If there’s a defining characteristic of Montana’s frantic 3-3-5 defense the last few years under Kent Baer, other than the torture it inflicts on opposing quarterbacks, it’s the system’s insatiable hunger for depth at every position.
Baer, who’s entering his 45th year coaching college football in 2022, looks like a high-school history teacher slash baseball coach. He doesn’t glower like Bobby Hauck or gesticulate like cornerbacks coach Ronnie Bradford or do everything, all the time, constantly, like defensive line coach Barry Sacks.
If Baer had an avatar, though, it would be the war boy strapped to the front of a truck with a flaming guitar in Mad Max. He’s the overseer of chaos, the inciter of madness, his vision of delirium writ large on the field before him.
The Griz get most of their pass rush from their linebackers. Defensive linemen always have to be ready to drop into coverage, safeties to scream downhill into the box. What the picture looks like in the second before the snap has no correlation to what it will be a second after (hence the torture). In Montana’s heavy-metal scheme, effort and energy are required, because a player not getting to the place he’s supposed to be, when he’s supposed to be there, means gaps. It means openings. It means big plays.
To keep the fire burning high, the Griz run platoons and rotations at almost every defensive position. Just four players had more than 50 tackles for Montana a year ago – but 22 were in double digits. Seven linebackers are expected to see serious snaps for the Griz this year. Alex Gubner and Eli Alford will rotate almost 50/50 at defensive tackle, and the Grizzlies run four-deep at corner.
So far, Montana’s development machine has been able to keep up with that demand at almost every position. Gubner and Alford have been a steady platoon for years now. The Griz churn out linebackers like an assembly line, a steady stream of 6-foot-2, 225-pound hitters from the Treasure State. In the secondary, although the Griz have supplemented with transfers, two of the four cornerbacks expected to see playing time this year and two of the three starting safeties started their careers at Montana.
But defensive end is where the rarest athletes on the field hang out, and that’s where the developmental pipeline has faltered for Baer and the rest of the defensive staff. The Griz can recruit small, fast kids and make them into defensive backs. They can recruit big, fast kids and make them into linebackers. Defensive ends have to be even bigger than that, and just as fast – the kind of athlete who doesn’t often fall to Montana, although the Griz proved they could develop defensive ends for almost all of the 1990s and 2000s.
A year ago, both of the Grizzlies’ starting d-ends, Joe Babros and Justin Belknap, were transfers. This year, Michigan State transfer De’ari Todd is one of the starting defensive ends. The other, Jacob McGourin from Cheney, was profiled in this series last year as the exception, the hopeful prototype of a wave of defensive ends recruited to and developed in Missoula.
The next model off the assembly line? The man listed as McGourin’s backup.
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Henry Nuce is from Kalispell, goes by Hank and loves to hunt. Like McGourin, his spot in this Elevated Expectations is inseparable from his appearance – 6-foot-4, 245 pounds, in Nuce’s case. Whispered reports from fall camp are that he’s one of the fastest players on the team – not fastest linemen, fastest period. Steven Pfahler, who owns the gym Nuce works and trains at, said that his weightlifting marks from high school were good enough to hold most of the high school records at his facility – only moderately impressive until he mentions that those records are currently held by former Griz defensive tackle Jesse Sims and current Griz linebacker Geno Leonard. The late Sims boasted prodigious strength from a young age, helping him receive offers from Oregon State and Nebraska entering his junior year of high school, so the lifting marks are nothing to sneeze at.
“Boy, he can move weight in the weight room, he’s got a different type of twitch to him,” Pfahler said of Nuce. “With him only being, you know, 245 pounds, I’m pretty sure he’s the strongest or top two or three strongest kids on the team.”
That’s what creates buzz when your freshman stats are good – 10 games, 12 tackles, one forced fumble – but not immediately eye-catching. Nuce was a late bloomer under former Griz quarterback Grady Bennett at Kalispell Glacier, only making all-state his senior year and only receiving a partial scholarship offer to Montana.
Before moving from Winthrop, Maine to Kalispell, Montana when he was in high school, Nuce had never considered the possibilty of playing college football.
“In Maine, nobody on my team really ever played college
football so I didn’t really know it was a reality. When I moved out here, I heard there was three or four guys every year from Glacier going off to play college football. I was like, ‘Holy cow, that’s cool,” Nuce told Skyline Sports in February of 2020.
Pfahler is perhaps a biased source, but it doesn’t take long in conversation with anyone before Nuce’s dedication to the weight room comes up. He trained with former Griz strength coach Mike Gerber in Kalispell before joining Leonard on Pfahler’s staff at Pfahler Sports Specific in Missoula.
“We don’t, you know, accept applications or anything like that,” Pfahler said. “It’s just me stepping aside with individuals that I know are good people off the field that are going to represent our gym, their selves, my family, their family, inside and outside the gym. That’s the biggest thing. … And I know that he has a true passion for the weight room.”
“There’s not a lot of feelings out there like hitting a new PR clean or a snatch or front squat,” Nuce said. “It’s a great feeling. But it does take a lot of work to get there, and that’s fun too, going in and having a good training day.”
That drive has helped take Nuce from a partial scholarship to a spot on the two-deep. It also isn’t the only thing that will define what he does from here. As the Griz have learned, it’s not that easy to brute-force depth at defensive end. McGourin, a player about whom the sentence “If there was a picture in the dictionary of a pass-rusher, it would look about like Jacob McGourin,” was written last year, finished the season with 2 ½ sacks in 13 games.
Nuce will get his chances to spell McGourin this year. But aside from an important part of the defense, he’ll also be an interesting and perhaps crucial experiment to follow. Hank Nuce is the ideal defensive end who only got to Montana because he developed so late in high school. He’s the ideal worker who’s determined to continue that development.
If Hank Nuce, for all of his qualities, can’t follow the path of so many players at so many other positions on Montana’s defense, what will it mean for a unit that requires depth more than anything else?
Photos by Brooks Nuanez and attributed. All Rights Reserved.
