The look on Kristen Mattio’s face said it all.
As Esmeralda Morales flexed towards the Montana State bench after splashing a 3-pointer to end the first quarter in Sunday’s second-round game at the Big Sky Tournament, Mattio spun back towards her sideline and gathered her assistants in a tight circle, helplessness written plain across all their faces.
The first quarter had been 10 minutes of frustration for Mattio, a montage of questioning hands raised and futile timeouts taken to try to stem the flow of turnovers and stop Montana State’s onslaught.
None of it worked. Morales’ buzzer-beater gave Montana State a 29-7 lead over Mattio’s Northern Colorado Bears, capping a quarter in which the Bobcats scored the first 19 points of the game.
It got no better. In their debut at this year’s Big Sky Tournament, Montana State demolished Northern Colorado 92-60, forcing 26 turnovers, scoring 37 points off them and causing the Bears to melt down as they struggled to even get set in their offense at times.
By the second half, most of the Northern Colorado players looked as though they’d just returned home from the front lines, thousand-yard stares locked on their faces as Montana State didn’t let up even as Bobcats’ coach Tricia Binford emptied her bench.
“They’re like Dobermans,” Idaho State play-by-play announcer Mark Liptak marveled from the third-floor balcony at Boise’s ICCU Arena. “Attack mode all the time.”
Midway through the third quarter, UNC’s Louise Dykstra returned to the Bears’ bench after yet another turnover and slammed her chair, upsetting a water bottle and spraying it everywhere, the defining image of a demoralizing afternoon.
“The turnovers,” Mattio said simply in the post-game press conference. “There’s not much to talk about outside of, we didn’t value the basketball much today, and it completely got out of hand pretty quickly. … And so there were moments we were not even able to get a shot up.
“I am proud of our team, proud of the resilience to stay in the fight. Even though we were getting punched throughout that fight.”
To be fair, being overwhelmed by Montana State puts the Bears in good company this season.
In her 20th season in Bozeman, Binford and her staff have built a Big Sky team that looks more like a Power 4 roster, one that runs 10 players deep and is stocked with long, athletic wings. The result is one of the best defenses in the country, a relentless, suffocating pressure cooker that has carried MSU to perhaps the greatest Big Sky season since Robin Selvig retired at Montana and certainly one of the two best teams Binford has rolled out.
Following their demolition of Northern Colorado, the Bobcats lead the country in steals with 14.7 per game, and are third in turnover margin (plus-9.0), fourth in turnovers forced (23.8) and 19th in scoring defense (55.9 points allowed per game).
“They can really get after it defensively,” said Idaho State head coach Seton Sobolewski, whose team committed 29 and 28 turnovers in two double-digit losses to MSU. “You just prepare for pressing and switching 1 through 5. And even with some male practice players who are pretty big and athletic, it’s hard to replicate that in practice.”
More importantly than their gaudy defensive statistics, the Bobcats moved to 28-3 with the rout of Northern Colorado. Despite a shock Senior Day loss to Sacramento State that snapped their program-record winning streak at 19 games, Montana State sits 54th in the latest NET rankings and 11th in the mid-major top 25 poll.
And the Bobcats, if they win two more games in Boise this week, have a very real chance to be the first Big Sky team to get a 12 seed or better in the NCAA Tournament (and thus avoid having to play a power-conference team on their home court) since the 2017-18 Northern Colorado Bears.
“This team’s mission is to go 1-0 at a time, but they also have a mission of winning in the postseason,” Binford said. “We definitely have challenged them in that regard. But we also know if we get too far ahead of ourselves, then we cannot be our best.
“We talked about moving the needle, just getting a little bit better the very next day, whether that’s practice or whether that’s a game. Our team has done a very intentional job of knowing that we have to be our best the next day, because what we did yesterday doesn’t matter.”
***
If you wanted to start telling the story of Montana State’s mind-melting, panic-inducing, game-warping defense, you’d have to go back a few years, to a district track meet in Belgrade and the glint in Binford’s eye as she watched Taylee Chirrick run the final curve of an 800.
“I saw her … come around the final corner, and everybody was already beat at that point,” Binford recalled. “But instead of just coasting through the finish line, she hit into another gear, just to kind of out-compete herself. She ran a 2:10, and one of our track coaches was at that meet. I looked at our track coach, I’m like, 2:10, that’s pretty good. And he’s like, Yeah, that’s really good.”
Multiple years on from that memory, Chirrick is one of the most magnetic and athletic freshmen in the country, and the relentless avatar of the Bobcats’ chaotic defense.
Montana State has plenty of players who are long, athletic and committed on defense – six players on the team average more than a steal per game. But they don’t have anybody else like Chirrick – and nobody else in the country does either.
The blonde dynamo, who spent the final two years of her high school career at tiny Montana Class C Roberts, not only has legit track speed packed into a long-armed 5-foot-11 frame.
She’s also such an indefatigable athlete that teammates have reported seeing her run track workouts in Brick Breeden Fieldhouse – immediately after one of the Bobcats’ two-hour-long practices.
Chirrick’s offensive game and general basketball fundamentals are still unpolished. But her athleticism and unceasing motor are so overwhelming that, as the arm-waving front of the Bobcats’ full-court press, she’s already become one of the most impactful per-minute defensive players in Division I.
After ripping seven steals against Northern Colorado in Sunday’s game, Chirrick moved up to sixth in the country with 3.29 steals per game, despite coming off the bench and playing just 21 minutes per contest. She had at least one steal in all but two of MSU’s games this season – including 11 against Eastern Washington in January – and was named the Big Sky’s Defensive Player of the Year last Friday.
“We have watched Taylee Chirrick play a lot of basketball for a long, very long period of time,” Binford said. “There was no doubt, from the coaching staff, of knowing what she brought to the table.
Please just watch No. 44 for the entirety of this play
— Montana State WBB (@MSUBobcatsWBB) February 14, 2025
Beat EVERYONE down the floor@TayleeChirrick | #All4One pic.twitter.com/ReD1vJtmk7
“I’ve seen her in every sport, track, cross country, and you just don’t see her get tired. I’ve seen her go up against kids playing in the Power 4, with the (AAU team) Northwest Blazers, and being able to defend and guard some of the greatest athletes that were in the top 50 prospects (in the country). So yeah, we’ve been aware of it for sure.”
Chirrick is far from the only player on Montana State’s roster who looks designed in a lab to ruin opponents’ offensive game plans. Fifth-year senior Katelynn Martin, who joined Chirrick on the conference’s all-defensive team, is 6-foot-2. So is sophomore forward Ella Johnson, who played over 20 minutes a game despite averaging just 2.7 points because of her defense. In fact, of the 15 players on the Bobcats’ roster, 11 are 6 feet or taller. Meanwhile, a full 10 players averaged double-digit minutes.
“Trish has done an amazing job,” Weber State head coach Jenteal Jackson said. “Her personnel is elite. Their depth is elite. You know, they’re playing 10, 11 kids on any given night, and they really just don’t lose much when they do sub.”
“She treats it like a professional rotation with how the roles on the team are defined,” added Montana interim head coach Nate Harris, who was an assistant on Binford’s staff from 2014 until 2018. “Everybody knows what their role is, what they are going to be asked to do.”
It’s all the result of a recruiting philosophy that values exactly what Binford saw in Chirrick on the track those years ago – athleticism and competitiveness.
“We enjoy having kids that just like to get after it, and that are athletic enough to do it,” MSU associate head coach Sunny Smallwood said. “You’re always looking for speed. … You’ve already got kids in here who like to play that attack-minded style. But then when you add in, for instance, the three freshmen now, all of a sudden it becomes even more contagious.”
***
If Binford has had this style in mind for a few years, it truly crystalized last season.
Three years after winning the 2021 Big Sky title, the Bobcats lost presumed starting point guard Dylan Philip, high-energy post Lexi Deden and valuable role player Lindsey Hein for the season with injuries.
Without those three – and particularly with freshman Natalie Picton starting at point guard in place of Philip – the Bobcats had no choice but to grind out games on defense.
It was ugly at times – nobody who saw it will ever forget their 47-44 overtime win over Northern Colorado in the Big Sky quarterfinals, or the 39 points they scored in a semifinal loss to eventual champion Eastern Washington. It was also a critical experience towards building this year’s Bobcat team.
“I think (this identity) actually formulated last year, but unfortunately, with all of the injuries and things that we had to work through, people probably didn’t notice as much,” Smallwood said. “So in terms of the identity, it started last year. I should say it started coming together, because we’ve been on a track for that for a while.”
In the off-season, Martin, Deden and Taylor Jansson all decided to return for a final year in Bozeman. Chirrick, Addison Harris and Teagan Erickson joined the program as freshmen. And most importantly, the Bobcats poached high-scoring point guard Esmeralda Morales from in-conference rival Portland State.
The fifth-year senior from Spanaway, Washington, ended up elevating Montana State’s ceiling on and off the court.
“Every time we played against them, she lit us up,” Binford said. “I had spent my time coaching against her and watching this kid do really special things in ball screens, do really special things in isolations. Two years ago in the Big Sky tournament, we couldn’t stop her.
“The great ones are consistent at what they do. There’s a lot of really talented players out there that have some gifts, but your ability to be that person night-in and night-out separates the great ones. She’s put in the work and she’s earned the right to be special.”
𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒
— Montana State WBB (@MSUBobcatsWBB) February 7, 2025
BEHIND-THE-BACK DIME @moralesme08 x @TayleeChirrick pic.twitter.com/UG3v3DoMhJ
Binford was confident that Morales could be a difference-maker – and, indeed the point guard went on to average 15 points, 3.6 assists and win Big Sky MVP.
What was less certain was whether the Bobcats could find the same defensive intensity that they had by necessity in 2023-24.
But during MSU’s summer practices, Binford started to think that this year’s team had even more potential on that end. Closer to the season in a closed scrimmage against Nevada, the Bobcats were so disruptive with a full-court press that Binford decided to commit fully to that identity.
“When we got everybody together in the summer, with knowing how fast our freshman class was, as well as getting somebody like Esme in the portal and the kids returning, we knew we wanted to find more possessions,” Binford said. “We had created so many steals last year and we weren’t able to maximize those possessions with such a limited roster.
“I just think we’ve increased the length of the floor that we’re wanting to be disruptive. Last year it was more getting the ball into the half court and being disruptive at that point. But those principles have just continued to just get a little bit longer on the floor.”
The result was a team that warped the traditional math of basketball, generating so many extra possessions that they stomped through their schedule despite not being all that efficient on offense.
In their first exhibition game against Chadron State, Montana State forced 48 turnovers. In their second Division-I game against Cal Poly, the Bobcats nabbed 17 steals – and haven’t looked back since.
In one mid-January stretch, MSU forced 29 or more turnovers in three straight games, including 32 apiece in back-to-back road wins at Eastern Washington and Weber State. Incredibly, the ‘Cats have won the turnover battle in 30 of 31 games, only coming out on the wrong end of that equation in their late-November loss at then-No. 23 Utah.
After an overtime loss at Oral Roberts on Dec. 7, they snapped mid-major power Florida Gulf Coast’s 37-game home winning streak in their very next game, and didn’t lose again for nearly three full months until Sacramento State ruined their Senior Day on March 3.
Chirrick, Martin, Johnson, Morales, Picton and Philip all averaged over one steal per game, while Morales’ on-ball wizardry and Marah Dykstra’s hard-nosed post game gave them just enough clutch-time shot creation in games when they didn’t avalanche the other team out of the gym.
And now, one of the most enjoyable, unique and successful teams in Big Sky history is just two games away from getting their chance on the national stage.
“As a coach with this team, I sure hope the NCAA is looking at the resume,” Binford said. “What they have accomplished up to this point is worth having a conversation, because they have had to take everybody’s best game and they have been very, very consistent at responding to that. So I would hope that our resume does speak some things as far as the mid-major recognition, the NET ratings, the RPI ratings. Our kids have done a tremendous job.”
