BOZEMAN, Montana — On Saturday evening, Sean Chambers will play in a nationally televised game that will be watched by hundreds of thousands across the country on ESPN2.
For just the second time in his college career, he will play in his home state as the Montana State senior and the second-ranked Bobcats play at co-defending Big Sky Conference champion and third-ranked Sacramento State.
The native of Kerman, California, will have plenty of friends and family in attendance to see him play. It will be an emotional moment for the Bobcat captain for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being that Chambers simply could’ve walked away from the game. Instead of turning 24 years old as a college super senior, like he did earlier this week, instead of coming back from two broken legs and a blown out knee, he could’ve simply given up on the game that brought him so much pain.
Given the devastating injuries, his eradicated development schedule because of the rehabilitation from those injuries, and the mental strife that came with being constantly hurt, no one would’ve blamed Chambers if he’d hung it up after losing his starting quarterback job at Wyoming in the middle of the 2021 season.
No one would’ve blamed him if the injury that ultimately ended his 2022 season at Montana State would’ve been his last and he’d graciously let Tommy Mellott be the only captain quarterback at MSU this fall rather than coming back for a sixth season.
But on Saturday, Chambers will help lead a Montana State squad with national championship expectations into Hornet Stadium for the first time since 2018. MSU and Sac State shared the conference title last season but have not played since 2019. The challenge will be the latest in a grueling road schedule that has already included road trips to No. 1 South Dakota State and then-No. 9 Weber State.
“I’ve only played football in California one time in college, and that was my freshman year at Wyoming,” Chambers said. “Going back to Cali is going to be fun and is going to be a good time, will have a lot of family there.”
“I’m trying to take it all in, soak it all in and not miss out on anything.”
As he should. Chambers suffered season-ending injuries as a true freshman, sophomore and junior at Wyoming between 2018 and 2020. In 2021, he and Levi Williams split time as the starting quarterback, ultimately prompting both to leave. Brent Vigen, who’s in his third season as Montana State’s head coach, had left the previous off-season, meaning Chambers also had a new position coach.
The unrest in Laramie caused Chambers (and Williams) to enter the transfer portal. At first, Chambers didn’t know if he would transfer anywhere at all.
Yet here he is, a key cog on one of the best college football teams in the Western United States. Chambers has graciously accepted a variety of roles, from red-zone Wildcat quarterback to one of two QBs used in rotation (and sometimes, simultaneously) to the go-to man under center, like he has been for the last month and a half with fellow dual-threat Mellott on the shelf.
Chambers has done nothing but produce at a historic level in Bozeman. Last season, despite starting just four games, he was the Big Sky Newcomer of the Year, a two-time Big Sky Player of the Week and one time National Player of the Week and third-team All-American.
His 19 rushing touchdowns were the third-most in Bobcat history, behind only Troy Andersen in 2018 (21) and Don “The Iron Tumbleweed” Hass (20) in 1966 in the MSU record book.
He’s continued lighting it up this season with Mellott on the bench after an injury suffered in Week 2 in a 20-16 loss at No. 1 South Dakota State. Chambers was the Big Sky Player of the Week after leading MSU to a 40-0 destruction of a Weber State team ranked in the Top 10 at the time. He’s rushed for 461 yards and 11 touchdowns already, adding 712 passing yards and five more TD tosses, most of which have come over the last four games.
“The guy just makes plays,” Mellott said.
“He’s a competitor and he’s going to do everything he can to win. The name of the game is scoring points and competing and he does that as well as anyone.”
None of those numbers matter to Chambers. What matters is the number of wins he’s been a part of. Montana State tied a school record with 12 victories last season. MSU has five wins already with five regular-season games remaining. Another run to the FCS semifinals (the Bobcats have been three years in a row) and MSU could surpass the dozen-win mark. And Chambers is a huge part of it.
“There is nothing about him from Day 1 since we started recruiting him that’s ever changed about him. He’s been about winning, this team and that’s it,” said Montana State offensive coordinator Taylor Housewright, who was an offensive analyst at Wyoming in 2018 when Chambers was a starter for four games as a true freshman. “He doesn’t care if he plays one snap or 100 snaps. He loves being here. He loves winning football games. It’s been cool to see.”
The snapped fibula in Reno almost made him call it quits. The CBS Sports on-field mics picked up Chambers’ agonizing groans. How would he summon the fortitude to come back this time?
“We both felt that was going to be his breakout season,” Vigen said. “And then it was over in three plays.”
Chambers had already come back from a similar injury, plus a torn-up knee that had ended his last two seasons. The surgeries, the rehab, the mental doubt that lingers…it not only altered his state of consciousness but also his development as a quarterback. He missed most if not all of spring football three years in a row, yet still figured out how to forge his way back into the fold.
Chambers wrote on his personal Instagram page following his 2020 injury:
“I’ve been trying to put into words of how I’ve been feeling for the past 24 hours. I simply can’t. When you put your all into something and you get nothing in return but pain and misery it makes you question and doubt yourself. I don’t know why this keeps happening. I don’t know what keeps making it happen, but what I do know, is I know that this isn’t the last of me. This isn’t the last time you’ll hear the name Sean Chambers. I WILL be back and the comeback story will be one that’s talked forever. Believe that.”
He led Wyoming to nine wins in 12 starts between the end of the 2018 season and when he snapped his leg again in 2020, this time in the opener of an abbreviated pandemic-impacted season that would also serve as Vigen’s last as the offensive coordinator as the Cowboys.
Chambers didn’t walk away. Instead, he gutted his way back one more time in Laramie. He started the first seven games of the 2021 season, including leading Wyoming to a 19-17 win over Montana State in Vigen’s head coaching debut at Montana State. The Bobcats have lost five games since.
The revolving door at quarterback ultimately caused Chambers to look for other options. He had already earned his liberal studies degree, so he wanted to see what other experiences might be out there, even if they didn’t include football.
“The road has been challenging to say the least,” Vigen remembers years later. .
“He never had a full season at Wyoming to play and to learn and that spilled over into spring ball on a couple of occasions. He plays his four games as a freshman and we just put him out there and make plays, it was really simple as that and he was able to do that. But he was really able as a young 18-year-old to show those leadership qualities you want.”
“But then he missed so much time. He was so affected in spring ball. And in ’19, we beat Missouri early and we were 6-2 and he gets hurt again and it was season-ending at that point and again that spills over into spring and his training, again.
“Then COVID and he breaks his leg again. Then the next season, I am gone and we had to see him that first game and he led them to a victory against us and then things got off the rails. It’s been such a strange road for him.”
Three season-ending injuries and the loss of a starting spot is enough to make any man walk away. And Chambers said he thought about it.
Instead, around Chistmas time in 2021, he called up the man who had recruited him during his time at Kerman High. Vigen had just led the Bobcats to a pair of the biggest wins in school history. Montana State knocked off No. 1 Sam Houston State 42-19 in the first-ever road win in the FCS playoffs by a Bobcat team. The following week, MSU shoved past South Dakota State, posting a 31-17 win to advance to the first national title game for the program since 1984.
During that run, Mellott took the world by storm. The upstart rookie from Butte, America, burst onto the national scene, rising to a level of fame rarely seen by freshmen from Montana in the Treasure State.
By the time Mellott carried the ball 28 times for 155 yards and threw for 233 yards in the win over South Dakota State, you could argue he was one of the most famous people in Montana, period.
Yet the sample size was only three games. And Vigen knew what kind of talent, and leader, Chambers is.
“When he went in the transfer portal, I wasn’t surprised but you want to know, why is this happening?” Vigen said. “Ultimately, Sean and Levi Williams both went in the transfer portal at the same time. Both talented guys that in this world of the transfer portal, they are going to get looks.
“Sean did. And I just told him, ‘Here’s where we are at. We had just beat South Dakota State and they had played the bowl game a couple of days later and we had advanced to the national championship and we have this young guy who has started our previous three games and we like what he can do. But I just told him, ‘I think you could really help us out. I don’t know what that looks like, but you could really help us out.”
Vigen said he didn’t know what Chambers was thinking. And after a few days, “I had to start concentrating on what was in front of us with the national championship (chuckles).”
“We ended up talking right after New Year’s and he said, ‘Coach, I want to come play for ya. I like what I see and trust ya,’ so that was that first step of not being done with football. He had a semester left at Wyoming and he could’ve been done with football. He was not feeling really good about football at that time.”
Meanwhile, Mellott suffered an injury in MSU’s 38-10 loss to North Dakota State in the national title game that ended up requiring surgery.
Still, after Mellott’s meteoric rise, when the tweet came through with Chambers posting he had committed to Montana State before the weekend was even over, it turned heads and started conversations around the Treasure State.
“When we first brought him over here right after the national championship game, it was like, ‘What’s going to happen with this? How is this guy going to be?” Mellott said. “And I think from the very start, we were always up front with each other, talking to each other, making it very plain that what we are doing here is to win. We will do our 1/11th really well, whoever is going to play, and focus on the win. That’s been the same thing since the very first day.”
That ability to communicate has helped Chambers acclimate to a new environment and a new program. It helped him rush for more than 200 yards and throw for more than 200 yards on the way to earning national player of the week honors in a win over UC Davis last October. It helped him earn the respect of his Bobcat teammates in short order.
“Getting him here, getting him integrated, that doesn’t happen overnight,” Vigen said. “He’s a likeable guy but that’s a process through the spring and through the summer and I really felt it wouldn’t exactly click until he played in games and found that love for football again.
“Sure enough, I think that happens the first couple of games. Having the chance to play and playing in front of our fans and getting on the other side of how that was feeling for him compared to how he felt with how things were going at Wyoming was huge.”
Kerman, California, is a farming town of about 16,000 located in Fresno County about 15 miles from Fresno itself. The area is often under-recruited compared to other hot-spots in California, yet it has yielded some serious talent.
Vigen plucked Josh Allen out of the general vicinity and brought him to Wyoming before the strapping signal caller went on to become a first-round NFL Draft pick and a Pro Bowl quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. Chambers and Portland State quarterback Dante Chachere are each from the Fresno Valley as well.
“It’s a blue-collar area, an ag area and people grow up working,” Chambers said. “They instill a work ethic into their kids. Dante (Chachere), we both have that ethic instilled in us, that chip on the shoulder piece, you see guys from my area with that. You see guys from NorCal, the Bay Area, SoCal getting recruited to big Power 5s, big schools. But guys like us fly under the radar, all those coaches that come in, don’t come to see us, we want to prove those guys wrong and prove ourselves right that we can do that.”
Regardless of what Chambers has had to prove, what obstacles he’s had to overcome, he’s done it. The 6-foot-3, 235-pounder carries himself with an aura of confidence and swagger that are rare for young men in any realm. He is quick to flash his charismatic smile and even quicker to engage when talking to Bobcat fans or the media.
“His personality goes right back to his parents, and that’s how it should be,” Vigen said. “His parents are great people. He was raised in the right way. It’s as simple as being polite. He’s got that in spades.
“He’s likeable and he embraces people. Since he’s been here in this community, when he gets asked to give back to the community, there’s no hesitation whatsoever. It’s how he was raised. That’s just ingrained in him to be a good person, to be likeable, to give back. That’s evident and there’s not one piece of that that is forced.”
Montana State’s national championship quest continues with its latest Top 5 showdown on the road. The Hornets beat Stanford earlier this season and have lost just two conference games since the beginning of 2019.
Like so many of his senior teammates, Chambers is simply trying to savor the moment while the moment is upon him.
“This time in Bozeman, it’s meant so much to me for a program to take a chance on me, an older guy, to welcome me in, bring me in with open arms, that means a lot to me,” Chambers said. “I’ll forever be thankful for, grateful for Montana State and Bobcat nation.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved.
