Keali'i Ah Yat has completed 70.1 percent of his passes for 2,280 yards, 22 touchdowns and two interceptions. He leads the Big Sky in passing yards and touchdown passes, six touchdowns clear of anybody else. Over these recent two losses he was 54 of 70 for 685 yards, eight touchdowns and one pick. Against Idaho he threw five touchdowns with no interceptions and lost.

Eli Gillman has 1,016 rushing yards at 7.1 a carry, leads the league in rushing touchdowns and in scoring, and took Marc Mariani's career all-purpose record against Idaho. Brooks Davis leads the Big Sky in catches and receiving yards, 64 for 914, and caught three touchdowns Saturday. Pease has three guys who are the best in the league at their position, and he’s mostly using them at a world-class clip, but we are losing. For years we’ve begged for an offense like this to support a standout D. My how the turn tables.

Montana's offense played one of the best games in FCS this year against Idaho. We stayed on schedule on 34 of 58 snaps, better than 97 percent of FCS single games this season. It added half a point of expected scoring every snap, produced 10 explosive plays and netted 9.88 yards a dropback. Across the two games it scored on 12 of its 19 possessions. We are first in the Big Sky and sixth in FCS in total offense.

I spent September telling people to stop with the Ah Yat slander. I'd like a little credit for that now. Also I’m reopening some of the Ah Yacht Club's leather seats for new members.

By the measure I trust most, how often the other offense stays on schedule, Idaho and Northern Arizona had the two best days against a Montana defense in the 48 games we have play-by-play for since 2023. The two worst, in order, back to back. Third on that list is South Dakota State in the 2024 playoffs.

Take out the kneels and the clock running out at the half, and Northern Arizona and Idaho had 16 real possessions between them. Twelve ended in the end zone. Our defense ended four. Through the first six games, on the same count, this defense ended about seven of every ten drives with a punt, a turnover, a missed kick or a stop on downs. In the last two it ended one in four. Some of that regression is injuries. Most of it is the scheme being on film.

The last time we forced a three-and-out was the third quarter in Flagstaff, with Northern Arizona already up 35-24. Twelve opponent possessions have come and gone since without one. Idaho punted for real once, with 2:05 left and a seven-point lead to protect, and its third downs went 11 of 14.

Ninety-one in two games is the most we've given up since Eastern Washington and Weber State hung 104 on us in 2024, but we pulled out the Eastern game 52-49. The 1949 team gave up 110 to Oregon State and Idaho in consecutive weeks, so if you are looking for a lower bar, we have to go back to the Truman Administration.

We won the big plays and the field position in both games. We lost finishing drives in both, and in a shootout finishing drives is the whole game. Two stumbles on the last two red zone drives against Idaho sealed our fate. I did not love the play calling, but the offense was far from the culprit for the losses.

Montana has zero defensive touchdowns and zero special-teams touchdowns this season. Every point we've scored, the offense scored, except the safety Northern Arizona handed us on purpose with six seconds left. Last year the defense took back 27 turnovers, 21 of them interceptions. This year it has three interceptions in eight games, and one of them lasted five yards before Chris Johnson II fumbled it back to Idaho at our 39. Idaho scored seven plays later in a game it won by seven.

The defense doesn't have to score. It has to make a team punt every now and then, and give the best offense in the league the ball back on a drive that doesn’t begin with a kickoff.

Montana has started 22 different players on defense in eight games, eleven of them in the secondary. The lineup that started the opener has started together exactly once. Against Idaho, six of the eleven opening-night starters weren't in the starting lineup, and four of them didn't play. Kade Boyd is the only defensive back who has started all eight.

Bobby 3.0 didn’t blame player unavailability: "I've never used and I never will use injuries as an excuse," he told Skyline after the game. Good for him. Injuries have clearly gutted this secondary, and that's football; nobody is mailing us healthy safeties. Which means we have to stop building the defense around a secondary that isn't there.

Eric Sanders is trending the right way. Per PFF, Montana blitzed on about one dropback in three through the first five games and on half of them in the last three. Against Idaho we sent extra on 24 of Wood's 44 dropbacks.

When we sent extra, Wood averaged 6.4 yards a throw. When we sat back and covered, he averaged 10.9. The blitz is the only thing that slowed him down. Most of what we've been sending is a fifth rusher, though, and five hasn't been enough to get the QB on the ground or get us off the field.

The one real stop Idaho's offense gave us came on its last third down, a third-and-8 after a false start, and I watched Sanders send six. Wood immediately had a defender in his face and threw it incomplete and Idaho punted. We have seen what the shell does against a quarterback who can hold the ball and run. It does nothing. It gives a good quarterback all day to find the guy the backup safety lost, usually over the middle.

The other half is tackling, and the tackling is a real problem. PFF has us missing 47 tackles in the last three games, almost one in five, after missing about one in eight before that. Even when we get to the right guy, he's still running.

Somebody killed our shot at a top-eight seed and a first-round bye, and I've solved the mystery. It was Colonel Mustard (DC Sanders and his yellow hat) in Washington-Grizzly Stadium, with the four-deep shell.

I’ve been imploring sending six for weeks. We did it on the biggest defensive snap Saturday, and forced the only real punt of the game. Time to adopt it all the way. If a good offense is going to score on three of every four real possessions against us anyway, a big play costs us almost nothing. They just score a little faster, and our offense gets the ball back sooner. Play man, bring six, make the quarterback beat us in two and a half seconds instead of four.

Bobby 3.0 said the staff talked about taking away the middle and that "we have to play with better leverage." He’s right, but at some point you either aren’t lining your guys up correctly (inexcusable in week 7) or you don’t have guys capable of maintaining leverage. In either case, immediate fixes are needed.

Onside kicks and going for two every time sound like a joke. With our current defense, half of it isn't.

The onside half holds up. FCS teams recover a surprise onside kick about a third of the time. With our (lack of a defense) the last two weeks, the EPA math says we only need to be half as good: recover one time in seven, because a deep kickoff mostly hands the other team a 75-yard touchdown drive anyway. Even the onside kick everybody sees coming gets recovered about one time in ten, which is close to break-even here. We haven't tried one all year.

The two-point half is harder. FCS teams convert 42 percent of two-point tries, for an EPA of 0.84. Jo Silver hasn’t missed a PAT this year, so our EPA kicking is 1. We’d need to convert >50% for the strategy to be live, meaning our goal-line offense has to be better than the average FCS team's. I believe it is, but it's probably not time for that measure—yet.

Against Idaho, one more stop on a touchdown drive makes it 35-35. Two and we win. In Flagstaff the math is uglier, because Northern Arizona also returned a kickoff for a touchdown and gave us a safety at the end, but one more stop gets you a tie and two gets you the win.

At its rate through the first six games, this defense would have gotten about six stops in Flagstaff and five against Idaho. It got three and one. We aren’t asking for the group to be world-beaters, or even above average. All we need from them is to get off the field once or twice more than they did, so the best offense in the league can get their helmets back on without being behind another score.

Eastern Washington is 2-6, gives up 38 points a game and just let Montana State put 56 on it at home. They are off this week too, probably licking their chops watching our soft coverage. We are 1-6 at Roos Field since 2010, and this series turns into a shootout no matter whose turf it's on: 52-49 in Cheney in 2024, 48-41 and 42-37 Eagles in Missoula in 2017 and 2013.

If this is the secondary we're taking to the red turf, the plan has to change, on defense, on kickoffs, maybe on the PAT. A bye week is the one chance all season to install something new without a game on Saturday. Running the same defense in Cheney with these personnel and two weeks to fix it would be coaching malpractice.

The bye week blues are real. Two losses, the Stein in Moscow and Bozeman waiting for us at the end. You can't coach a quarterback into throwing eight touchdowns in two weeks. You can coach a defense into taking more chances.

Go Griz.