It’s impossible to ignore the fraternal nature of the football coaches throughout the Big Sky Conference.
Every head coach in the league save Brent Vigen at Montana State and Mickey Mental at Weber State had strong Big Sky ties before taking over their respective programs. Mental even spent a year on Jay Hill’s staff before guiding the Wildcats. And Vigen is a North Dakota State alum turned coach who spent seven seasons at Wyoming before taking over at MSU.
Such is life in small-school football out West.
Portland State’s Bruce Barnum and Sacramento State’s Andy Thompson are Big Sky lifers (thus far at least) with stops at multiple schools in the league. Bobby Hauck coached at Montana in the 1980s and Northern Arizona in the 1990s before returning to lead UM as the head coach between 2003 and 2009…and again from 2018, where he still resides. Aaron Best has been at Eastern Washington every season save two since 1996 between his time as a player, assistant and head coach.
Paul Wulff was the head coach at Eastern Washington in the 2000s and is the head coach at Cal Poly now. UC Davis head coach Tim Plough is coaching his alma mater but started his rise through the coaching ranks at Northern Arizona. Cody Hawkins coached at UC Davis for his old man, Dan Hawkins, who also used to employ Plough
Northern Colorado head coach Ed Lamb even has Big Sky ties even if Southern Utah was only in the league from 2012 until 2018. Lamb led SUU to Big Sky prominence before spending a stint at BYU before returning ahead of last season to coach the Bears.
Idaho head coach Jason Eck did his formidable assistant coaching years at South Dakota State but had a stop at Montana State before that.
“It’s a good conference, and there’s great camaraderie, great competition,” said Hauck, who has won 133 games during his 13 seasons at his alma mater. “Everybody has great players, everybody has got good coaches. Week in and week out, it’s a test. That’s attractive to people.”
It also was attractive to Brian Wright, even if Northern Arizona’s first-year head coach took a much more meandering path to make his way back to the Big Sky. NAU plays Hauck’s Griz for Montana’s homecoming game on Saturday.
Unlike many of the other Big Sky lifers, Wright has Big Sky experience but not deep Big Sky roots. He hails from Ohio, where he played and coached small-school football for the duration of the 1990s.
He dove into the Division I ranks as the quarterbacks coach, then the offensive coordinator at Youngstown State between 2001 and 2009.
In 2010, he got his first (and only) taste of the Big Sky until he earned the head coaching job in Flagstaff ahead of this season.
Wright spent the 2010 and 2011 seasons at Montana State, helping usher in a new era for the Bobcats. The 2010 Bobcat quarterback competition was much publicized and certainly compelling. When redshirt freshman DeNarius McGhee beat out incumbent Cody Kempt, who was an Oregon transfer, that made waves around Montana and around the Big Sky.
“We had a lot of fun in the Big Sky, certainly on the offensive side of the ball,” Wright said at the Big Sky Kickoff in Spokane in July. “We had a lot of good players and we played a lot of good football at Montana State.”
Then McGhee won Big Sky Most Outstanding Offensive Player and led MSU to the Big Sky title, Wright’s star began to really rise. The following season, when McGhee was again an All-American and the Bobcats again won the Big Sky title, Wright vaulted into the FBS.
“McGhee was special and remains special,” said Wright, who gave McGhee his first coaching job. McGhee now coaches for the Houston Texans of the NFL. “He was driven and that’s the first thing we look for in a quarterback is that driven mindset.
“I will never forget, and I often think about sitting in my office there in Bozeman, and you couldn’t see the front door from my office, but you could always hear when DeNarius walked in, because DeNarius would yell ‘Coach Wright!’ to the top of his lungs as soon as he walked in to make sure I knew that he was in the building and we better get ready to go to work.”
After McGhee’s sophomore year, Wright vaulted to the FBS when he landed a job as the offensive coordinator at Florida Atlantic on Charlie Partridge’s staff.
“I was always fond of my days in the Big Sky and thought ‘what a great opportunity if a head coaching job that was a good fit ever opened up in this league.”
Wright was in the mix at Montana State after Rob Ash did not have his contract renewed following the 2016 season but elected to take the offensive coordinator job at Toledo. He became the head coach at Pittsburgh State, a Division II school in Kansas, in 2020.
Wright guided the Gorillas to a 33-8 overall record and 2 conference championships in 4 seasons at the helm. Each of the last two seasons, Pitt State finished ranked No. 5 in Division II.
The head job at Northern Arizona opened up after Chris Ball’s squad started 0-3, went 5-3 in league play but finished under .500 for the fourth full season in a row (NAU went 3-2 in the spring of 2021).
Enter Wright, who brought his Pitt State quarterback Ty Pennington and the entire offensive staff from his previous stop.
“When NAU opened up, I had my eye on that for quite some time, really ever since my time in the Big Sky because I believed there was a lot of potential here to make this a consistent, championship program,” Wright said.
Prior to Ball’s arrival ahead of the 2019 season, Northern Arizona had 19 winning seasons since 1993, qualifying for the FCS playoffs six times, including five times under long-time head coach Jerome Souers.
When it comes to the various coaches who have made stops in Flagstaff, the list is as rich as any small-school football program in the country.
Names like NFL head coaches Andy Reid, Mike Shannahan, Marty Mornhinweg, Brad Childers and Bill Callahan along with Power 5 head coaches Gary Andersen (Wisconsin), Karl Dorrell (UCLA), Larry Kentera (Arizona State) and Steve Kragthorpe (Louisville) all coached at NAU. Plenty of coaches with Montana ties, including Hauck, current UM offensive coordinator Brent Pease along with former UM head coaches Joe Glenn and Robin Pflugrad also have had stops in Flagstaff.
“From a coaching standpoint, for the new and younger guys, the Big Sky is a great opportunity for them to cut their teeth,” Hauck said. “If you look back at the history of coaches in this conference, everybody from Dennis Erickson and Keith Gilbertson (Idaho) and Don Read (Montana), you look at NAU, the people that have coached in this league, you have NFL head coaches with NAU, like Mike Shanahan, Andy Reid, Marty Mornhinweg, Brad Childress, go down the list, Mike Callahan.
“This has been the conference where there’s been a lot of innovation over the years, a lot of great coaches and great coaching, and it’s really a great, competitive place to be a college coach.”
Now Wright hopes to be the next head coach to find innovation and help Northern Arizona re-attain relevance within the Big Sky and in the landscape of football in the West.
Northern Arizona comes to Missoula with a 3-3 record that includes a convincing 34-16 win over No. 10 Sac State and a 23-17 loss last week at No. 7 Idaho. The Lumberjacks beat Montana 28-14 last season for their first win of the season. But the roster includes 67 new players as NAU makes its first trip to Missoula since 2017. Not a single Lumberjack, player or coach, has ever played at Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
NAU’s last winning season also doubles as its last playoff season and also happens to date back to 2017. On Saturday, Wright and his program has the opportunity to take the next step to helping the ‘Jacks climb the Big Sky ranks like Wright helped the Bobcats do more than a decade ago.
“I think it’s consistency,” Wright said when asked about helping NAU become nationally elite. “Consistency is the hallmark of a champion. We’ve got to stack consistent days together in the weight room on the practice field, whatever it may be. So we got to build the consistency and build a unit that’s playing for one another and playing together like a championship team would.”
