Canzano: Clearing smoke of college football
Big Sky Conference serves as a reminder.
SPOKANE, Wash. — A staffer holding a portable smoke machine waved it at the ankles of Montana State quarterback Sean Chambers on Sunday afternoon.
The football player was in full pads and his uniform, standing in the middle of a dimly lit ballroom at Northern Quest Resort and Casino. The fake smoke floated in the air around him. A video-production crew had set up curtains, lighting, positioned a camera on the end of a boom.
Chambers stood motionless for a beat, holding his helmet in front of him with two hands while Drake’s song “Knife Talk” blared from the speakers. Then, Chambers raised his helmet, chopped the smoke in half, and put it on.
“That’s sick,” the director said.
The Big Sky Conference will hold its Media Day on Monday. I flew to Spokane on Saturday, dropped in for 36 hours, and observed the run-up to the event from behind the scenes. The weekend schedule included a Hall of Fame dinner banquet, media training, and other sessions for the athletes, coaches, referees and athletic directors.
I spoke with 24 of the most talented football players in the Big Sky, including Chambers. I met the coaches, talked with a number of assistants, and had candid conversations with conference administrators and staff. I’m here to tell you if you miss the innocence and purity of old-fashioned college athletics, the Big Sky Conference has you covered this football season.
As commissioner Tom Wistrcill told me on Sunday: “We know who we are.”
Wistrcill, 53, has been on the job for four years. The former University of Akron athletic director was the captain of the basketball team in college at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. He’s tall, bald, has a solid handshake and doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Since last September, the guy at the helm of the Big Sky has been added to the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, and also, tweeted a couple of GIFs featuring Ted Lasso and Forrest Gump.
After taking the job Wistrcill and his team got busy negotiating a television deal with ESPN that will put two of the conference’s biggest regular-season football games on linear television this October. They’ve also relocated the conference headquarters to the suburbs of Salt Lake City and moved the conference’s basketball championship tournament to Boise.
Wistrcill’s chief lieutenant is a former Akron colleague, Dan Satter. Together, they adopted an aggressive approach to social and digital media. And the new Big Sky headquarters casts a bold image. The building has a fascia that features a 26-foot-wide backlit sign with the conference’s logo overlooking eight lanes of traffic on Interstate 15.
Still, this is a conference that prioritizes ambition while clinging to core values.
“Saturday college football is sacred for some of our campuses,” Wistrcill said. “That means we’re not playing football games on Wednesday night or Tuesday night. I lived that in the MAC. I need to find a way to drive value for the Big Sky without playing games all over the place during the week — that’s my challenge.”
On Saturday night, Wistrcill stood at the center of the banquet room as the Hall of Fame dinner attended by 250 came to a close. On Sunday morning, he was at breakfast with his conference’s head coaches, sports-information directors and players. On Monday, he’ll walk across the tribal casino floor to the event center and help open the doors for Big Sky media members who made the trip to cover the event.
Said Satter, the deputy commissioner: “What makes this weekend uniquely special for the Big Sky is that our attention is simultaneously on yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
Why Spokane for the festivities?
“It’s a drive for most of the media that cover our conference,” Wistrcill said.
Major college athletics is in an era of mind-numbing transition. UCLA and USC ditched the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. Texas and Oklahoma bolted from the Big 12 to the SEC. The transfer portal and the buying power of the NIL collectives have turned the landscape into the wild west. Major college athletics isn’t just off the rails, it feels as though it came rumbling through the saloon doors in Tombstone, Ariz. looking for trouble and a drink.
Said Wistrcill: “It’s so fractured. It’s so hard to follow. There’s so much going on.”
I suppose that’s why it was so charming to hear some of the Big Sky Conference sports-information directors talk about stepping into a basketball practice to serve on the scout team. There’s a simplicity about it that reminds you of what college athletics used to be.
“I’m not above driving the team bus,” quipped one of them.
The Big Sky has some obstacles like any other conference, of course.
As an FCS conference, it flies under the radar nationally. Its best football and men’s basketball players are prone to being flight risks. And the last Form 990 filed by the conference showed $14 million in total revenue for the conference. By comparison, that’s roughly the budget of the UCLA men’s basketball program.
“Our members are not talking about what to do with hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re talking about what to do with a couple hundred thousand here and there,” Wistrcill said.
The Big Sky football coaches are an interesting cast of characters. Portland State’s Bruce Barnum famously picked up a $14,000 beer tab for fans at his home stadium a couple of years ago. Barnum is the longest-tenured coach in the conference and has a promising team. Montana’s Bobby Hauck, on his second coaching stint in Missoula, is a Big Sky fixture, too. And UC Davis’ Dan Hawkins is joined this season as a head coach in the conference by his son, Cody, who is in his first year as the head coach at Idaho State.
There are five new head football coaches for 2023, in fact, representing nearly half the 12-team conference. Montana State’s Brent Vigen and Sacramento State’s Troy Taylor shared the conference co-championship a year ago. Both went 8-0 in the Big Sky in 2022. Taylor was hired by Stanford to replace David Shaw.
“Coaching is coaching, teaching is teaching,” Taylor told me at Pac-12’s media day on Friday. “If you can coach in the Big Sky, you can coach anywhere.”
The Hawkins father-son duo is a fun storyline in the upcoming season. It’s sure to get some run on media day. I bumped into the elder Hawkins outside the elevator doors on the fifth floor of the hotel on Sunday afternoon. We talked in depth for 20 minutes about his time as the head coach at Colorado.
Hawkins confessed that he’s had a number of private conversations with current and former head coaches about the daily migraine that running a Power Five college football program now appears to be.
“Some of it doesn’t look like much fun,” he said.
Hawkins sounded happy where he is and offered that the in-game adjustments in the Big Sky happen at a more consistent and accelerated rate than he remembers anywhere else in his coaching career.
“You don’t get away with running the same thing out on the field there series to series. People are dialing it up,” Hawkins said. “It’s high-level coaching.”
I’m excited about the start of the college football season. I’m hopeful we’ll get to focus on the football itself and not television contracts, NIL, or the transfer portal. But I’m here to tell you that there are still college coaches and players out there competing for the same reasons you and I watch the game — for the love.
They coach and play in the Big Sky.
I appreciate all who support, subscribe and share this independent writing endeavor. Please consider a paid subscription or gift a subscription to a family member or friend here:
As much as I love my Ducks, this article reminds us that out there, in smaller colleges everywhere, are players in all sports that don’t play for contracts, endorsements, or future trading rights. They are young men and women who play for the love of the game. They become our future leaders and go on to do great things in life.
Refreshing indeed and why WE love YOUR new gig! Would have never expected an article about the good ole Big Sky conference.
I miss PSU games downtown.... wait, I don’t go downtown anymore.