The Bobcat Nation

I think the era of Earl started the Griz dominance over the cats and the Big Sky. Earl did not recruit Montana very well and those were the years the Griz started getting all the best of the best players in Montana! What is earl doing now a days? I think Coach Ash is a present day Earl but i do think Ash is a much better recruiter of Montana kids than Earl.
Other than a very few Montana kids in the past 20 years the Griz have gotten the best Montana kids, with the few exceptions of Ione, Daly, Cordeiro and Bignell. What say you??? Thanks for your responses.

I say you are a dipstick.

catnipt wrote:I think the era of Earl started the Griz dominance over the cats and the Big Sky. Earl did not recruit Montana very well and those were the years the Griz started getting all the best of the best players in Montana! What is earl doing now a days? I think Coach Ash is a present day Earl but i do think Ash is a much better recruiter of Montana kids than Earl.
Other than a very few Montana kids in the past 20 years the Griz have gotten the best Montana kids, with the few exceptions of Ione, Daly, Cordeiro and Bignell. What say you??? Thanks for your responses.

Just on the off-chance that you're trying to start a smack thread under the barest of efforts to try to disguise it as a "real" topic ... please stop it.

Thread moved to smack.

CPACAT wrote:I say you are a dipstick.

That's putting it extremely mildly. Worthless POS is also putting it very mildly, but I'll go with that for now.

CPACAT wrote:I say you are a dipstick.

I second that

Bay Area Cat wrote:

catnipt wrote:I think the era of Earl started the Griz dominance over the cats and the Big Sky. Earl did not recruit Montana very well and those were the years the Griz started getting all the best of the best players in Montana! What is earl doing now a days? I think Coach Ash is a present day Earl but i do think Ash is a much better recruiter of Montana kids than Earl.
Other than a very few Montana kids in the past 20 years the Griz have gotten the best Montana kids, with the few exceptions of Ione, Daly, Cordeiro and Bignell. What say you??? Thanks for your responses.

Just on the off-chance that you're trying to start a smack thread under the barest of efforts to try to disguise it as a "real" topic ... please stop it.

Not smack at all. I was in the Conrad area today for business and a cat alum and fan brought his name up and was the one who brought up Earl and blamed him for the Griz dominance over the past 20 years. Driving back to Great Falls for the 45 minutes made me think of his comments and ponder them in depth. I really wonder what Earl is up to and if he did any thing after MSU? I would also like to hear cat fans thoughts on that subjuct too! But i guess i hit a nerve of truth. Sorry dont mean to talk kaka! Not that im past doing it, but i think its an interesting subjuect.

I don't think Earl ever coached again. After MSU he was selling life insurance for the Lutheran Brotherhood. Helluva nice guy, but he killed the Bobcat FB program. He made no attempt to recruit Montana kids, in fact he publicly said that Montana kids weren't good enough to participate at the I-AA level. It took a concerted effort by Hysell to get Montana high school coaches to even talk to him and had a lot to do with why he hired Greg Salo and Butch Damberger as assistants to help mend the burned bridges.

I think Ash is doing a nice job recruiting in state. Bignell, Rider, Ogden all are cream of the crop.

You are right that we went through a drought of hiring Montana kids(pissed me off), but what I love about the Cats even more now is that we have been recruiting more and more kids since my senior year in high school,'04. Check the last three media guides, and MSU has more MT kids than um which is awesome and says a lot about the direction of our program (um fans use a calculator). We always used to get mostly MT kids, see the 76 and 84 championship teams. I love it.

As for the best MT kids, I think you would be pretty hard pressed in the last 3 years to find any sort of advantage for either school having more top MT athletes. So far this year I know you can't and I would give the edge to our Cats. Over half our team's starters are MT raised.

Dane Fletcher (Buch Buchanon) Dan Ogden
Chase Gazzo
Jeff Price
Mike Rider
Clay Bignell
Brad Smith (out now)
Joe Screibs
Mark Desin
Jeff Hansen
Kyle Begger
Mark Person
Erick Fisher
(Hope I didn't miss one)
and look at our young MTns making some plays already.

Some good quality guys with some honors. And not to take anything away from our out of staters, I know them and they're good guys and damn good players. Just feels good to have more MT kids at the real Montana State school. BTW give me a count on the sniz starters could have more starters I don't keep track of who starts just know who's on the team, and Trumaine's not from Alzeda...

FTGfrom85MSUGradin08 wrote:You are right that we went through a drought of hiring Montana kids(pissed me off), but what I love about the Cats even more now is that we have been recruiting more and more kids since my senior year in high school,'04. Check the last three media guides, and MSU has more MT kids than um which is awesome and says a lot about the direction of our program (um fans use a calculator). We always used to get mostly MT kids, see the 76 and 84 championship teams. I love it.

As for the best MT kids, I think you would be pretty hard pressed in the last 3 years to find any sort of advantage for either school having more top MT athletes. So far this year I know you can't and I would give the edge to our Cats. Over half our team's starters are MT raised.

Dane Fletcher (Buch Buchanon) Dan Ogden
Chase Gazzo
Jeff Price
Mike Rider
Clay Bignell
Brad Smith (out now)
Joe Screibs
Mark Desin
Jeff Hansen
Kyle Begger
Mark Person
Erick Fisher
(Hope I didn't miss one)
and look at our young MTns making some plays already.

Some good quality guys with some honors. And not to take anything away from our out of staters, I know them and they're good guys and damn good players. Just feels good to have more MT kids at the real Montana State school. BTW give me a count on the sniz starters could have more starters I don't keep track of who starts just know who's on the team, and Trumaine's not from Alzeda...

Hansen & Gazzaro for sure Bignell would be close! Chase Raynolds, Mariani, Selle, Palmer, Hillasland, Dyke, Pfahler, Beaudin, Lebsock, Schillinger, Mullins not even close!

catnipt wrote:I think the era of Earl started the Griz dominance over the cats and the Big Sky. Earl did not recruit Montana very well and those were the years the Griz started getting all the best of the best players in Montana! What is earl doing now a days? I think Coach Ash is a present day Earl but i do think Ash is a much better recruiter of Montana kids than Earl.
Other than a very few Montana kids in the past 20 years the Griz have gotten the best Montana kids, with the few exceptions of Ione, Daly, Cordeiro and Bignell. What say you??? Thanks for your responses.

Who the f**k asked you?

Cledus wrote:

catnipt wrote:I think the era of Earl started the Griz dominance over the cats and the Big Sky. Earl did not recruit Montana very well and those were the years the Griz started getting all the best of the best players in Montana! What is earl doing now a days? I think Coach Ash is a present day Earl but i do think Ash is a much better recruiter of Montana kids than Earl.
Other than a very few Montana kids in the past 20 years the Griz have gotten the best Montana kids, with the few exceptions of Ione, Daly, Cordeiro and Bignell. What say you??? Thanks for your responses.

Who the f**k asked you?

Lighten up Cledus, it's the smack board.

FTGfrom85MSUGradin08 wrote:You are right that we went through a drought of hiring Montana kids(pissed me off), but what I love about the Cats even more now is that we have been recruiting more and more kids since my senior year in high school,'04. Check the last three media guides, and MSU has more MT kids than um which is awesome and says a lot about the direction of our program (um fans use a calculator). We always used to get mostly MT kids, see the 76 and 84 championship teams. I love it.

As for the best MT kids, I think you would be pretty hard pressed in the last 3 years to find any sort of advantage for either school having more top MT athletes. So far this year I know you can't and I would give the edge to our Cats. Over half our team's starters are MT raised.

Dane Fletcher (Buch Buchanon) Dan Ogden
Chase Gazzo
Jeff Price
Mike Rider
Clay Bignell
Brad Smith (out now)
Joe Screibs
Mark Desin
Jeff Hansen
Kyle Begger
Mark Person
Erick Fisher
(Hope I didn't miss one)
and look at our young MTns making some plays already.

Some good quality guys with some honors. And not to take anything away from our out of staters, I know them and they're good guys and damn good players. Just feels good to have more MT kids at the real Montana State school. BTW give me a count on the sniz starters could have more starters I don't keep track of who starts just know who's on the team, and Trumaine's not from Alzeda...

Mike Person

This is not an Earle apology, his .254 5 year win/loss percentage speaks for itself. But he did bring us guys like Rob Tesch, Reggie Carthon, Sean Hill, Cory Widmer, Jeff Newton, Bob Wilkinson, Todd Graves, Morgan Ryan, Jeff Newton, Jon Skelton and John Tetrault (4th in Total Offense in a career; behind Lulay, Bradley and Compson..ahead of Dennehy and Erickson) to name a few. Among his problems IMHO was bringing the veer offense into the BSC when the whole conference was breaking world record passing yardage and total scoring. In fact, one week (10-06-90) Earle decided to install the shot-gun taking NAU completely by surprise and scoring the 2nd most game points (70) in MSU history. One needs to just take a look at some of the defensive stats to get a quick picture of his era.
MOST POINT ALLOWED IN A SEASON: 1987-460 (1st all time), 1988-374 (4th all time), 1990-304 (8th all time), 1991-300 (9th all time). But you gotta admit, things were improving . How does one put up points to match that with a running attack?
Given that, his teams lost to the griz 7-55, 3-17, 2-17, 18-35, 9-16. But he lost to nearly everyone else a lot worse and none of them had any "Montana Boys". What happened to the Bobcats is what happened to everyone else in the BSC at that time....the griz got very, very lucky and hired Don Read.

all I can say is Earl was not a good coach...should have left him in ND