Illinois State football’s opponent in the Jan. 5 national championship game is one they've never faced before — even though some things may feel familiar.
The Montana State Bobcats hail from the Big Sky conference and are playing in their second-straight FCS national championship, and their third of the decade. The Bobcats lost both title games to North Dakota State, which like ISU plays in the Missouri Valley Football Conference [MVFC].
Montana State is the only program to win a national title in three different classifications of college football: NAIA, NCAA Division II and Division I-AA. Division I-AA would later become the FCS football that ISU and Montana State now play in.
A tale of two campuses
Montana State has just over 17,000 students and is the largest university in Montana. That's about 5,000 fewer students than ISU.
Montana State is located in Bozeman. Bobcat Stadium, where Montana State plays, would be about a 20-hour drive from Normal and a 25-hour drive from Nashville's FirstBank Stadium, the location of the Jan. 5 national championship game.
Normal and Bozeman have similar populations, around 53,000. While Normal has Bloomington to its south and largely flat, rural areas elsewhere, Bozeman is in the middle of the Horseshoe Hills and the Bridger, Tobacco Root and Big Belt Mountains. The mountainous geography places Bozeman 4,900 feet above sea level. It also has three different ski resorts within about 40 miles of the city.
Montana State photography students can take classes at Yellowstone National Park, just 89 miles from Bozeman. In 2022, paleontology students were able to excavate triceratops bones from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana.
Montana State plays in two sports that Illinois State does not: men’s and women’s rodeo and skiing. The men’s rodeo team finished the summer season as the 22nd best in the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association. Rodeo events include, but are not limited to, bareback riding, goat tying, saddle bronc riding and steer wrestling.
Other points of comparison include:
- Illinois State was founded in 1857 as a teachers' college; Montana State was founded in 1893 as an agricultural college.
- Hamilton Hall, the first student dormitory at Montana State, shares a name with a former student dormitory at Illinois State.
- Illinois State’s university-owned public radio station is WGLT; Montana State’s is KGLT. KGLT is not, however, affiliated with NPR.
- Joe Tiller, under whom Brock Spack coached as defensive coordinator at Wyoming and Purdue, played college football at Montana State.
The scouting report
Monday’s game will be the first meeting between ISU and Montana State in football. ISU is 4-3 against other teams currently in the Big Sky conference, including two playoff wins in a row against UC Davis in 2024 and 2025.
Before taking over as head coach of Bobcat football in 2021, Brent Vigen worked for Wyoming and North Dakota State. Vigen played tight end in college at NDSU and moved from grad assistant up to offensive coordinator there between 1998 and 2014. He moved to Wyoming where he worked as offensive coordinator, quarterbacks coach and then associate head coach for the Cowboys, including during the time Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen played there.
Illinois State head coach Brock Spack said Vigen’s team plays much like the schools from the Dakotas that make up four of the 10 schools in the MVFC.
“They're good at attacking the perimeter,” said Spack. “The quarterback play is very good, they take care of the football. He's a really good player. Their [running] backs are tough.”
“They’re a very talented offense,” said ISU junior middle linebacker Tye Niekamp. “Our challenge this week is stopping those guys.”
The defense also provides a challenge to the ISU gameplan.
“I can tell you that the less you do, the better you are,” said Spack, who as a former defensive coordinator is often considered a defensive-minded head coach. “They don't do a lot, but they don't have to because they're really, really good at executing what they do.”
The Bobcat roster looks quite different from the one that played in the FCS title game a year ago. The 2024 team had 23 seniors on the roster, many of whom did not return for the following year due to graduation. It left this year’s team with many players new to the program — and new to a national title game.
“Treat like a normal game, but understand that we're not going to Nashville to go to Nashville,” said Montana State offensive lineman JT Reed, of his message to younger players for preparation for the game. “It’s a business trip.”
Another shot at glory
Montana State has made seven straight postseason appearances. Leaders of the Montana State team said having lost in this game a year ago adds some motivation but not an advantage over a Redbird team 11 years removed from the big stage.
“Being there last year doesn’t do anything but give you an accolade,” said Reed.
The national championship moved away from Frisco for at least the next two seasons due to renovations to Toyota Stadium, which hosted the game each year since 2010.
“I think the one thing moving the game to a bigger venue allows for is simply more of your fans to access the opportunity,” said Vigen.
Vigen said he felt a year prior, the Montana State crowd had a “decided edge” over the opposing team in Frisco. He hopes for the same this year, but noted that the ISU fans will be coming from a shorter distance — about six hours or so.
“I imagine they'll have a good crowd there too. But you know this fan base is something. And we had 10 home games, and each one of those was a charged environment.”
Monday’s game will be the sixth time Vigen faces a Spack-led Illinois State team. In the five years before Vigen left North Dakota State, the Redbirds won the first two and lost the final three games at the beginning of Spack’s tenure, which started in 2009.
“My memory of those games is they were all very hard-fought battles, and the wins that came our way the last three years were really challenging,” said Vigen. “There's a toughness factor that I think his teams have always exuded.”
