appearances under Choate. Kidd earned Hero Sports sophomore All-American honors that season.
As a junior, Kidd started all 15 games at guard, earned second-team all-league honors and helped Montana State forge its deepest playoff run in 35 years.
Despite those accomplishments, Kidd had to move positions to an unfamiliar spot that he’s not as ideally suited for for his final season. Yet he has embraced it and thrived.
The off-season between that all-league junior year and his finale has been a trying one for many reasons. First came a global pandemic. Then race riots gutted cities across America, few more destroyed than Minneapolis.
Then came the postponement of the 2020 fall season. And Choate’s almost departure to Boise State before officially bolting for Texas. And finally, a position switch under a new coaching staff in the pursuit of success for the name on the front of his jersey.
Kidd has had two head coaches during his college career. He’s learned from offensive line coaches Josh Taufalele and Armstrong, along with tight ends coach Nate Potter, a former college All-American at Boise State who played offensive line for the Dallas Cowboys.
He wants to play football as long as he can. Choate and Gregorak each think Kidd’s measurable will at least earn a shot. Kidd is closing in on a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the MSU School of Education. He chose the academic pursuit because he could get the master’s done in a year and because it caters to going into coaching, which he’s already earned a minor in.
“Hopefully, we will be finishing here in January, that’s the goal and then after, we will see,’ Kidd said. “We are going to train and do the Pro Day here. It would be awesome to get a combine invite if that is something that’s in the future, who knows.
“Especially this year, I’ve just learned to enjoy all the little things…This isn’t going to last forever and football isn’t forever and college isn’t forever. I know I am really going to miss the people, being out here every day with the coaches and teammates I love. I’m trying to cherish that as long as I can.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved
