BOZEMAN — It’s been like clockwork now for two years.
The calendar turns to November. And Kenneth Eiden IV reaches a new level. He goes from great to elite, becoming the game wrecker Montana State needs off the edge to make deep playoff runs.
And while Eiden had one of the most prolific high school careers in the history of the state of Montana, it hasn’t been a linear path for one of Bozeman’s favorite sons to become a Bobcat team captain and a star amongst Bobcat nation.
Eiden has certainly always had talent and ability. He’s certainly always had desire. But to hear his coaches tell it, he’s also needed to mature and grow, learn to accept his role despite his prodigious talent.
Eiden has been willing to be challenged and he’s been willing to be pushed, which has helped him embrace a growth mindset and become an All-American candidate for a Montana State team that’s won three Big Sky Conference championships during Eiden’s time on the roster.
Saturday afternoon, it all culminates. One of the most dyed in the wool Bobcats in the modern history of the program will take the Bobcat Stadium turf one last time. Last Friday was all about Eiden. That morning, he graduated. That afternoon, he posted a trifecta of sacks against Stephen F Austin, taking Sam Vidlak, fittingly a former Grizzly, to the ground three times as Montana State rolled to a 44-28 win and into the semifinals of the FCS playoffs.
Now the Griz come to Eiden’s hometown for the rare game that has the ultimate guarantee: it doesn’t matter if Montana State wins or loses, Saturday afternoon will mark the last football game Eiden will ever play in Bozeman.
Eiden earned his undergraduate degree in accounting last week. He’s already declared grad school is his next step. So if Montana State cannot defeat Montana on Saturday, his football career is finished.
The magnitude of the moment and the potential triumph or the potential fallout is not lost on the man who defensive coordinator Shawn Howe affectionately calls “the King of Bozeman.”
“I’ve been trying not to think about it too much…we have a big enough game as it is, so, trying not to add too much to it, but I’ve definitely thought about how this is the last one,” Eiden said on Tuesday. “Trying to take every day with a sense of gratitude and take a few extra seconds to look around every once in a while, and also focus on the guys and playing ball.
“I’m definitely going to miss it. I think it’ll really hit when the game is over on Saturday afternoon. But I’m trying to make the most of it while I can now, trying to cherish it the best I can.”
Basically every single Fall since 2018, Eiden has been ruining outings for opposing offensive lineman. As a sophomore at Bozeman High School seven years ago, he rolled up 21 sacks, 38 tackles for loss and 93 total tackles. His sack total broke Will Dissly’s school record. Dissly is the starting tight end for the Los Angeles Chargers and one of the better players to come out of the state of Montana, ever.
The following season, Eiden led Bozeman to the state championship, piling up 94 tackles, 41 tackles for loss and 15.5 sacks. That junior season, he also caught 31 passes for 512 yards and eight touchdowns while rushing for another 155 yards and six more scores.
His senior year at Bozeman High saw his stats take a slight dip — 46 tackles, 20 for loss, seven sacks plus 366 yards from scrimmage and four touchdowns — mostly because he played in just six games due to injury and the global pandemic.
After a redshirt season at Montana State that he didn’t expect — “I was confident, probably too confident, and I expected to play right away”, Eiden reflected this week — the 6-foot-1, 250-pounder started his trend of dominating down the stretch of each season.
He ended his first season in the rotation by starting four of the last five games of 2022. That redshirt freshman season, he posted five sacks and eight tackles for loss. He had at least one tackle for loss in each of MSU’s final five contests and notched more than half his sacks each game the last month of the season.
It’s a trend that has continued. Last season, he had a sack in each of MSU’s final seven games, including two against UC Davis in a 30-28 win that helped the Bobcats clinch their second Big Sky Conference championship in three seasons. Eiden also had two sacks in a 52-19 playoff win over Idaho to vault MSU into the Final Four for the fourth time since 2019. And he had a sack in MSU’s 35-32 loss to North Dakota State in the national championship game, the first and only loss for the Bobcats in 2024.
And now in his senior season, Eiden is a first-team All-Big Sky selection. He has nine sacks and 14 tackles for loss. Exactly half of those TFLs and six of those sacks have come of the last four games as MSU has defeated No. 8 UC Davis, No. 2 Montana, No. 20 Yale and No. 7 Stephen F. Austin in consecutive weeks to push the longest win streak in the FCS to 12 games and set up a chance to go to the national title game for the third time in Brent Vigen’s five seasons at the helm.
“You need big-time players to show up in those big-time moments and that’s what Kenny’s become,” Vigen said on Monday. “Don’t tell him I said that (laughs).”
“When the lights are the brightest and the moment is the biggest, he’s not afraid of it. I think a lot of his maturity is that if I do my job, I’m going to get my opportunities. There aren’t really plays anymore where he’s going rogue. He knows if he just stays within the system, other teammates will put him in position. And when opportunities come, he’s talented enough to beat a guy one on one, and finish the quarterback. He’s just that type of player. We will need him again on Saturday.”
Eiden has always been naturally gifted and a hard worker. Ask around certain circles in Bozeman and you’ll hear stories of the son Kenneth Eiden III, a Montana State offensive lineman in the early 1990s, dominating football fields when Kenny IV was in middle school.
He was an immediate star for the Hawks and by his second year on varsity, he was a state champion after Bozeman beat Tommy Mellott’s Butte Bulldogs 49-28 in the 2019 state title game in the Mining City the day before the Bobcats blew the doors off the Grizzlies, 48-14, welcoming Montana head coach Bobby Hauck back to rivalry games in Bozeman hospitably.
When Eiden was in middle school and high school, often his father would bring him into the Ridge Athletic Club for workouts. If he wasn’t wearing a Bozeman Hawks t-shirt, he was wearing a Montana State t-shirt. He never seemed to mind grinding it out in the weight room with his old man.
Naturally, when he was in middle school, his favorite Bobcats were former Hawks turned legendary Bobcats. He specifically cites Dane Fletcher, a 2005 Bozeman High grad who became a Big Sky Defensive Player of the Year at Montana State before becoming a Super Bowl-winning linebacker for the New England Patriots as one of his childhood idols.
Eiden also references Grant Collins, the original No. 41 at MSU and a Hawk turned Bobcat who endured a plague of injuries during his career to still start almost 40 games and be a part of one of the most unforgettable plays in Rivalry history when Collins and Tucker Yates punched out a fumble on the goal line to complete MSU’s improbable comeback in Missoula that resulted in a 29-25 Bobcat win, resulting in a documentary film about the comeback to boot.
“I loved Dane when I was a kid, but Grant, I was closer to him in the high school ranks, so watching Grant go on and have a great career, and I was pretty good friends with his cousins, Cal and McCade O’Reilly, when we were growing up, so seeing Grant have success gave me some confidence,” Eiden said. “Watching all those Bozeman guys, that made me believe we can compete. We might be a smaller town, but we can compete on the highest stage.”
By the time his senior year wrapped up, Eiden was a 3-star recruit and one of the most statistically prolific players in the history of Class AA football in Montana. He totaled 232 tackles, 162 solo tackles, 99 tackles for loss, 43.5 sacks while also scoring 23 total touchdowns.
That helped him receive offers from Montana, UC Davis, Northern Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, and Montana Tech. Eiden also had recruiting interest from Oregon State, Washington, Nebraska, Utah State, North Dakota State and South Dakota State.
All that attention and all that production made Eiden one of the top-ranked recruits in the Treasure State and a teenager oozing with confidence. He also gave him an illusion of what his instant impact at Montana State might be.
“I thought I was going to play right away my first year and I ended up not, which was humbling,” he remembers. “Playing in my hometown, it felt like pressure, but at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of people that want me to succeed. I had to switch my mindset so I could make sure I could make Bozeman proud.
His coaches recognized his desire for a switch in mindset almost immediately when the high school phenom first arrived on the roster. He was a legacy kid whose father had played for the Bobcats, a kid who was playing for a team he’d grown up wanting to impact his entire childhood.
“Kenny came here as the ‘King of Bozeman,’” said Howe, MSU’s defensive line coach during Eiden’s first four seasons and now the Bobcat defensive coordinator. “We always tease him saying that. And he was kind of happy with that. ‘Everybody here loves me, I get to go cut it loose and play.’ That was him.
“And we really took Kenny and said, ‘Hey, if you want to be successful at this level, you are going to do a lot and be a lot different.’
“And never one time has Kenny not been willing to show up and do the work or take the coaching or change something or fix something.”
Vigen, Howe and Nicholas Jean-Baptiste, the interior defensive line coach turned DL coach now that Howe is calling the plays, are all vague but affirming about Eiden’s challenges to find maturity and steadiness in his life as a football player and as a college student. But it’s certainly an open talking point. And Eiden’s growth has certainly been crucial in transforming him from a third down pass rush contributor to one of the best every-down defensive ends in the FCS.
“Kenny has always been a guy who wants to work, he just had to understand how to work,” Jean-Baptiste said. “His dad played here and he wanted to live up to that name. Kenny has done a good job under Coach Howe’s direction, going from this guy who was a Tasmanian Devil, all over the place, you don’t know what you are going to get, to a guy who’s sharp, detail oriented, and a vocal leader. That’s impressive.”
Eiden racked up five sacks and eight tackles for loss during his debut season even though he played spot snaps and had that Tasmanian Devil mentality while Grebe anchored the edge. The following season, he had five more sacks while Grebe kept collecting All-American odds.
Between 2023 and 2024, Vigen said he saw something click.
“He’s got a motor and if you have a motor, you are going to withstand the growing pains of transition to Division I, no matter how talented you are,” Vigen said. “I don’t know where it clicked for him, but somewhere between his sophomore and junior year, somewhere it clicked for him that he didn’t need to make every play, he just needed to do his job. That’s the hardest thing for those guys that make all the plays in high school, whether it’s inside or outside on our defensive line. Once they learn that the plays will come if they just do their jobs and play really hard, they turn a corner.”
That’s exactly what happened for Eiden. He earned all-conference in 2024 for the Big Sky champs, totaling 9.5 sacks and 10.5 tackles for loss along the way. His stretch run last year, just like his stretch run this year, was particularly impactful.
“Nobody is playing their best the first game of the season,” Eiden said. “Teams want to get better every year and so do players, year to year and also throughout each year. I think I get more into a rhythm toward the end of the season.”
More than the progression of the season, Eiden’s teammates say they see a player get better as a season rolls along because of his relentless preparation and his mental endurance, which helped him pick up first-team All-Big Sky honors during his final season with the Bobcats.
“I think it starts with the way he prepares. I think he prepares as hard as anyone. In practice, he’s always going hard,” Montana State junior captain Caden Dowler, the Big Sky Defensive Player of the Year, said on Monday. “He’s working his feet, his hands. He gets extra reps after practice.
“And he’s just a gamer. Since high school, he’s been that, that same guy. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone, especially in the state of Montana, that he’s this good. He was wrecking games as a sophomore in high school. I was scared to play him. He’s a game wrecker and he’s a baller. He will always show up in big moments.”
Eiden said his teammates and coaches certainly deserve credit for his improvements as a player and as a man. But so do his parents and his family in general. They’ve stood by him during his evolution into a Bobcat captain.
“My parents have always been my No. 1 fans, no question,” Eiden said. “Every single thing I do, they’ve been there. They’ve been that way my whole life,
“And they just, they just want to see me succeed, and they just want the best for me, and so they do all they can to put me in a position to be successful. Getting to share this part of my life with my dad has been a really, really cool opportunity and an experience that I’ll never forget, and I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.
“Being a Bobcat has been a part of our identity as a family in Bozeman. I’m really glad I could have a successful career, make him proud and make our family proud.”
Eiden has certainly made his family and his community proud. He’s had an impact on 47 wins over the last five years. This year’s MSU team only has eight seniors, but four of them play on the defensive line and the entire team looks to Eiden and fellow Montana-made veteran Paul Brott of Billings for inspiration.
The pass rushing aficionado enters Saturday’s rivalry 2.0 having played 58 games. He has 133 tackles, 37 tackles for loss and 27 sacks despite not being the featured edge player on the MSU defense until this season.
Most importantly, he’s playing his best football on a team that has helped affirm the Bobcats as one of the nation’s elite no matter who graduates or transfers. MSU is on the doorstep of its third national title game appearance in five seasons. And if Montana State can defeat Montana for the second time in a month, the Bobcats will be heavy favorites entering the national championship game in Nashville on January 5.
Eiden is not naïve to the situation. He was both reflective and appreciative on Tuesday as he put into perspective the waning days of his career.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is the relationships you have with people are the things that are going to carry you through life,” Eiden said. “You can have a good play, a bad play, but at the end of the day, you’ll forget the next day.
“What’s more important is, who am I? Who have I affected? How have I grown as a person? What relationships have I built? What have I done for the guys around me? How have I added something, added value to this place?
“I ask myself those questions every day. That’s given me more purpose than just wins and losses. And did I make the tackle or not? I’ve learned to focus on the relationships around you and really dive into it and get to know the people around you.
“More than anything, love what you’re doing. I love this. And I want to make sure we keep it going.”
