The Montana/Montana State rivalry: a personal retrospective

There have been 109 meetings on the gridiron between the Montana Grizzlies and Montana State Bobcats. It's the oldest football rivalry west of the Mississippi River, and it is always as intense as any other heated rivalry the game of college football has seen. Regardless of how good or bad both teams are, statewide bragging rights are always on the line. The 110th meeting between the Grizzlies and the Bobcats is this coming Saturday in Missoula, and there certainly is a lot more on the line than just bragging rights. For Montana, a win would help their chances of getting selected to play in the FCS postseason for an unprecedented 18th straight season, but a loss will likely mean the end of their season. For Montana State, a win would definitely lock them into the playoffs. It's the first time in years the Bobcats have entered their cross-state feud ranked higher than the Grizzlies in the FCS polls (only Big Sky Conference rival Eastern Washington is higher than both of them, and they host an Idaho State team that will begin the process of hiring a new head coach once their offseason starts).

While this is the first Brawl of the Wild for Robin Pflugrad as Grizzlies head coach, he's no stranger to the rivalry. He previously served as an assistant under Don Read from 1986 to 1994 and had a second stint as a Grizzly assistant last year (under Bobby Hauck) before getting promoted to head coach at the start of 2010.

After I moved to Missoula from the state of Washington in 1992, I didn't begin to embrace the significance of the rivalry until about 1994. At that time the Grizzlies were in the middle of a long win streak against the Bobcats that began in 1986, the first year the Grizzlies played at Washington-Grizzly Stadium and the first year of the Don Read regime.

The first game I ever attended at Washington-Grizzly Stadium was the 100th meeting between the Griz and the Cats in 2000, with Montana prevailing 28-3, making it the Grizzlies' 15th straight win over the Bobcats. They would beat the Bobcats in Bozeman the following season before the streak was snapped in 2002 during a snow-covered, defensive battle in Missoula, with the Bobcats winning the 102nd Meeting 10-7, getting their first win against Montana since 1985. Every Griz-Cat game I've attended, the Grizzlies have won, and won quite handily aside from 2006 (where Montana won 13-7).

But the battle between the two teams that fans from both sides of the rivalry remember the most is the 1997 game in Bozeman. Before the Bobcats broke their drought against the Grizzlies in 2002, this was the closest they came to ending that drought during the 16-year stretch. Here are the final minutes of that nail-biter in Bozeman (even though the video quality isn't great, it's the quality of the game's conclusion that is):