Editor’s note: This oral history remembering the 1984 Montana State national championship football team. An abbreviated version originally appeared in the 2014 Bobcat Football Review & Preview magazine published by FMFP Enterprises.
It remains one of the greatest turnarounds and fastest falls back to earth college sports has ever seen.
Thirty-two years go, the Montana State Bobcats put together a once-in-a-lifetime run that still holds a unique mystery about it. The 1984 ‘Cats were coming off a dismal 1-10 campaign the season before, a season that saw an anemic offense muster just seven touchdowns. Sonny Lubick, who’d been fired in 1981, had recruited most of the upperclassmen on the team. Doug Graber led the team in ’82 before giving way to former offensive line coach Dave Arnold before the 1983 season.
Montana State had no illusions of grandeur or national title aspirations. Following a 2-2 start, it appeared the team might be solid. After a 10-game winning streak that included some of the most iconic plays in the history of the Big Sky Conference, the Bobcats were national champions.
The next year, the team fell back down to earth, posting a 3-8 record. By 1986, Arnold would be fired. The tale remains as one of the most unique and stunning runs college football has seen.
Montana State’s 1983 defense was stout, but the Bobcats averaged nearly 40 minutes per game on the field. The unit would have to endure upwards of 100 plays per game. Against Nevada, MSU didn’t earn a first down until the fourth quarter and accumulated 66 total yards, 60 coming on one run.
Tensions brewed between the offense and defense. The units road on separate busses. Arnold knew something had to change. A month before fall camp opened, he hired offensive coordinator Bill Diedrick from Whitworth University to run the offense. Arnold hired Steve Carson as his defensive coordinator days before fall camp, leaving his unit with a sense of unease all the way up until the season officially began.
Before adding the new coordinators to the mix, the other MSU coaches had to talk a star into staying.
Mike Kramer, linebackers coach and future MSU head skipper: “People don’t remember, but we had huge drama late in July as (senior defensive end) Mark Fellows called Coach Arnold and told him he didn’t want to play. Arnold asked why. Fellows said, ‘I’m playing defensive end, I’m a little undersized. I’d like to play linebacker. I’m playing an inside I shade on the end against (all-league tight end) Joe Bignell and he just pounds the crap out of me. I don’t want to play that spot.’ We literally came off the road from summer vacation and we had a meeting to convince Fellows to play defensive end and how our defense benefited him. He was going against a 245-pound tight end that was as good a blocking tight end as MSU has ever had. Fellows had just had enough of it. He didn’t get his butt whipped, but it was a battle every day.”
Dave Arnold, head coach: “We had a long talk over the summer. He wanted to play middle linebacker. He thought his chances to go to the NFL were better playing middle linebacker. I said, ‘Well, I’m not worried about your NFL career.’ I meant it at the time. I was worried about where he could help us better. I must have said the right thing some way, some how because he came back, thank goodness.”
Once Fellows was on board, the transition could begin, but the battered mentality of a season before had to be overcome first.
Kelly Bradley, All-Big Sky sophomore quarterback and first-year starter: “The year before was a bad year? That’s the understatement of the century. In 1983, that was about as bad as it could get. I was a redshirt freshman that year, so coming into ’84, I was young and naïve and I didn’t know much then. We brought in a transfer from Washington and I was battling for the starting job in spring. Coming into the fall, I knew I was going to be the starter, but I had no idea how we would be.”
Kramer: “A little bit of a rough year? Oh boy…that’s an understatement. That was an unmitigated MSU disaster. We were OK defensively, not great, but OK. We returned the bulk of that ’83 defense and we thought they could be outstanding, but the real story of 1984 is how offensively we finally got on track and got going.”
Lonnie Burt, All-Big Sky nose guard: “It was a painful year. Coming off the field, it hurt. We just didn’t mesh.”
Bruce Randall, All-Big Sky junior guard: “That class had gone through a lot of changes. The class that went in in 1981, by the time we got to Dave Arnold in ’84, he was our third head coach in four. Sonny Lubick was actually the guy who recruited me. He was there the first. Then Doug Graber came in for a year and Dave Arnold was his offensive line coach. Dave took over in 1983. A lot of the guys who were on that ’84 team cut their teeth in ’83 and got beat up pretty good. Those guys had a lot of pride and didn’t want to get embarrassed a second year. We had a lot of respect for Coach Arnold and we really wanted to see him succeed.”
Kirk Timmer, All-Big Sky sophomore middle linebacker: “We had a great defense in 1983, but we were on the field a lot. Mentally, we knew we had what it took. We knew the offense had to make some changes. We got some new offensive coaches and some things in the off-season that really helped the offense. Defensively, we always felt very proud. We knew we could compete. There were just times that we were on the field for 100 plays. It was tough to keep people out of the end zone.”
Joe Roberts, All-Big Sky senior safety: “Arnie was lucky to have his job before that year. Arnie gets a DUI right before the season and then he’s really on the hot seat.
“Everyone can say we thought we could be good and everything else, but in that day in age, we didn’t even know there was playoffs. It was so foreign to us. We didn’t know we got to keep playing. We all played for different reasons. Nobody cared.”
Mark Fellows, All-America senior defensive end: “There wasn’t one of us there that thought about anything but winning our first game. You go through a season like 1983 and all of a sudden, it becomes very obvious that if you are not in this thing together, it because very difficult to do anything. We had an offensive bus and a defensive bus when we traveled in ’83. A bunch of us seniors decided that wasn’t a good thing. We wanted to mix it up. Having talent and being a good team, but not winning made us realize there were just a few things going on that were not right that we could fix. We had to start playing it as a team.”
Roberts: “They were all of our friends, but hell yeah there was animosity. I saw Mark Fellows go up to Mark Gotfried in 1983 and tell him if he threw another inception, he was going to beat his ass. He said ‘If you throw a pick, I’m going to fucking kill you’. We weren’t playing for the scoreboard in 1983. We were just seeing if we could hold people and have fun. We knew we weren’t going to win because we couldn’t score, but we knew we could hold people down and be nasty and stay in games.”
Mike Callahan, junior linebacker, current TV commentator for MSU: “It’s so different from now. I can honestly say there wasn’t one guy who was thinking about the playoffs. We didn’t even know what they were. That’s how remote it was to us. No one had a sense at all that we were going to be what it turned out to be. That year before, defensively we’d done well and the offense really struggled. We knew the offense would be a lot different and we knew we’d be good on defense again. But it wasn’t like we were thinking about winning the Big Sky and getting to the playoffs.”
Will Johnson, senior cornerback and current team chaplain: “It’s night and day, the exposure. Back then, it was limited. Media was really just beginning to step up. I mean, ESPN? What was that? It was the beginning of a number of things that were happening. I’d say the biggest media exposure for me was signing autographs for little kids.”
Dave Arnold, head coach: “Now that I’m old and decrepit, I don’t worry about anything anymore, but I worried a tremendous amount about (hiring Carson late). Steve Carson came highly recommended. I hired him before I was told I could. I can say that 30 years after the fact because no one can fire me again. You have to go through the hiring procedures, but we didn’t have a lot of time. We knew of Steve and we had talked on the phone on five occasions. I told him, ‘Look, the job is yours. I need you to get to Great Falls, Montana. There’s a coaching clinic there and I’m going to sequester you with the defensive staff in your room for four days.’ That’s how it all went down.”
Timmer: “I will say that going into 1984, we did not feel like we had the team to win a national championship. It would be silly to say that because none of us did.”
Carson simplified the 5-2 defensive scheme the Bobcats ran the year before. He let Fellows work the open side as a devastating pass rusher. Burt, Troy Timmer and Tex Sykora all played with their hands on the ground. Kurt Timmer and Greg Wilkes manned the middle and Clete Linebarger played the CAT, a hybrid outside linebacker used to contain the edge and rush the passer.
Kramer: “Carson came in so late, it took him two months to learn guys names.”
Clete Linebarger, junior outside linebacker: “Carson simplifying everything was an important a factor as we had. We had a bunch of good players who came back in ’84 and the strength of Carson was he just thought ‘Why don’t we just let them try to block Mark Fellows on the wide side of the field and we will shrink everything on the front side.’ It worked. It was pretty simple, but it worked.”
Johnson: “It was one of those things that he still had a military style of hierarchy and respect. Whatever the coach said, you did. You didn’t question it. You did it. When he came in, he was a lockdown coach. He knew what was necessary. He understood the game very confidently. He knew his personnel. He tailored the scheme to each of our strengths.”
Fellows: “They allowed us to be aggressive. We were never on our heels. We liked what we were doing, we liked each other, we held each other accountable. There were a few arguments in the huddle, but we wanted to get our jobs done, play with emotion and have fun. Then on Mondays, no one gets in trouble as long as you played hard. We wanted to come into every game with both our guns out. I really admire the coaches for allowing us to be like that. We got beat for some big plays. But I heard Tiger Woods say this: ‘I’d rather win one Masters going for it than six laying up.’ I love that thought. We liked going for it.”
Offensively, Diedrich scrapped the I-formation offense installed by Lubick in favor of a West Coast passing offense that emphasized timing and precise route running. It was also essential to have a stud under center.
Dan Davies, wide receivers/tight ends coach, current Associate AD at MSU: “We just didn’t have the drop-back quarterback we needed for the offense. Then Kelly Bradley got his shot.”
Tom White, junior wide receier: “Diedrich came in and put a system in that simplified things so much. We were able to communicate it quickly at the line of scrimmage and from the sidelines. It was kind of revolutionary for 1984 to be doing that. We did a lot of no-huddle stuff. He would script our plays, 25 to 30 plays, to run in succession through the game regardless of situation. He was an innovator. We were very much like what you watched with the 49ers at the same time. We were a short passing, West Coast passing attack. Our three-step drop game was executed to perfection and he demanded that. We were so in sync and on time with what we were trying to do.”
Bradley: “We were using three and five-step drops. We weren’t throwing the ball down the field 40 yards. We were just getting the ball out. We weren’t fast or super strong. We just were very well coached and had a really, really good systems. The coaches melded the system around the players we had and it clicked.”
Randall: “It certainly open things up for us. Sonny Lubick was kind of three yards and a cloud of dust kind of guy. Graber kind of started to change that a little bit, but Diedrich really opened things up for us. As an offensive linemen, I personally enjoyed the passing game much more than the running game. We threw the ball all over the place and it was a lot of fun.”
MSU opened up the 1984 season with a 30-14 win over Mesa College in which the offense totaled 427 yards. The next week, MSU racked up 492 yards, but four turnovers, including an interception by Bradley returned for a touchdown that helped seal a 21-16 loss to Eastern Washington. Against Idaho, Tim Clements scored three touchdowns and MSU emerged 34-28. The next week, the Bobcats mustered just 286 yards in a 22-6 loss to Idaho State. The ‘Cats stood at 2-2.
Callahan: “At 2-2, I thought we could be pretty good. There was a new feeling that our offense could score in one play.
Davies: “We played so bad against Idaho State, we didn’t even watch the film.”
Then something clicked. The Bobcats rolled up 498 yards and blocked five punts in a 48-0 decimation of Weber State. MSU would not lose again.
Timmer: “Football is a game of momentum. Once you get momentum, you are dangerous. There’s nothing more dangerous than a team that has that confidence, has that momentum. As the season progressed, we had a lot of really close games and we’d always prevail.”
The next week, MSU went into four overtimes against Nevada. It was the first college football game to test the 3-OT rule in which teams must go for two points after touchdowns following the second OT. Running back David Pandt caught a 13-yard touchdown to seal the 44-41 victory in four OTs.
Davies: “I remember being up in the booth and wondering what happens after 2 OTs. I still remember the play we scored on to win. They kicked a field goal and David Pandt scored a touchdown. 88H-FY-Change was the name of the play.”
Bradley: “The Reno game should have never gotten to overtime. We were ahead and then they busted off like a 98-yard run. They didn’t do much, then they made some big plays. Once you get to overtime, anything can happen. And that was the first year of the put the ball at the 25-yard line for overtime.”
Randall: “The four-overtime game against Reno at home was a big one. They had historically beat up on us pretty good. I don’t recall the score from the prior year in Reno, but I know it wasn’t pretty. When we were able to hang with them for four overtimes and win that one, I’d say that’s when we turned the corner.”
White: “The Reno game was insane. The ability we had to score and spread the field on offense was so much fun that even superior teams like that had a difficult time with us. It kept us in games for so long.”
Against Reno, Fellows came off the edge for a school-record four sacks. He’d go on to total 23 in 1984, giving him a school-record 40 in his illustrious career.
Fellows: ‘When you don’t have pocket aces and I know it, I’m quite a different poker player. When you’re down 10 points and the coaches know you’re down and you have to come out and start throwing the ball, it gives you a different mindset. Once we put points on the board and got ahead, it was our turn. We could pin our ears back.”
Bruce Parker, former MSU sports information director, Carroll College AD: “Fellows is the best. He could dominate a game from opening whistle to final buzzer. He is the best player I’ve ever been around at any place. He is quiet. He doesn’t boast. He’s just so tough. One day, he had his fingernail ripped off and it was dislocated. He put tape on it himself and checked himself back in. I’m not sure he felt pain.”
Davies: “Mark Fellows is a great player, fantastic, but the could not block Lonnie with one guy. Mark always had a single and he made mince meat out of most tackles. He was so strong and so quick.”
Burt: “I’d get double-teamed, triple-teamed and Fellows would come free and kill these guys. No one could block us. We had the best front four in I-AA football. It was known. We were all so strong. We were all benching in the mid-400s and I was squatting 700 pounds. Tex was squatting 700 pounds. We were as strong as these guys these days.”
Kramer: “One guy was clearly better than everyone else. That was Mark Fellows.
“If you look at it from the outside, everything that happened in ’84 to MSU is a collision of the stars, a once in an epic event. It’s not viewed over the long term. But he was literally unblockable. Coach (Dennis) Erickson told me many times that without Fellows, MSU could have never gotten to .500. And he might have been right. He whipped everybody. The Fresno State guys, the Idaho guys, the Boise State guys, he whipped them all. In the playoffs, he was unstoppable. He was such a humble guy, it elevated everyone else. You can say a whole bunch of positives for the whole team, but one guy elevated everyone else’s play because if a kid like that from Choteau, Montana can play that well, then guys from Missoula and Butte and Bozeman wanted to play just as well.”
The team was chocked full of Treasure State stars. Seventeen key contributors came from Montana high schools, including six defensive starters from the Class B ranks.
Fellows, Choteau native: “For whatever reason, our parents had a good crop of kids there in ’62 and ’63. You don’t see that very often where that many good kids come into the program from in state. You have to get credit to Sonny and his staff for recruiting all of us. I’m sure it was a leap of faith to walk into my house and say you’re interested me. MSU liked what they saw. Joe Bignell and Tex Sykora could have went bigger, but Sonny was a great recruiter and got them to Bozeman. Tex was offered at Wyoming and Joe was offered at Washington State. How they ended up at Montana State, I’m not sure. I’m glad they did.”
Linebarger, Conrad native: “We were just a bunch of guys who got along. We all had the same upbringing, the same background, the same work ethic. Everything just fit. We had a couple of big leadership things happen where Mark Fellows and Joe Bignell kind of started sticking up for everyone and that galvanized us as a team.”
Roberts, Missoula native: “(Current Montana Grizzlies head coach) Mick Delaney would still tell you that that was one of the best in-state recruiting classes he’s ever landed.”
Randall, Miles City native: “I’ve thought about it often over the years and what exactly pulled it together is hard to say, but I like to think that a lot of it was that class of guys that came in in ’81 were really some of the premier athletes in Montana,” Randall said. “We had a lot of pride in performing well. We knew that ’84 was our last chance to shine and we did. The whole team stepped up and we did it.”
Timmer, Boulder native: “I don’t know if since then, there’s ever been that many small school Montana guys starting on a defense. Everybody says it, but small town guys have work ethic. It’s not that kids from Great Falls or wherever don’t, but in a small town, your parents had different expectations of you. You got up in the morning and you worked and you were held more accountable to contributing.
“Our front seven was what you’ll call a powerful, strong, ornery group. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but we were a group of guys that you’d want to take in an alley with you.”
That toughness continued to show. Following a 45-28 whipping of Portland State in which MSU compiled almost 500 yards and saw seven players score, the Bobcats again needed magic against Boise State.
Arnold: “The Boise game, I’m not trying to say anything bad about our kids, but Boise had a hell of a lot more than we did. They didn’t like to play in Bozeman and we didn’t like to play there. We had a third down and we throw the little dump pass to (fullback) Jesse Jones and he breaks seven tackles and runs 80 yards for a touchdown. And Fellows sacked the quarterback three or four times in the last few minutes.”
White: “I vividly remember Jesse Jones and that screen pass and the amount of tackles he broke and the blocks he got up the sidelines, that was really something.”
“I was so tired at the end of the run,” Jones told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in 2006.
Against rival Montana, the Bobcats found themselves down 24-12 at halftime.
Arnold: “Mark Fellows and Joe Bignell grabbed me as we were walking off the field and they said, ‘Coach, be calm in the locker room.’ They knew I could get a little excited. They just said, ‘We got this.’ We came out and scored 24 points in the second half. They were right. You have to listen to your players because they are out there.”
Roberts: “Marty Morningwheg was the quarterback at the time and they were beating us at halftime and people were freaking out. We were just laughing. We knew we’d beat the hell out of them in the second half and we did.”
In order to open things up on the outside, Bradley looked for the 6-foot-5, 245-pound Bignell early and often. The Deer Lodge product caught a school-record 13 passes for 174 yards and a touchdown. He’d go on to catch a school-record 88 passes that All-America season.
Bradley: “I could see him really easy (laughs). I was like Lines from Charlie Brown who always had his blanket. Joe was my blanket. Any time I was in trouble, I’d throw it up to Joe. It worked pretty good.”
White: “Early in ball games, we’d throw five or six balls inside to Joe and he’d body up like a power forward and they just could not stop him. They would continue to try and then all of a sudden, we could get slant routes and we started playing chess on the outside with our route calling.”
Parker: “I remember he played with a hearing aid in his ear so he could hear the snap count. He could catch literally anything. He was another one of the best players I’ve ever seen.”
Callahan: “He’s the most clutch guy. These last few years, they’ve talked about Tanner Bleskin when you need a first down. That was Bignell ten-fold. You knew he was going to get open and you knew he was going to catch the ball. He was such a hard-nosed competitor. Good players, he just ran over them. He just flat-out wouldn’t be denied.”
A 41-10 win over Northern Arizona sewed up the Bobcats’ first Big Sky title since 1979. The next week, MSU took on I-A Fresno State, a familiar foe.
Callahan: “We paid attention to them because of the (Jim) Sweeney connection. (Sweeney coached at MSU from 1963-1967.) We had some good battles with him. I remember Mark Fellows just beat (quarterback and Jim’s son) Kevin Sweeney to death in Bozeman one year. One of my professors asked me before the Fresno game what they were telling us about playoffs. I said I’d heard if we beat Fresno, we’d get a buy and be the No. 1 seed. He said, ‘You ain’t beating Fresno.’”
Bradley: “Fresno State, at halftime I remember thinking that they were taking us lightly and I remember as an offense that we were mad. I can’t even remember what the score was at halftime, but we felt like we were getting jobbed pretty good. Then we ran the two-minute drill down three. I remember talking to Coach Arnold on the sideline and there was a calm about that game. We were rolling good offensively. We knew if we could get the ball back, we’d score. I still remember telling him, ‘Don’t worry Arnie, we are going to win.’ I knew they couldn’t stop us.”
Davies: “That’s one of the all-time great games. Their coaches have their headsets off after halftime. They were up 17-0. The go-ahead touchdown, Bignell gets hit on the seven yard line and carries two guys into the end-zone to take the lead (35-31). That was one of the all-time great games I’ve been associated with. They thought they had us, but they didn’t stop throwing.”
Kramer: “It had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with the head coach making a grievous mistake. I remember being on the sidelines and when they threw the ball against us on 3rd-and-1 with no timeouts left and a minute to go in the game, I told the defense, ‘That guy doesn’t want to win’.”
The win over the Bulldogs clinched the top overall seed in the I-AA playoffs and home-field advantage throughout. In the quarterfinals, MSU drew Arkansas State, a team with a speedy defense coordinated by future Auburn head coach Tommy Tubberville. An early December snow storm hit Bozeman that night and ASU was the last flight allowed to land at the airport. Despite momentum and homefield advantage, the Bobcats found themselves in a hole yet again.
Bradley: “I threw two touchdowns in the first quarter. Unfortunately, it was to the wrong team. That was another one where our defense shut them completely down. I just needed to quit screwing up.”
Kramer: “We still fall behind 14-0 because Bradley throws two picks to the same guy that are interception returns for touchdowns. You can’t write stuff like this.”
Roberts: “Kelly throws two pick-sixs to the same kid and there was just kids booing him leaning over the rails. We told him to hang in there and he pulled us out of it.”
Bradley ended up throwing for more than 330 yards and two touchdowns and ran for one more in MSU’s 31-14 win. In 1984, the 6-foot-3 righty from Zumbrota, Minnesota threw for 3,508 yards and 30 touchdowns and ran for five more.
In the semifinals, MSU looked like it was finished. The Bobcats trailed 20-12 with under nine minutes to play. Butte product Kelly Davis caught a 70-yard touchdown from Bradley to cut it to 20-19, but Rhode Island had the ball on the MSU 3-yard line with four minutes to play.
That’s when Joe Roberts etched his name in MSU lore forever.
Randall: “I will never forget the Joe Roberts miracle. There’s a lot of guys who thought we were done right there. When he ran that back (97 yards) and we subsequently recovered the onsides kick, there was no stopping us after that.”
White: “They were going into score and it’s over and then Joe gets this miracle of an interception. Joe was a strong, average player and now he’s the hero of the team because of one play. He had the courage to jump a slant route he’d just had an ass full of and took a risk and did it.”
Roberts: “Doug Kimball would tell you, ‘I had 26 interceptions and Joe gets one in his life and people remember it more than any of mine.’ Really, it was a play that I got beat twice for touchdowns on that same play. They come down and it’s late in the game and I said, ‘Hell, I bet they do it again’. And they threw it right to me. I was just an average player, nothing special.”
Arnold: “If we lose to Rhode Island, everyone is going to pat us on the back and tell us what a good year we had. We are down, they are going into score, we show blitz, they call a timeout. We take the blitz off and Joe Roberts makes a play that is maybe one of the top three or four plays in Montana State football. We squib kick it because it’s a frozen field. We recover and score three plays later and win by 12 points. Those were there and those who read the history books know that it wasn’t a 12-point game. Luck was on our side.”
Fellows: “We are coming down to Defcon 2. That flips the whole season around if he doesn’t pick that off. He doesn’t get that one, no one remembers us and we aren’t talking right now.”
MSU stamped the astonishing comeback when Eric Miller scored on a 29-yard draw play.
Roberts: “After my interception return, they call a pass play and Bradley said, ‘Hell no, I’m not throwing the ball. No damn way.’ So he calls a draw and the kid goes 40 yards for a score. He refused to throw it. He didn’t want to throw a pick and have everyone choke him.”
The win meant MSU was headed to Charleston, South Carolina to take on Louisiana Tech at the Citadel.
Bradley: “You have Willie Cotton and Jerry Rice at Mississippi Valley State, so we’d heard about them all year long. They were scoring 80 points per game or something. Then Louisiana Tech crushes Mississippi Valley to get into the championship. We were thinking, ‘Holy cow.’ We thought we were in trouble.”
Roberts: “We played at the Citadel and it was on TV, but there was probably 8,000 people there. It was nothing like it is today.
“Louisiana Tech made the mistake of watching what Fresno State did spreading us out and throwing the ball. They just didn’t have the same people as Fresno State. By the time they figured out how to beat us, it was too late. Our defense smothered them.”
Arnold: “We’ve talked about this over the years many, many times and if you had to put one word on this team, it’s belief. They believed they were never out of a game. And they weren’t.”
The Bobcats built a 19-0 lead behind two touchdown catches by Bignell. The defense held Louisiana Tech to minus-25 yards rushing and 262 total yards. They didn’t score until there was less than a minute left in the game. Montana State had its first national title since 1976 and the last it has captured in the three decades since.
Kramer: “It’s such a domino story. You couldn’t write a script of that team and take it to Hollywood and get anyone to produce it unless it was some Rocky Horror Picture Show. So many things went wrong that we were able to overcome. It stands by itself as an anomaly.”
White: “It’s a capsule in time, there’s no doubt about it. As time goes on, it becomes more of a capsule for us to reminiscence about. We were a team full of smart asses, the funniest team in America in our opinion. In camp, we had no visions of grandeur at all in this thing. We were 2-2 and then it took off. Then it started to speed up so fast, it was over with before you knew it. We didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. The playoff system was relatively new. We never even paid attention to us prior to this ’84 season because it’s not like it was on our radar prior to that. It took not only the team, but the entire state of Montana by surprise.”
Callahan: “I think about how we’d stack up to today’s teams a lot and I think it’s really tough to compare, but I think that we were different in that we got it done and finished.”
Arnold: “I was just the ringmaster. I directed the circus. Those kids are the ones that deserve the credit. A lot of them have been put in the Hall of Fame. They certainly deserve it. I couldn’t have predicted we were going to be a national championship team. I just wanted to get better and we all of a sudden got really good. At one point, we had the biggest turnaround in the history of college football.”
Roberts: “Dave Arnold is a great man. He treated us so well. Sonny Lubick got us all there to start with. He got us there. But Arnold was the one who put all of the pieces together and rallied us together. He cared about people and not about himself. He did anything for us kids and it wasn’t about him. Some of these head coaches are about themselves and Arnie is not like that at all. It was all about what he could do for his kids.”
Linebarger: “It was just an incredible ride. While it was happening, it was amazing. Everyone remembers certain plays. Everyone remembers Joey Roberts’ play. That was a significant moment in many people’s lives, myself included. When they think back to ’84, they think of Mark Fellows, Joe Bignell, Joey’s interception. If they had the 30 greatest plays of all time from Bobcat history, there were probably 10 of them that year. It was an incredible ride. I want MSU to win another one so we can move beyond us and people like myself can have those memories as a fan going through it not just as a player.”
Fellows: “It was a little bit like catching lightning in a bottle, but I will tell you that you don’t push through beating teams like Fresno State by being lucky. We were good. We were. And we had kids that didn’t think anything about making All-Big Sky and all that. It was absolutely about being credible and realistic with our goals to begin the season. We took it one game at a time and refused to get embarrassed again.”
