BOZEMAN, Montana – Callahan O’Reilly paused briefly before acknowledging a potential reality he knew could become true.
The Montana State inside linebacker and his senior teammates, just maybe, did save their best for last.
“Having that be ya know…the last game in Bobcat Stadium that we can control and to have it go like that, wow,” O’Reilly said following Montana State’s 55-7 decimation of fifth-seeded William & Mary, the champions of the once-mighty Colonial Athletic Association.
“Shout out to the crowd tonight. An 8:15 kickoff, cold as hell and that stadium was rocking. That was pretty awesome. To have that one potentially be the last game in Bobcat Stadium, pretty cool.”
In fact, the MSU freight train rolled to the 20th straight home victory for the Bobcats. O’Reilly’s gut feeling was correct. Montana State will not play another home game until September of 2023.
Instead, the Bobcats will travel to Brookings, South Dakota to take on a familiar nemesis. Top-seeded South Dakota State awaits MSU for a rematch of last year’s semifinal.
Last year’s 31-17 MSU win over the Jackrabbits propelled Montana State into the FCS national title game for the first time in 37 years. It was also one of the most memorable home victories for O’Reilly and his senior classmates.
O’Reilly and his senior teammates have been a part of 29 home victories. The final home game of last season and the final home game of this season each proved among the most memorable. While a 29-2 home record for this year’s Bobcat seniors is notable and admirable, it’s particularly special for one of Bozeman’s favorite sons.
“It’s been incredible to have our time here, to win like we’ve won here, it makes the time pretty special,” O’Reilly said following the William & Mary victory as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning.
“I was really trying to soak it. At the beginning of the game you’re really focusing on your job, focus on flying around and executing. In that second half, being able to soak it in, that was pretty cool.”
O’Reilly has spent his whole life in Bozeman. Both his parents grew up in town; his mother Debby is also a Bozeman High graduate who went on to play basketball at Arizona State. His father Keith went to high school at West High in Billings before playing football at Carroll College in Helena.
Callahan grew up watching his next-door neighbor Tanner Roderick blossom into a star at Bozeman High, helping lead the Hawks to the 2010 Class AA state football title—the high school’s first since 1917. Callahan and his two brothers also kept close tabs on their cousin, Grant Collins, when he was starring at Bozeman High before, like Roderick, joining the Bobcats.
Collins was a standout on the famed Bozeman High team that also featured Will Dissly and lost the state title game on a walk-off field goal by Butte High kicker Jake Dennehy in 2012. The following season, Collins led the Hawks on an undefeated run to the state title, earning Class AA Defensive MVP honors along the way.
Collins is a second-generation standout for the Hawks. His father and Callahan’s uncle, Shane Collins, was the Montana Gatorade Player of the Year in football and track and field before going on to star in both sports at Arizona State and eventually play in the NFL with the Washington Redskins. Grant’s sister, Averie, played soccer at Stanford and Washington State and still plays professionally.
O’Reilly dreamed of being a Hawk first, then a Bobcat. Once he completed his time at Bozeman High and joined Montana State’s football team, he went from walk-on practice squad quarterback to fearsome linebacker, standing out both statistically and in leadership for three years running. Protecting home turf in his hometown has always been one of O’Reilly’s primary motivations.
“I think it’s within him first of all, it’s very important to him that he is a Bobcat and he’s doing it here in his hometown and representing Bozeman High,” Vigen said. “I do think that’s really important to him.”
O’Reilly has been one of Montana State’s most consistent, durable players over the last three fall seasons. In three years as a starting inside linebacker, he has 273 career tackles. He led the Bobcats with 91 total tackles in 2019 and followed it up with 105 last season while playing next to Troy Andersen, the greatest talent in Bobcat football history.
“Callahan has continued in my time to get better,” Vigen said. “We came here and he had been a productive player in 2019. And he was definitely a guy we were going to be counting on moving forward but there was still some growth on and off the field that he needed to have.
“In my time with him, boy, he’s done that and then some. He’s become the leader that we had hoped. He’s become the play-maker we had hoped. He’s a very smart individual and how he’s applied that both to his play and his leadership, it doesn’t always click for guys as they go through. But it’s definitely clicked for him.”
The click has allowed O’Reilly to peak this season. Entering 2022, the Bobcat defense was shrouded in question marks. How they would ever replace Andersen and fellow NFL draftee defensive end Daniel Hardy, along with All-Americans line defensive tackle Chase Benson, edge Amandre Williams & all-league safety Tre Webb, who also got into a mini camp with the Atlanta Falcons?
Montana State’s defensive unit struggled a bit through the first month of the season. But over the most recent month, the Bobcat defense has been lights out. O’Reilly has been a catalyst, which is part of the reason why the sixth-year senior captain earned All-Big Sky honors for the second season in a row.
“I think it’s his mentality and it’s his wits about him that makes him so good,” fellow sixth-year senior captain R.J. Fitzgerald said earlier this season. “He’s a really smart football player. His football IQ is definitely one of the highest on the team. He probably could coach any position on the field with playing quarterback and I think that’s helped him a lot with that transition to linebacker. He knows what the quarterback is looking for so he can look for ways to expose that on defense.
“He works extremely hard. He’s always doing extra work and he’s really grown into a leader. He’s one of those guys you are going to count on when the going gets tough.”
This year, O’Reilly has 83 total tackles, including three sacks and six tackles for loss. His ability to take away the ball helped him earn first-team All-Big Sky accolades after being recognized on the preseason all-league squad. O’Reilly has four interceptions, the top mark on the Bobcats. He has also forced three fumbles and recovered two more, giving him nearly double-digit takeaways this season, the top mark in the Big Sky.
“He’s just such an instinctive player,” MSU senior captain Ty Okada said. “Playing quarterback and being an athlete coming out of high school has helped him so much making plays. Always runs to the ball, always making plays …I mean, shoot, he’s an inside linebacker and he has four picks. That speaks to his instinctive play and his passion and hustle.”
The Ridge Athletic Club is an institution in Bozeman, a place thousands of Gallatin Valley residents flock to for their fitness. This football season, the Ridge has a commercial that runs on the Bobcat Stadium big screens with endorsements from Callahan and his younger brother, fellow Bobcat linebacker McCade O’Reilly, about the healthy environment the Ridge can provide for young athletes.
The commercial is authentic in the best way. The O’Reilly brothers (including oldest brother, Payton, who played linebacker at Miami of Ohio) spent countless hours at the Ridge as kids and teenagers. The brothers frequently lifted weights with their father, Keith, an education that would serve Callahan well when he first flipped from scout team quarterback to covering kickoffs as a reserve linebacker to captaining Montana State’s defense.
Keith had a strong weightlifting background. And it helped that Steve Roderick, Tanner’s father, is an owner and primary operator of the Ridge. Getting exposed to a disciplined lifting regimen certainly played a role in all three O’Reilly brothers playing Division I football.
“What set me and my brothers up for success was going and working out when we were in sixth grade,” O’Reilly said. “We would ride the bus over to the high school and work out there and when we couldn’t do that, we were going and working out with my dad at the Ridge.
“My dad is a weight room guy too, really knowledgeable, and he set us up to know how to train on our own once we got older. He gave us that base that gave us head start on other kids who didn’t have them. I’m really thankful for my dad giving us that knowledge and base in the weight room. It’s really helped us.”
The point is O’Reilly is from Bozeman and proud of it. He’s proud of his red-and-black Hawk lineage. He is proud his family is part of the conversation that Bozeman High has been the state of Montana’s best Division I talent factory over the last decade. The point is being a Bobcat captain means a hell of a lot to the local kid who dreamed he would one day be living the existence he’s currently living.
“He’s an absolute model for what you are looking for in an in-state, hometown guy, a guy who makes the most of his opportunity in every which way,” Vigen said. “We have a couple of those but Callahan has been able to take it to a different level in this, his senior year. To be the team we want to be, you need guys like him that have these senior years where you say, you know what, that is absolutely his best in every which way. Without guys taking that step, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”
O’Reilly was a utility player on Bozeman High’s 2015 state championship squad and the starting quarterback for the Hawks as a senior the following fall. He was a second-team all-state selection in 2016 after throwing for 3,178 yards and accounting for 39 total touchdowns.
His experience playing at Bozeman High was at the same time a source of pride as well as an education. Like many Hawks before him and many Hawks after him, going through a program first engineered by Troy Purcell and carried on by current Bozeman head coach Levi Wesche helped give O’Reilly the tools to quickly acclimate to the college football grind.
“There were so many guys who were older than me who made it to college and you could see how hard they worked, the way they worked, the time in the weight room,” O’Reilly said.
“They take the weight room really seriously at Bozeman High. If you want to be a player there, you have to put in the time in the weight room. You can’t spend all summer doing whatever, skipping workouts and expect to play. They expect you to be there every day, putting in the work, just like they do in college.”
Montana State knew the 6-foot-2, then-210-pounder would be a project as a signal caller. When former Montana State head coach Jeff Choate first addressed O’Reilly during a recruiting visit, he maniacally joked in trademark Choate fashion about how he had no clue if O’Reilly would make it at quarterback but that he’d certainly get a shot somewhere on the field.
O’Reilly surprised many by winning Montana State scout team player of the year in the fall of 2017. Still, the next spring he flashed in reps at linebacker and the switch was underway relatively quickly.
“Think about how many great high school quarterbacks we brought in,” Choate said earlier this season. “When we got there, we were like, ‘Mass, speed, length, and if they don’t have any of those, they have to have some other elite quality. Maybe quickness. Maybe football IQ. And when it came down to it, I was like, ‘What position does he naturally play in high school? If the answer was quarterback, OK, take him.
“So we filled our roster with quarterbacks if they were marginal guys. He was a marginal quarterback. But he could’ve played tight end, he could’ve played H, could’ve grown into an edge guy. But off the ball inside linebacker became his niche. And we recognized that pretty early on.”
“He has a lot of passion for the game of football. He’s always in there watching extra film. He’s a guy who A) has the athleticism and the ability and B) has the work ethic to pair it and that’s when you really see players become great,” Okada said. “And that’s what you see in him. He’s just continued to develop. Playing alongside him has been extremely fun and rewarding for sure.”
And O’Reilly hasn’t left the starting lineup since he first broke in. On Saturday, the now 230-pounder will make his 37th start. MSU has won 35 games against just eight losses since the beginning of the 2019 season and are 12-1 entering the game against South Dakota State. O’Reilly has helped guide MSU to this point.
“I can’t even talk about all the stuff that guy has been through but he’s emerged and he’s a better person, No. 1, for his experience at Montana State,” Choate said. “Tremendous football player. Great, instinctual off the ball inside linebacker who probably has better instincts than Troy even if he doesn’t quite have that elite athleticism.
“It’s been fun to watch him cut out his niche in Montana State history.”
O’Reilly has spoken consistently all year about wanting to relish in his final months playing for his hometown Bobcats. He has already earned a degree in mechanical engineering, but he has not explored where that experience might take him.
“I’m focused on having the best senior season I can have,” O’Reilly said. “You don’t have your whole life to play football. I have my whole life to be an engineering. So I’m trying to focus on taking football as far as I can and then take some time to figure out what’s next after that.”
That senior season has a chance to continue if Montana State can knock off South Dakota State for the second year in a row — this time when they’re the No. 1 team in the country — on Saturday afternoon in Brookings, South Dakota.
Win or lose, the normally soft-spoken O’Reilly becomes impassioned by what the experience of representing his roots has meant to him over the last six years.
He hopes the journey can continue just a few more weeks.
“It’s what we always say: in the short run, you get what you get, and in the long run, you get what you deserve,” O’Reilly said. “That’s something I really hung my hat on my first few years here. I didn’t really know that’s what was going to happen. I started playing quarterback and then moved over to the defensive side of the ball and going into spring of my redshirt freshman year, I was the fourth-string guy.
“I kept telling myself that if I kept working hard and doing the things I needed to do to get on the field, it would happen,” O’Reilly said. “Going into my redshirt sophomore year, I wasn’t the starter but I kept telling myself to keep doing the things I could control, keep working hard and good things will happen. If you are good enough, they have to put you out there.
“That’s the attitude I want to take into life. Whatever I do, be the best at it no matter what the opportunity is. Opportunities will come if I’m good at what I do. Sticking to things, sticking it out through Covid, that’s what I learned too: sometimes, you just have to stick it out. I think the Covid year stunk for everyone and it would’ve been nice to play five years but in the end, it turned out really well. It gave me a whole year to keep working on myself and I don’t feel like I’m too old and I feel like I’m in a great spot.
“It’s been quite a ride. Now we just have to keep it going.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez, Jason Bacaj, Blake Hempstead. All Rights Reserved.
