Curious Big Sky coaches weigh in on newest member in Grizzlies' Stitt
PARK CITY, Utah – Coach Bob Stitt was the Sasquatch of college football for years. Most everyone had heard of him; few had ever seen his football teams.
"Only what I'd read," Sacramento State coach Jody Sears said of his Stitt knowledge before Montana hired the elusive coach last December.
The literature reads like fiction, hardly believable with points and yardage and play counts soaring beyond reasonable comprehension. But Stitt, sharpened at Division II's Colorado School of Mines for 15 years before this season's leap to the Big Sky Conference, is unknown no more.
Especially to those who have his Grizzlies on their schedule in 2015.
Idaho State head coach Mike Kramer still keeps in good contact with his former wide receiver's coach, a one-time Griz player and current Montana staffer Mike Ferriter. Kramer's curiosity has only been heightened from the tidbits that trickled out of his former assistant.
"He says it's gonna be pretty similar (to what ISU ran in 2014)," Kramer recalled. "Throw it, move it, get out and get going."
Should the Grizzly "O" turn out like the Bengals from yesteryear, Montana can expect a lot of action when its team holds the ball. Idaho State led the league in 2014 with 562 yards per game and scored better than 40 points each week.
But Stitt isn't enigmatic to all Big Sky head men. The coaching fraternity is small. Somebody always knows somebody.
Occasionally for many, many years.
Stitt ran across both Northern Colorado's Earnest Collins Jr. and Portland State's Bruce Barnum more than 25 years ago.
Collins Jr. was a player at UNC from 1991-96, first recruited the year Stitt served as graduate assistant on the Bears' staff in 1989. Barnum's coaching career began at Western Washington in 1990 and his defensive coordinator was a childhood friend of Stitt's from the Midwest.
Barnum and Stitt met at a conference that year.
"We kept in contact on and off, on and off, and now we're both coaches in the same conference," said Barnum, himself a first-year head coach as PSU's interim head man.
"We were laughing last night about it," added Barnum, who got to mingle with Stitt again at the Big Sky Conference Football Kickoff this week.
Now that the meeting and chit-chatting is out of the way, the Big Sky's 12 other coaches are shifting their focus to stopping the offense they've all heard so much about. It's an imminent threat for Cal Poly, which gets the Griz on Sept. 5 for its opener.
"They're gonna score some points, but we hope they're not all touchdowns," joked Mustangs coach Tim Walsh. "You have to be great open-field tacklers, which hopefully we will be."
Stitt's arsenal suddenly features the kind of athletes he could never lure to Mines, an engineering school with rigorous academics – in a way similar to Cal Poly, Walsh added.
"He's found an offense that can maybe overcome some deficiencies that he's had in the past, but he may not have as many now with a great offense," Walsh said. "That's scary for people in the Big Sky."
Like a sudden Sasquatch appearance.
