To get to the home team’s post-game press conferences at Holt Arena, head down the ramp at the southwest corner of the stadium, go left, and turn into a small, low-ceilinged room. Old media guides ringing the wall, three stools set in front of a Bengal backdrop and behind a fragile table. Idaho State has been doing press conferences there for long enough that the air has become heavy with the weight of coaches through the years grappling with losses, trying to explain things that don’t really make all that much sense.
“They’re warriors. They want the right things, man,” ISU head coach Charlie Ragle said after a 28-20 loss to No. 3 Montana dropped the Bengals to 0-5 in his first season at the helm. “We’ve got the nucleus, we’re just missing a few key points here and there, whether it be plays, execution, some depth. … We answered the bell at certain times, we just need more consistency.”
You can almost hear Rob Phenicie’s disembodied voice calling out from the walls.
To be fair, Ragle has been in searching-for-answers mode since the first game of the season, when ISU hit a 55-yard touchdown pass to close to within 10-7 of UNLV at the end of the first quarter but then gave up five touchdowns in the second quarter of what became a 52-21 loss.
A week later, he sat in the bowels of Snapdragon Stadium and promised “if we can continue to play like we’ve been playing, we’re going to win a bunch of games in the Big Sky” after a 38-7 loss to San Diego State.
He said that with backup quarterback Hunter Hays sitting beside him after starter Tyler Vander Waal was knocked out with a shoulder injury. Three weeks later, Ragle had third-stringer Sagan Gronauer next to him after the Montana game because Hays had gotten injured the week before, and sounded like a man trying to wrestle the universe.
Red-faced and earnest, the former Cal special teams coordinator gives a good press conference performance, leaning forward and letting the emotion of the game show in his voice and on his face. The anti-Bobby Hauck, if you will.
Three more losses in a row after the SDSU game have only reinforced Ragle’s evangelism and made him more determined to have you see what he sees in his team, to believe in his players as much as he’s telling you he believes in them.
“You keep promising them, if they do the right things, that it’s coming,” Ragle said. “They refuse to fold when so many people think they will. They just need the right things, the right guidance, the right love, the right positivity and the right toughness at the right times to get them over this hump. And we’re the right people to do it with this staff. And we’re gonna do it.”
The question is whether belief will help a program that’s now won just six of its last 34 games dating back to the beginning of the 2019 season, and still has just two winning seasons since Larry Lewis left after 2006.
Saturday’s loss to the Grizzlies was one that an evangelist could spin into optimism. Against the No. 3 team in the country, Idaho State not only scored first, but held the Griz in check until a flurry at the end of the first half, scored two almost-but-not-quite garbage time touchdowns to get within one possession at the end of the game and gained more yards than any team had against Montana all season.
So while Hauck was downplaying the closeness of the game and pointing out (correctly) that Montana was a yard away from a 35-6 lead in the fourth quarter before Lucas Johnson fumbled the ball through the end zone, Ragle was pointing out (correctly) that his players had a lot to be proud of.
“Well, (Montana) is the No. 2 team in the country, (for) one,” Ragle said. “I think that everybody in here, to a man, thought that we’d come out here and get blown out. … I mean, we’re playing with a third-string quarterback, he sure didn’t look like a third-string quarterback to me.”
It’s a fine line to walk, saying explicitly that you don’t do moral victories (“We didn’t win the game, and that’s all that matters,” Ragle said) while pointing out all the ways that it would have been a moral victory if, you know, that was a thing your program cared about.
Outside observers can give Idaho State credit for competing in a game against a good team. For Ragle, the challenge is keeping that effort consistent – the week before the Montana game, ISU allowed 21 unanswered fourth-quarter points and lost 35-14 to Northern Colorado, one of the few teams projected with the Bengals in the bottom tier of the conference – and then turning that competitiveness into wins.
Finding that winning formula has been difficult no matter who’s been in charge at Idaho State, which is why hearing Ragle’s press conference explanations caused so many flashbacks to Phenicie sitting in the same spot behind the table.
Phenicie, the longtime offensive coordinator at Montana under Bobby Hauck, took the Bengals up as high as a six-win season in 2018, his second year in charge, before cratering to three wins (and a season-ending six-game losing streak) in 2019, two in the 2021 spring season and just one in the 2021 fall season before ISU let him go with one year left on his contract at the end of the year.
By the end of the road, he was grasping for answers too, like why the 2021 team that got him fired could beat UC Davis (which went to the playoffs) and play within two points of Sac State (which won the conference title) but also get blown out by Portland State and Northern Arizona.
Or the fall season before that, when the Bengals were receiving top 25 votes after a blowout of North Dakota got them to 3-3 but then didn’t win another game the rest of the season.
Ragle’s not yet quite as lost as Phenicie was by the end. He can still explain why the Bengals are struggling. Gronauer, for instance, has never opened a season at the top of the depth chart but has now started games in three separate years thanks to ineffectiveness (2019) and injuries (2021, 2022). The sophomore from Las Vegas played well against the Griz, throwing just one interception, and will start against Montana State again this weekend.
“I think the jumps a young quarterback can make can be significant,” MSU head coach Brent Vigen said. “Listening to him in the post-game press conference, he was going out there with nothing to lose. … You have a guy who isn’t necessarily fighting for playing time. It’s there in his lap right now. He’s going to go out there and throw caution to the wind.”
More than a leader, Ragle is a bit of an experiment for Idaho State. The last time the Bengals changed direction at head coach, they went with experience in Phenicie, a Big Sky Conference insider who had been a part of 80 wins in seven seasons on Hauck’s staff at Montana as an assistant.
Ragle has never coached in the league before. He doesn’t bring insider experience or connections, just passion and belief that he lets show in every press conference.
Idaho State is betting that will be enough.
“Last year was last year for them. They made a coaching change. There’s new energy, there’s new hunger,” Vigen said. “And that hunger has not been satisfied with a victory to this point. But you can see them getting better. And seeing Coach Ragle’s post-game comments, you can see the pain with their dissatisfaction of coming up empty on Saturday. They are still finding their way but there’s a tremendous amount of fight in them.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez and courtesy of Idaho State athletics and the Idaho State Journal. All Rights Reserved.
