Another coordinator moves on up

The Montana Grizzlies took another hit to their coaching staff with the hiring of offensive coordinator Jonathan Smith by Boise State. Smith will be the quarterbacks coach at Boise State and yet receive a nice bump in pay: The Broncos pay their assistants anywhere from $140,000-310,000, and I’ve heard that they’ll pay Smith somewhere in [...]

Pease and other rumblings from Idaho

The Montana Grizzlies just lost their defensive coordinator, Mike Breske, to Mike Leach and the Washington State Cougars. Now that Brent Pease has been whisked away from Boise State to become the offensive coordinator at Florida, I have to wonder if that might have a domino effect on UM as well. One story has Boise [...]

Arizona Republic mentions Pflugrad

No TIWIW yet for the Grizzlies’ 41-14 playoff win over Central Arkansas; until then here’s an interesting story that features Montana coach Robin Pflugrad today from the Arizona Republic. It mentions a few possibilities for the Arizona State Sun Devils’ open coaching job, including Pflugrad. Along with mentioning that Pflugrad was an ASU assistant whose [...]

The real cost of Nevada’s upset of Boise State

In case you missed it, a couple of former Big Sky Conference rivals met on the football field last weekend, and a good Nevada Wolfpack team beat the favored Boise State Broncos in OT. Now comes this story from businessinsider.com: Nevada’s victory, because it cost the Broncos a berth in one of the BCS bowls, [...]

The Rivals

You’ve gotta love Cat-Griz — I call it Cat-Griz because I am 47 and when I was younger it didn’t matter which came first, Griz or Cats, and don’t get me started on Brawl of the Wild – but this Eastern Washington-Montana rivalry has some legs, doesn’t it? It’s safe to say everyone in the [...]

From the inside looking out

Here’s a column out of Honolulu concerning the Grizzlies and their possible move into the Western Athletic Conference. That the WAC wants the Griz seems a given; but can or will Montana make the move is the question. Boise State set the bar pretty high, that is certain, but as Ferd Lewis points out: The [...]

Just kidding, Boise; come on in

Here’s Kurt Kragthorpe’s take on Boise State heading off to the Mountain West Conference, and he asks many of the same questions I have, including: What changed in the four days since the Mountain West tabled expansion (on Monday)? It’s an interesting time in college football, but from my perspective it’s for all the wrong [...]

Idle hands… do the NCAA’s work

So I’ve been wondering where Marc Mariani, the subject of my Wednesday column, ranked in the annals of FCS title games with his two 170-yard outings in 2008-09. The NCAA doesn’t do such a great job with its record books, so it seemed it was up to me to find out. So I found out. [...]