A couple of interesting tidbits in here.......
Curious Big Sky coaches weigh in on Grizzlies' Stitt
By AJ Mazzolini
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
Kramers 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
In$tant replay
The Big Sky's new replay system for football and men's and women's basketball will cost upwards of $1 million by the end of its first full school year.
Big Sky Conference Commissioner Doug Fullerton addressed the financial side of the move Monday, saying the base system and equipment purchases have already run about $500,000.
But there's more to it than just the monitors and fancy cameras.
As previously reported, the Big Sky will employ an eighth official that will travel with the seven-person officiating crew that deals strictly with the replay system. The league will also employ up to three more game day staffers to help smooth out the process, including a communicator, technician and field-level assistant.
"But the only expensive one is the replay official who will fly in and travel," Fullerton added.
Fullerton said the league has been spiriting money away for a few years to be able to purchase the DVSport replay software and equipment in one chunk. All of the initial purchase was financed by the league to avoid monetary pressure on its member schools.
Yearly software updates and equipment upgrades will also come out of the Big Sky's pocket for the first five years, Fullerton said.
The only responsibilities for individual schools were nominal, running power to the portable systems that may be unplugged and moved from football stadium to basketball arena. Should schools require further press box space for the added working bodies, expansions would fall to that individual institution.
The Big Sky is also providing grants for some schools that must update their cameras for the transition
Big Sky's manifest destiny
Commissioner Fullerton has been forward in his pursuit of Idaho as a full member of the Big Sky Conference. The Vandals returned to the league for everything but football in 2014, after all, following almost 20 years away.
But why stop there?
In his address at the Big Sky Kickoff on Monday, Fullerton discussed not only the possibility of adding more schools to the 12-institution league – 13 in football – but a world of further fractioning football conferences.
New Mexico State is another name on Fullerton's list, though the Big Sky is not necessarily pursuing the Aggies, rather just hoping to "let them know we are here."
Of course a full realignment with Idaho is first on the wishlist.
"If anybody looks out there, OK, the Big Sky controls everything in the west," Fullerton said. "There's no secret ... and I actually think in the long run that would be better for Idaho, too."
The Vandals jumped to the Big West after exiting the Big Sky in 1996 before a stint in the Sun Belt and then the Western Athletic Conference. With the WAC's discontinuation for football in 2013, Idaho found itself again far flung in the Sun Belt.
Both Idaho and New Mexico State play football in the southeastern-based conference.
The Sun Belt is one of five FBS leagues not included in the "Power Five" grouping, which includes the SEC, Big 10, Big 12, ACC and Pac-12. Everyone not on that money making list is far closer to the Big Sky than they are to the likes of Texas or Oregon or Ohio State, Fullerton argued.
"If you look at the institutional profile and the research institutions we have, there are two or three conferences that we aren't chasing anymore. They're really chasing us," Fullerton said.
What exactly does it all mean? Hard to say, but such extreme movement in the landscape is still years away. Perhaps college football will splinter further with the mid-majors joining the FCS's elite, Fullerton implied.
"Quite frankly, it's just where we belong," he said. "But I think to chase FBS prematurely would have been a mistake
