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Stitt Putting His Stamp on Montana
- Thread starter bgbigdog
- Start date
mtgrizrule said:
That is why I love Colin Bingham on offense. Yes, he will be a split-out TE, but he will also be an in-line TE and a flexed H-back in the backfield. Which will allow him to be the absolute devastating blocker that he is. If people watch his hudl highlight video, they will see Colin just absolutely pick-up people and slam them into the turf. He is an INCREDIBLE blocker!
Love this kid!ALPHAGRIZ1
Well-known member
DuCharme said:
Wow, thats almost as bad as posting video online, now all of our opponents will start to follow AJs twitter feed (somebody has too) and gameplan around it. Way to tip off the opponents.
Somebody should email Stitt and tell him this is happening............
I couldn't agree more!! He is going to see the field a LOT in the upcoming years, and honestly...he might be the most physically ready freshman to play this fall. Downfield blocking, catching the ball in the middle of the field, put him at FB in short yardage situations, the guy can do it all. He's gonna be one of the meanest players on the team here in a couple years.IntuitiveGriz said:mtgrizrule said:
That is why I love Colin Bingham on offense. Yes, he will be a split-out TE, but he will also be an in-line TE and a flexed H-back in the backfield. Which will allow him to be the absolute devastating blocker that he is. If people watch his hudl highlight video, they will see Colin just absolutely pick-up people and slam them into the turf. He is an INCREDIBLE blocker!
brewskis said:I couldn't agree more!! He is going to see the field a LOT in the upcoming years, and honestly...he might be the most physically ready freshman to play this fall. Downfield blocking, catching the ball in the middle of the field, put him at FB in short yardage situations, the guy can do it all. He's gonna be one of the meanest players on the team here in a couple years.IntuitiveGriz said:mtgrizrule said:
That is why I love Colin Bingham on offense. Yes, he will be a split-out TE, but he will also be an in-line TE and a flexed H-back in the backfield. Which will allow him to be the absolute devastating blocker that he is. If people watch his hudl highlight video, they will see Colin just absolutely pick-up people and slam them into the turf. He is an INCREDIBLE blocker!
Likewise, Brewskis, I couldn't agree with you more!!
Yukon
Well-known member
came across this old article on Stitt's offense. It's from last October, when he was still with the Mines and before the offer from Montana. It was a very fun read and makes me quite excited. I'm sure some of you have already seen it:
http://www.sbnation.com/college-foo...bob-stitt-coach-offense-colorado-school-mines
http://www.sbnation.com/college-foo...bob-stitt-coach-offense-colorado-school-mines
This is the most promising and optimistic article I've read on Stitt yet. Makes me feel like we were damned lucky to pick him up. Having an offense that does "everything" such as this article states, is going to be so fun to watch. Once he starts getting his players into the program, look out.Yukon said:
"The Sasquatch of College Football"
July 11, 2015 12:05 am • By Brian Rosenthal | Lincoln Journal Star
The Bigfoot of college football will soon be discovered.
Surely Bob Stitt can’t stay obscure for eternity, can he?
How could a man credited with inventing the fly sweep — or at least a major wrinkle in it — and someone who earned shout-outs from an Orange Bowl-winning coach live on ESPN go largely unrecognized in a group of college coaches’ mug shots?
After all, Stitt is the mastermind behind an offense that averaged more plays per game in 2013 than any other college team in the nation — Baylor and Oregon included.
Such coaches generally don’t jokingly refer to themselves as "Sasquatch."
“Everybody knows about me,” Stitt said, “but nobody’s ever seen me.”
That figures to soon change for Stitt, a Tecumseh native and former Doane College player and assistant coach.
Stitt, 51, is beginning his first season as head coach at Montana, an FCS program with longstanding tradition and high fan expectations but recent bumps.
Sort of like another football program with which Stitt is familiar.
“When I was growing up, you lived and breathed Nebraska football,” said Stitt, a 1983 graduate of Tecumseh High School. “If you lost a game — which wasn’t very often — it ruined your life.
“I thought every place was like this, and then you get out and you coach, and you find out other places don’t care as much as what Nebraska fans did. This was a chance for me, the first time in my career — and this will be (my) 30th year coaching — that I get to coach in a place that is exactly what I grew up in.”
Stitt coached Colorado School of Mines the past 15 seasons and compiled a 108-62 record. His teams won Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference championships in 2004, 2010 and 2014, with NCAA Division II playoff appearances in those seasons.
Along the way, he quietly built and honed and tweaked a high-octane spread offense that caught the attention of coaches on the FBS level.
Former Kentucky coach Hal Mumme, who used his “Air Raid” offense in the 1990s to give a pulse to the Wildcats’ program, first met Stitt at a coaching clinic in Las Vegas, when Mumme was coaching at New Mexico State.
Stitt struck Mumme as a “really, really, really bright” coach — one that Mumme today says is the best football coach nobody knows about.
“He did a tremendous job at a place that was almost impossible to win at, and he kind of made it look easy,” Mumme said, referring to Mines’ woeful facilities when Stitt arrived and the engineering school’s high academic standards.
“He really built that place. I mean, it wasn’t like the talent pool was real wide. Bob found a way to win recruiting those kids, and he did a great job — maybe the best job anybody’s done from out of state — of recruiting the state of Texas.”
Stitt’s innovative offensive mind helped, too.
Dana Holgorsen, then offensive coordinator at Houston, had also attended that coaching clinic in Las Vegas when Stitt shared his wrinkle to the fly sweep — a receiver comes in motion, running full speed, and takes a quick handoff from the quarterback immediately after the ball is snapped from under center.
Stitt always liked the play and wanted to run it out of the shotgun but knew the timing would be difficult.
Then one day it clicked with him: Why not flip the ball forward, ever so slightly, instead of a direct handoff? If the ball is dropped, it’s merely an incomplete pass, not a fumble.
“Quarterbacks loved it,” Stitt said, “because they could complete it and it was passing yardage.”
Quarterbacks such as Geno Smith of West Virginia, who set an Orange Bowl passing record with 401 yards in a 70-33 romp over Clemson in the 2012 game. West Virginia ran Stitt’s version of the fly sweep over and over, and Smith piled up passing yards on a play where the ball may have traveled a couple of inches through the air.
ESPN announcers Mike Tirico, Ron Jaworski and Jon Gruden raved about the play. In a postgame interview, sideline reporter Lisa Salter asked Holgorsen, the West Virginia coach, about the play that Clemson never stopped.
“And he said, ‘I got that from my good friend Bob Stitt at Colorado School of Mines.’ And immediately my phone started vibrating, people texting me,” Stitt said. “And then Bruce Feldman, who was working at CBS at the time, texted me and said, ‘You’re trending on Twitter.’
"That’s when it all started. I got fan mail from West Virginia fans.”
The accompanying Twitter hashtag that soon caught fire?
#Stitthappens.
“That little fly sweep — it was so simple that when he first told me about it, I just kind of pounded my head,” said Mumme, entering his second season as head coach at Belhavan University, an NCAA Division III school in Jackson, Mississippi. “I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it, or that nobody had.
“He just takes simple ideas and tweaks them. To me, that’s the mark of a great offensive coach,” Mumme said. “He’s one of those guys that’s smart enough to know you can’t do everything. Believe it or not, there’s not a lot of those guys around. He’s real inventive in what he does do, but he doesn’t try to do too much.”
So why has Stitt remained relatively unknown?
Had he become an offensive coordinator on the FBS level, Stitt believes that would’ve stifled his creativity. Few head coaches, Stitt said, allow new offensive coordinators to implement off-the-cuff ideas or do things such as attempt 46 fourth-down plays, as Mines did last season.
“Nobody’s hanging over my head,” Stitt said.
And he remained mostly obscure at Mines, despite his success, because games weren’t televised.
Well, most weren’t. CBS Sports Network did show Stitt’s team on a Thursday night national telecast last season. The Orediggers had 420 yards of offense by halftime and led 42-7.
Former Nebraska quarterback and 2001 Heisman Trophy winner Eric Crouch was a color analyst for that game. One number sticks out in Crouch’s mind: 119.
That’s how many plays Mines ran.
Did Crouch, in his preparation for the game, know what he was getting into?
“I knew I was getting myself into some quick comments,” Crouch said, “that’s for sure.”
The fast-paced offense impressed Crouch.
“They were a very quick, disciplined team, and I like the shots they took downfield,” Crouch said. “It really opens up the quick passing game, because if you don’t respect the deep ball, you’re going to get beat. So it gives a little bit of leverage, a little room to work.”
One particular deep, play-action pass that Stitt called during a game at Doane, where he was offensive coordinator from 1990-93, sticks with him. The Tigers, coincidentally, were playing Colorado School of Mines, and Doane trailed but scored late on a touchdown pass from Brad McClatchey to Jeff Hill to win the game.
“Jeff Hill kept coming off on the sideline going, ‘I’m open every single time!’ which you hear from receivers almost every play, anyway,” Stitt said. “Finally I just said, ‘OK, we’re going to draw this thing up.’ They were being heavy with their safeties on the run but playing cover-2 corners and there was nobody deep.
“I was uncontrollable, emotionally, in the press box. It felt so good to help those kids be successful — way better than ever scoring a touchdown as a player. At that point, I knew coaching is what I needed to be doing.”’
Stitt was offensive coordinator at Austin College in Texas and at Harvard before becoming head coach at Mines, where he hadn’t planned on staying more than two or three seasons.
“Then one day you wake up and it’s 15 years later,” Stitt said. “That’s probably a little bit of a reason I stayed so long. I really wasn’t looking for a job. I was concentrating on my job.”
Plus, he wasn’t going to leave a program he’d built into one among the best in NCAA Division II for another rebuilding job. At Montana, he inherits a program that’s won 18 conference titles, made 19 playoff appearances — winning national championships in 1995 and 2001 — and won 119 games in the 2000s, the most of any college program.
But Montana is currently on NCAA probation and has had it scholarships reduced from 63 to 59 through the 2016-17 academic year. That’s after an NCAA investigation discovered boosters had provided extra benefits to players, and ruled former coach Robin Pflugard, fired after two seasons, failed to monitor the program.
In 2012, Montana suffered its first losing season in 27 years. Stitt replaces Mick Delaney, who retired after going 24-14 over three seasons.
“We've just got to put our stamp on things,” Stitt said. “I told the players we’re really not going to change things, we just need to get it back. We lost our swagger a little bit. That’s the only thing we need to get back is, ‘Hey, we’re Montana, and we’re going to get everybody’s A game every single week and we’ve got to be able to punch people in the mouth every single week.’”
Could Stitt parlay Montana into an FBS job someday?
“Bob could do anything he wants to do,” Mumme said. “Bob is a guy who the stage isn’t going to be too big for him. You see these guys, sometimes they do real well at a lower level or a smaller place, and they jump up and you never hear from them again. Well, basically the stage was too big for him.”
It’s not, Mumme said, for Stitt.
“A, he’s smart, and B, he’s not intimidated by anybody,” Mumme said. “I like him immensely. He’s really a neat guy. He’s a fun guy to be around, and he’s really inventive. He just fits in. I really think he’s a great football coach, and I think people are going to start noticing.”
July 11, 2015 12:05 am • By Brian Rosenthal | Lincoln Journal Star
The Bigfoot of college football will soon be discovered.
Surely Bob Stitt can’t stay obscure for eternity, can he?
How could a man credited with inventing the fly sweep — or at least a major wrinkle in it — and someone who earned shout-outs from an Orange Bowl-winning coach live on ESPN go largely unrecognized in a group of college coaches’ mug shots?
After all, Stitt is the mastermind behind an offense that averaged more plays per game in 2013 than any other college team in the nation — Baylor and Oregon included.
Such coaches generally don’t jokingly refer to themselves as "Sasquatch."
“Everybody knows about me,” Stitt said, “but nobody’s ever seen me.”
That figures to soon change for Stitt, a Tecumseh native and former Doane College player and assistant coach.
Stitt, 51, is beginning his first season as head coach at Montana, an FCS program with longstanding tradition and high fan expectations but recent bumps.
Sort of like another football program with which Stitt is familiar.
“When I was growing up, you lived and breathed Nebraska football,” said Stitt, a 1983 graduate of Tecumseh High School. “If you lost a game — which wasn’t very often — it ruined your life.
“I thought every place was like this, and then you get out and you coach, and you find out other places don’t care as much as what Nebraska fans did. This was a chance for me, the first time in my career — and this will be (my) 30th year coaching — that I get to coach in a place that is exactly what I grew up in.”
Stitt coached Colorado School of Mines the past 15 seasons and compiled a 108-62 record. His teams won Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference championships in 2004, 2010 and 2014, with NCAA Division II playoff appearances in those seasons.
Along the way, he quietly built and honed and tweaked a high-octane spread offense that caught the attention of coaches on the FBS level.
Former Kentucky coach Hal Mumme, who used his “Air Raid” offense in the 1990s to give a pulse to the Wildcats’ program, first met Stitt at a coaching clinic in Las Vegas, when Mumme was coaching at New Mexico State.
Stitt struck Mumme as a “really, really, really bright” coach — one that Mumme today says is the best football coach nobody knows about.
“He did a tremendous job at a place that was almost impossible to win at, and he kind of made it look easy,” Mumme said, referring to Mines’ woeful facilities when Stitt arrived and the engineering school’s high academic standards.
“He really built that place. I mean, it wasn’t like the talent pool was real wide. Bob found a way to win recruiting those kids, and he did a great job — maybe the best job anybody’s done from out of state — of recruiting the state of Texas.”
Stitt’s innovative offensive mind helped, too.
Dana Holgorsen, then offensive coordinator at Houston, had also attended that coaching clinic in Las Vegas when Stitt shared his wrinkle to the fly sweep — a receiver comes in motion, running full speed, and takes a quick handoff from the quarterback immediately after the ball is snapped from under center.
Stitt always liked the play and wanted to run it out of the shotgun but knew the timing would be difficult.
Then one day it clicked with him: Why not flip the ball forward, ever so slightly, instead of a direct handoff? If the ball is dropped, it’s merely an incomplete pass, not a fumble.
“Quarterbacks loved it,” Stitt said, “because they could complete it and it was passing yardage.”
Quarterbacks such as Geno Smith of West Virginia, who set an Orange Bowl passing record with 401 yards in a 70-33 romp over Clemson in the 2012 game. West Virginia ran Stitt’s version of the fly sweep over and over, and Smith piled up passing yards on a play where the ball may have traveled a couple of inches through the air.
ESPN announcers Mike Tirico, Ron Jaworski and Jon Gruden raved about the play. In a postgame interview, sideline reporter Lisa Salter asked Holgorsen, the West Virginia coach, about the play that Clemson never stopped.
“And he said, ‘I got that from my good friend Bob Stitt at Colorado School of Mines.’ And immediately my phone started vibrating, people texting me,” Stitt said. “And then Bruce Feldman, who was working at CBS at the time, texted me and said, ‘You’re trending on Twitter.’
"That’s when it all started. I got fan mail from West Virginia fans.”
The accompanying Twitter hashtag that soon caught fire?
#Stitthappens.
“That little fly sweep — it was so simple that when he first told me about it, I just kind of pounded my head,” said Mumme, entering his second season as head coach at Belhavan University, an NCAA Division III school in Jackson, Mississippi. “I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it, or that nobody had.
“He just takes simple ideas and tweaks them. To me, that’s the mark of a great offensive coach,” Mumme said. “He’s one of those guys that’s smart enough to know you can’t do everything. Believe it or not, there’s not a lot of those guys around. He’s real inventive in what he does do, but he doesn’t try to do too much.”
So why has Stitt remained relatively unknown?
Had he become an offensive coordinator on the FBS level, Stitt believes that would’ve stifled his creativity. Few head coaches, Stitt said, allow new offensive coordinators to implement off-the-cuff ideas or do things such as attempt 46 fourth-down plays, as Mines did last season.
“Nobody’s hanging over my head,” Stitt said.
And he remained mostly obscure at Mines, despite his success, because games weren’t televised.
Well, most weren’t. CBS Sports Network did show Stitt’s team on a Thursday night national telecast last season. The Orediggers had 420 yards of offense by halftime and led 42-7.
Former Nebraska quarterback and 2001 Heisman Trophy winner Eric Crouch was a color analyst for that game. One number sticks out in Crouch’s mind: 119.
That’s how many plays Mines ran.
Did Crouch, in his preparation for the game, know what he was getting into?
“I knew I was getting myself into some quick comments,” Crouch said, “that’s for sure.”
The fast-paced offense impressed Crouch.
“They were a very quick, disciplined team, and I like the shots they took downfield,” Crouch said. “It really opens up the quick passing game, because if you don’t respect the deep ball, you’re going to get beat. So it gives a little bit of leverage, a little room to work.”
One particular deep, play-action pass that Stitt called during a game at Doane, where he was offensive coordinator from 1990-93, sticks with him. The Tigers, coincidentally, were playing Colorado School of Mines, and Doane trailed but scored late on a touchdown pass from Brad McClatchey to Jeff Hill to win the game.
“Jeff Hill kept coming off on the sideline going, ‘I’m open every single time!’ which you hear from receivers almost every play, anyway,” Stitt said. “Finally I just said, ‘OK, we’re going to draw this thing up.’ They were being heavy with their safeties on the run but playing cover-2 corners and there was nobody deep.
“I was uncontrollable, emotionally, in the press box. It felt so good to help those kids be successful — way better than ever scoring a touchdown as a player. At that point, I knew coaching is what I needed to be doing.”’
Stitt was offensive coordinator at Austin College in Texas and at Harvard before becoming head coach at Mines, where he hadn’t planned on staying more than two or three seasons.
“Then one day you wake up and it’s 15 years later,” Stitt said. “That’s probably a little bit of a reason I stayed so long. I really wasn’t looking for a job. I was concentrating on my job.”
Plus, he wasn’t going to leave a program he’d built into one among the best in NCAA Division II for another rebuilding job. At Montana, he inherits a program that’s won 18 conference titles, made 19 playoff appearances — winning national championships in 1995 and 2001 — and won 119 games in the 2000s, the most of any college program.
But Montana is currently on NCAA probation and has had it scholarships reduced from 63 to 59 through the 2016-17 academic year. That’s after an NCAA investigation discovered boosters had provided extra benefits to players, and ruled former coach Robin Pflugard, fired after two seasons, failed to monitor the program.
In 2012, Montana suffered its first losing season in 27 years. Stitt replaces Mick Delaney, who retired after going 24-14 over three seasons.
“We've just got to put our stamp on things,” Stitt said. “I told the players we’re really not going to change things, we just need to get it back. We lost our swagger a little bit. That’s the only thing we need to get back is, ‘Hey, we’re Montana, and we’re going to get everybody’s A game every single week and we’ve got to be able to punch people in the mouth every single week.’”
Could Stitt parlay Montana into an FBS job someday?
“Bob could do anything he wants to do,” Mumme said. “Bob is a guy who the stage isn’t going to be too big for him. You see these guys, sometimes they do real well at a lower level or a smaller place, and they jump up and you never hear from them again. Well, basically the stage was too big for him.”
It’s not, Mumme said, for Stitt.
“A, he’s smart, and B, he’s not intimidated by anybody,” Mumme said. “I like him immensely. He’s really a neat guy. He’s a fun guy to be around, and he’s really inventive. He just fits in. I really think he’s a great football coach, and I think people are going to start noticing.”
mtgrizrule
Well-known member
signedbewildered said:
Nice find and thanks for sharing, That is a great article. I hope a lot of Nebraska kids read that. It would be awesome to get a few recruits from that state. Quite a bit of talent falls through the cracks because beating Nebraska for a Nebraska kid is very difficult. Many of the kids that don't get recognized by Nebraska will fall to g to one of the many smaller Nebraska colleges like UNO, Doane, Wayne State to name a few.
Also good to hear Stitt has a presence in Texas. I'd love to see us steal a few TX recruits from the Cats. I wonder what kind of things Stitt will have the players do to get and show swagger?
Look at the case of Idaho State in regard to what a good coach can do to revitalize a program. ISU was awful. Just downright bad. Just a few seasons with Kramer, who I believe to be a great coach and motivator, and they now they have everyone's attention. Look at UND, a once powerhouse at the D-II level on their way to replicating UNC's failure at the DI-AA level, and what just a couple seasons with Bubba Schweigert has accomplished. UND was easily the most improved after ISU. Im hoping that the Griz start to see similar results with Stitt. Only time will tell.
I think that the matter in which we win is really going to way Stitt is trying to turn the program around. When Delaney won, it sort of felt like we were simply marginally better at skill positions than the competition. Compare that to how BH won games, we were rolling people. When Stitt talks about "punching them in the mouth" he wants to be visibly more dominant at each position then the competition. With the way Stitt ran the score up on a few teams at CSM, I think we may see HUGE blowouts when he gets the ball rolling here just to make a statement.IdaGriz01 said:
brewskis said:
I don't recall many times that Bobby Hauck's teams were rolling opponents. He did win consistently, but it was general fairly close games - much of the time the result was in question until the end. I will concede that Montana definitely had a swagger during most of Hauck's era where the players knew they would win despite some less than spectacular offensive coordinating.
I enjoyed this article and I can't say enough how excited I am for Stitt to put his stamp on the program. Exciting times are ahead. Thanks for posting this article link!
statler & waldorf
Well-known member
Htowngriz said:
Close, but no cigar. Down 10-9 at Holt, McKnight kicks a partially blocked FG for a 12-10 win, in front of 2,000 Griz fans, of which I was one. My memory is not superior to yours. Had to use gogriz archives.
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