In his first season at the helm at Montana, Bob Stitt helped the Grizzlies to a signature win over four-time defending national champions of North Dakota State in front of a national television audience.
The Griz posted October wins over Northern Arizona and North Dakota, two Big Sky Conference teams who ended the season as hot as anyone in the country.
Stitt won his first showdowns with Eastern Washington and Montana State, UM’s two fiercest rivals. And the Grizzlies posted a first-round playoff win over South Dakota State in Stitt’s first appearance in the FCS playoffs.
Stitt will acknowledge that, given his team’s slew of injuries, particularly quarterback Brady Gustafson’s broken leg suffered the week before Big Sky play opened, Montana’s 8-5 mark seemed solid. But Montana’s second-year head coach is by no means satisfied with his squad’s 2015. He hopes 2016 is a season in which the Griz can take the next step to reclaiming a spot among the nationally elite.
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“Last season was an underachievement because you could see how much talent we had,” Stitt said during an interview in June. “We could play with the best in the country. When you beat North Dakota State and you beat some of the great teams in our league but then you can’t beat some of the lower teams in the league and play well on a week to week basis, that’s where you really have to work on things.
“It’s not a quick fix, it’s not an Xs and Os thing. It’s a culture change. We are really working on our guys and getting them to play every single week because we are getting to play football. Not because we are getting to play in front of 26,000 or other reasons. We want to play for the love of the game. We were not a very disciplined football team. A very talented football team but not very disciplined. That’s what we are working on so we can win them all instead of eight and say, ‘Hey, it wasn’t bad.’”
Between 1993 and 2009, Montana made the playoffs every season and won the Big Sky Conference 15 times. The Griz advanced to the FCS national championship game on seven different occasions, claiming titles in 1995 and 2001. But Montana has not officially claimed a Big Sky title this decade — the 2011 title shared with Montana State was vacated due to NCAA violations — and the rest of the Big Sky pack seems to have caught up to the Griz. Stitt refuses to let the gap close any further.
“Let me say last year, there was a little bit of a fight but we realized everything he is trying to implement is so we can win a Big Sky title year in and year out,” said Gustafson, a Billings West product who threw for 1,984 yards and 12 touchdowns in eight starts as a junior. “That’s what we have to expect at Montana.”
Stitt took over a program searching to find its footing following one of the best runs in the history of college football. Between 2000 and 2009, Montana won 119 games, more than any other Division I program, FBS or FCS. That tear came on the heels of 93 wins during the 1990s, including a win in the 1995 Division I-AA championship game. Montana won 28 playoff wins all told, piling up wins and championships as prevalently as any program in America.
In 2009, Bobby Hauck bolted to UNLV. In 2010, the Griz missed the playoffs for the first time in a generation, a streak snapped with a loss to arch rival Montana State in Missoula. In 2011, Montana bounced back, rolling then-No. 1 MSU in Bozeman before racing to the semifinals of the FCS playoffs in Robin Pflugrad’s second season at the helm. By the following spring, Pflugrad and athletic director Jim O’Day had been fired, the 2011 BSC title vacated, the program put on NCAA violations and the city of Missoula the microcosmic example in a Jon Kraukauer book about the prevalent rape culture on contemporary American college campuses.
Montana forfeited four scholarships instantly. UM bottomed out on the field in Mick Delaney’s first season, posting UM’s first losing record in more than two decades and missing the playoffs for the second time in three seasons. In 2013, Montana bounced back to win 10 games, but the season ended during the coldest afternoon in Washington-Grizzly Stadium with a 42-35 loss in the second round of the playoffs to eventual national runner-up Coastal Carolina, 42-35. In Delaney’s last season, the Griz trounced San Diego in the playoffs before losing to Eastern Washington for the second time in a single season.
Delaney retired at the end of the 2014 season. Stitt took over for a program searching to reclaim its identity and its national prominence.
“The transition is very difficult, especially at a place that is successful,” Stitt said. “A lot of times, you are going in and you are taking over a program that is struggling and they are all in because they just want somebody to help them. That wasn’t the case at Montana. It’s a great program and I took over a playoff team.
“That first year is very, very difficult, especially for the seniors because they are so used to a certain way of doing things. I get that. But we needed to start moving forward in the way we needed to create a championship culture. It wasn’t perfect for everybody but it got us to where we are at now and we are a much, much improved football team because of it.”
Montana’s off-season has been filled with changes, with the addition of a boatload of recruits, including eight total transfers. Former defensive coordinator Ty Gregorak dropped the bombshell of 2015 when he jumped to become Jeff Choate’s defensive coordinator at MSU. Stitt replaced Gregorak by promoting Jason Semore, an young up-start coach who followed Stitt from Colorado Mines to UM.
“I really, really love the style of defense because it’s really simple the way (Semore) teaches it and to learn it, it’s hard for the offense going against it because it seems like they are doing a million things,” Stitt said. “It was tough on us this spring offensively a lot of times because they can bring things from so many different places and they do such a good job of disguising what they are doing. It made us better every single day.”
The Griz lose a collection of talent from last year’s squad. Defensive end Tyrone Holmes, the 2015 FCS Defensive Player of the Year, was a sixth-round selection in the NFL Draft by the Jacksonville Jaguars. Senior linebackers Kendrick Van Ackeren, Jeremiah Kose and Herbert Gamboa were all multi-year starters and all-conference performers in their final seasons. Cornerback Nate Harris was also an All-Big Sky selection. Offensively, wide receivers Jamaal Jones and Ben Roberts each earned training camp invites from NFL teams. The rest of the offense returns intact.
Despite the loss of talent and the departure of a respected coach, Year 2 for Stitt holds lofty expectations. Circumstances do not matter. Stitt’s bar is set high.
“At Montana, if you are not winning championships every year and you aren’t getting a chance to win it all, it really is under achieving,” Stitt said. “That’s why we came here and that’s what this program is all about. We are never going to be happy with anything less than that.”
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