NASHVILLE, Tenn. — If Montana State is to win the FCS national championship, the Bobcats will almost assuredly get significant contributions from unheralded players — especially those along the offensive and defensive lines.
But to hear them say it, those successes won’t even belong to them.
“Coach (Sean) Herrin, our strength and conditioning coach, does a really good job of making sure we’re putting weight on guys, getting us as big, fast and strong as possible,” said senior defensive end Kenneth Eiden IV.
“I think coach Herrin does a great job with us in the weight room,” added senior defensive tackle Alec Eckert. “We’re getting after it. We’re being intentional about our development. We’re not just in there throwing around weight for the sake of throwing around weight.
“We’re getting bigger, faster, stronger with some intentionality.”
Herrin, a Helena native who played running back and receiver at Carroll College from 2004-08, became Montana State’s director of football strength and conditioning in December of 2020, just two months before Brent Vigen took over the reins of the program. The two have worked in concert since, developing the Bobcats’ offensive and defensive lines to the point they’re among the best in the country.
“It comes down to really having a pretty keen eye on recruiting and then turning those guys over to Sean Herrin and his staff and letting them go to work,” Vigen said.
“I love the fact that our offensive and defensive lines, half of those guys are from the state of Montana. I know, when those guys came on campus, they didn’t look like they look now, so being able to identify those guys first from our state that could really develop and become what they’ve become was a key element.”
Eiden was a 220-pound sack machine at Bozeman High School and recorded 21 sacks as a sophomore. He plays at 240-245 pounds now, and attributed his development to Herrin, defensive coordinator Shawn Howe and defensive line coach Nick Jean-Baptiste.
This season, Eiden has a team-high 8.5 sacks, and eight other players have recorded at least one.
“I kind of feel like right now I’m coming into ... the best version of myself as I can be as a player,” he said, “so excited to go put that on display for this last game.”
Eiden is one four Montanans in the Bobcats’ defensive line rotation — Paul Brott of Billings, Talon Marsh of Helena and Zac Crews of Missoula are the others.
On the offensive line, Treasure State products Braden Zimmer (Billings) and Burke Mastel (Red Lodge) start at left tackle and left guard, respectively. Dylan Rollins of Missoula and Everett Carr of Bozeman are among the top backups.
“It’s important to me (to have Montanans on the offensive line) because I consider myself a Montana guy,” said right guard Titan Fleischmann, who came to Bozeman from Pocatello, Idaho. “I don’t consider myself an Idaho guy anymore. I love the state of Montana, I love Bozeman, I love the Cats.
“I’m an out-of-state guy who came in and now I found my home, and I love it here. It’s the culture and the impact, and the community has been so welcoming to me that I want to start my life, I want to be in Bozeman. I love it.”
While recognizing the strides the Bobcats have made in the trenches over the past five years, Fleischmann was also sure to credit the people who helped lay the foundation.
When then-head coach Jeff Choate guided the Bobcats to the semifinal round in 2019 — MSU's first semifinal appearance since its 1984 championship season — he had made significant inroads in beefing up the trenches with offensive line coach Brian Armstrong.
“As we’ve developed throughout the years, it’s been like Mitch Brott, who’s passing the torch onto like Lewis Kidd ... who’s developed guys like Rush Reimer, T.J. Sessions and Marcus Wehr,” Fleischmann said, referencing the Bobcats’ standout offensive linemen that came before him.
“And then Marcus Wehr got the mantle and passed it on to whoever else may have been next, whether it’s JT (Reed) or me,” Fleischmann continued. “We’ve both grown up in that era of learning from Marcus, and now hopefully the young bucks are growing up in that era of learning from me and JT.
“And so I think that’s the development from the beginning. And I think that’s where it started, is that coach Choate and coach Armstrong built a bully, and then the old heads had to take that bully and continuing developing the young guys.”
Since losing to NDSU in that 2019 semifinal, Montana State has seemingly been playing catchup with the Missouri Valley Football Conference. The Bobcats have ended each of their past six seasons (dating back to a second-round loss to the Bison in 2018) with losses to teams from the powerful conference, and Monday’s championship matchup with Illinois State is yet another opportunity for the Cats to close the gap.
“I think we’ve established ourselves. The program has performed consistently, and I don’t think that’s going away,” Vigen said. “But to be able to finish this journey off, yeah, I think that’s what we’re all after.”
Montana State’s starting offensive line — from left to right, Zimmer, Mastel, Reed, Fleischmann and Cedric Jefferson — has paved the way for an FCS-best 3,517 rushing yards and 44 touchdowns this season.
Reed is the only senior. Fleischmann and Mastel are redshirt juniors, Jefferson a redshirt sophomore and Zimmer a redshirt freshman. Those “young bucks” are as much a testament to Herrin as anything.
“I’m not going to say this lightly, he’s the most important piece, he is,” Vigen said. “There's a lot of science that goes into strength training, and he’s cutting edge as far as that goes, but there’s so much art that has to go into what he does and the impact he makes on all our guys.
“I can’t say enough about what he means to me and what he means to our guys. ... His impact I hope is visible on Saturdays when we go out there and we just look the part a little bit more than we did when I first got here.”
In this case, Vigen hopes that impact will be visible on a Monday.
