> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.bobbyball406.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Week 1 Scouting Report - URL: https://www.bobbyball406.com/week-1-scouting-report-if-it-barks/ - Published: 2026-09-04T10:41:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T08:37:58.000Z - Description: Drake at Montana, Saturday, 1 p.m. The Top Gun offense, the brother index, extra powder for the cannon, and the season champ all-name team. - Author: Schuyler Watt - Tags: Scouting Report, #Migrated-1789105250837, #Import 2026-09-10 23:41 Here we are, finally in week 1\. The first week of the new Griz season. Our first look at the new squad after a long fall camp, up against the Drake Bulldogs. The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Wait — that’s not right, our season started on week nothing. But it wasn’t nothing, and I haven’t forgot it, and from what I’ve read and been told, I was higher on the team’s performance than most of Griz Nation. *Spoiler:* I’m even higher on the team this weekend, and the math has my back. But we’ll get to the nerd stuff later. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup) First we need to address the elephant in the room, and in this case the elephant happens to be a duck. A male duck. A drake. Where I am from, which is not Iowa, a drake is not a dog. Dogs pick up ducks. Could a drake pick up a dog? We’re two paragraphs in and I’m already spinning out. I’ve heard the school’s name comes from its war hero benefactor (Francis Marion Drake, shot through the hip in battle, later governor of Iowa, and the man whose money built the school), but I’m a simple guy. When I hear “Drake” I think layout blinds and yelling “get em.” And with the Top Gun offense rolling into town, all this weapon talk has got me thinking shootout. So, for the purposes of this column, it will be the Drake Ducks from here on out. Just so an already confused Montana writer can keep his wires uncrossed. The Ducks play in the only non-scholarship football conference in Division I. Nobody on Drake’s roster is getting paid. No bail bondsman NIL money to be found. They are flying into town for a matchup with the No. 3 team in the country, with 26,000 of us waiting. And doing it only for the love of the game. That is the pure version of college football we all claim to miss. The guys running down the visitors’ tunnel Saturday have my respect. Be that as it may, when I said the Top Gun Ducks are coming to Missoula for a shootout, I didn’t mean the 52-48 thriller kind. I meant the kind where your dad wakes you and your brothers up early ‘cause the ducks are flying; everybody brings extra boxes of shells and does some finger calisthenics knowing the trigger’s about to wear out. No, the boom you’ll be hearing Saturday won’t be a shotgun, but the cannon operators best be bringing extra powder. [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup) ## Top Gun offense set records and lost last week Four of Drake’s five offensive coaches arrived together in February from Wisconsin-River Falls after winning the D3 national championship, and they brought the system with them. Joe Matheson, the coordinator, built it during the 2020 shutdown and named it Top Gun. Last year’s Top Gun quarterback at UWRF, Kaleb Blaha, set an NCAA all-divisions record with 6,189 individual yards and won the Division III Heisman. Blaha graduated and his backup followed the staff to Des Moines. The backup is Riley Warzynski (”Ry War”) and against South Dakota Mines he went 38-of-56 for 535 yards, breaking a school record that had stood for 56 years. Drake gained 559 yards at 7.7 a play and lost. Why? I would argue a flawed philosophy for this level, as articulated by the Top Gun architect himself, Matheson: “Number one, we’re gonna play ultra-fast and attack with relentless tempo at all times. We’re trying to get it snapped as many times as possible in a football game.” ## The box score is gaslighting you, again Drake scored 35 points last week, and 35 sounds like an offense that works. But watching the game back, I was not so sure. After going up 10-0 in the first, Drake trailed 31-13 entering the fourth quarter and scored 22 in about four and a half minutes: an 80-yard touchdown to Willis Nofsinger on one snap, a 73-yard touchdown to Hank Foley on one snap, and a blocked punt that Karson Kindred picked up and carried two yards. None of it came off a drive or even a carefully schemed play. The 73 was an 8-yard slant against a seven-man cover-zero pressure where the corner missed the tackle. The 80 was a 12-yard dig where the safety fell down at the break. The blocked punt came against a Mines protection group that had at least four of its players forgetting there was a football game going on, leaving multiple Drake rushers unblocked. What isn’t gaslighting, and what is most indicative for this Saturday, is what happened after the Ducks retook the lead. D2 Mines answered with a sixteen-play, 79-yard drive that took almost six minutes, where they looked like the better team. The drive finished off with a punishing goal to-go run that scored the go-ahead touchdown with under 2 minutes to play. The Ducks came back with a few underneath completions, three curls in a row, before throwing an interception to seal the upset. There were far fewer true run-pass options than the Top Gun literature promises. What there was, over and over, was a curl. It felt like every time Drake lined up in trips with the safety ten yards off over the No. 3, it was a slot curl. When a corner played off, it was a stop route. One game of tape, against a Division II secondary, but the reads were pretty consistent. Their QB moved well in the pocket and escaped many heavy rushes, often by climbing forward on a shoulders square to the line run, before repositioning to throw. He’s great on schedule, but I thought he stared down his first read without much eye deception. He made a lot of good throws. Besides the interception that ended the game, I marked down two other interception worthy throws in the first half, which isn’t that many on 58 Something to watch for: broken and missed tackles and cutback runs against the flow. Drake’s second and third levels over pursued at times. One instance in the second quarter was both safeties tracking a fly motion across the field, only for the ball to be handed off on a backside zone which popped for a 48 yard rush; the back untouched to the second level, where he broke two arm tackles from the out of position players before sprinting to the end zone. ## The Ducks flew in the open, shot down in the red zone I warned you there would be math. How the Ducks lost last week becomes pretty clear when you look at where on the field the Top Gun succeeded and where it failed. In the open field, it chewed up yards. But when the field compressed in the red zone and fringe, the Top Gun got shot out of the sky. The metric for this is success rate, an advanced stat that is pretty simple. It measures how often an offense gains enough yards to stay on schedule based on the down and distance. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/39/cb/39cbecda-9202-45ec-8fc2-1800ffd1dfa8/content/images/2026/09/36472ab4-f02b-4e4e-b3d0-3ec2d3a7b4d9_765x199.png) Until Drake crossed the opponent’s 40, they succeeded on 62 percent of their snaps; past that point it started falling off as they got closer, with the Ducks succeeding on only one snap out of twelve inside the 20 yard line. Inside the ten specifically, they were zero of seven, at a cost of about eight tenths of an expected point per snap. Four trips inside the 20 produced two field goals and no touchdowns. That’s the ballgame. Look closely at the pass column. Inside the ten-yard line they only ran once in seven snaps. With an offensive line getting little push, they kept throwing quick game into a compressed defense, and the holes that were there at midfield were not there, because there was no field left to spread anybody across. What decides Drake’s scoring is how Montana’s defense plays in the fringe and the red zone. Warzynski will get his yards this game. It is not how little time it takes to reach the scoring area that matters. It is what happens once you are there, and for Drake, last week says: not well. Bend but don’t break kind of game for the good guys. Maybe bendddddddd sometimes. I’ll be watching the red zone, because last I checked you don’t get any points for yards. ## Bobby Ball does not believe in tempo Snaps will not decide this game; the data isn’t there, and neither is my anecdotal observation. The Top Gun premise is that more snaps is more good. There is research on it, and “mixed” is the honest word. The most careful work on it is Rob Bowron’s regression on nine years of college drives, which found that defenses do not give up more points per drive as the drive count climbs; if anything, slightly fewer. Tempo does not tire a defense into submission. It gets you more at-bats, and more at-bats is only good if you can hit. Connelly’s Five Factors, the framework this column ran on last week, do not include a pace term at all. Yards per play and success rate tell you whether an offense works. Plays and yards tell you how long it was on the field. River Falls ran 85 a game and won a national title, and the difference is that River Falls could also run for 212 yards a game while Drake ran for 32 on 15 real carries once you pull the two sacks out of the box score. Anyone selling you plays and yards is selling you the thing that happens to a team while it is busy not scoring. And look at last week, while the tempo team ran 73 plays, Mines ran 82\. When you play fast and go 3 for 13 on third down, you hand it back just as fast to your opponent. Where have we heard that before? ## The Bob S\*\*\*t echo Looking at the circumstances of Drake’s incoming regime is an uncanny echo of Montana’s 2014 hire. In December that year we hired a small-college coach with a famous up-tempo offense out of the Colorado School of Mines, a different Mines, and in his first game Brady Gustafson threw it 55 times for 434 yards to beat four-time defending champion NDSU. Warzynski’s 38-of-56 for 535 is the same silhouette. Gustafson broke Dave Dickenson’s single-game completions record twice in 2016, 47-of-59 at Cal Poly and 45-of-63 at Eastern Washington, the offense averaged 39.5 points a game, and the team went 6-5 and missed the playoffs. It missed them again in 2017. Why? We all remember. Those Griz could not run the ball. In Bob-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s three seasons the Griz were 3.6, 4.4 and 3.7 a carry; for context, last year’s Griz averaged 4.7. A volume passing offense imported from a lower division, without a run game, is a shape Montana fans watched up close for three seasons, and it produced gaudy quarterback numbers, a soft team and two years of watching the playoffs on television. Based on one game, Drake’s metrics point at the same disease. ## Drake’s inexperienced offensive line, and 120 toaster ovens We are going to dominate the line of scrimmage on Saturday, or we are going to have a bad season. Walker told his own podcast that three of his five offensive linemen made their first career starts against Mines, and that they had some jitters. Their second start is at Washington-Grizzly, against a Montana defensive line that has gotten heavier. I am not sure that eases the jitters. That first start produced 1.51 line yards a carry, a figure below the fifth percentile of every FCS single game played last season. The median is 2.98, and Montana’s line got 3.00 against Southern Utah. That is the difference between a front that moves people and one that does not, and Drake’s came against a Division II foe. On Montana’s side, the annual August concern about the offensive line can stand down a week. Somebody is going to tell you the combined weight of Drake’s offensive line. I am tired of it. I am tired of reading articles and hearing broadcasters recite the total tonnage of a five-man unit as though it were a scouting report, when every Division I offensive lineman in America weighs somewhere between 280 and 330 pounds, the sum of which tells you exactly nothing about whether any of them can reach a linebacker, anchor against a bull rush, or pick up a twist, which is exactly what Drake’s right guard and center did not do too well last week, the center in particular having a habit of standing up and watching on longer pass sets. None of that weighs anything. Drake’s five starters go 305, 320, 290, 305 and 290\. That is 1,510 pounds. It is also roughly 120 toaster ovens, if a toaster oven weighs twelve and a half pounds, which is the kind of thing this statistic makes you look up. Both figures are equally useful. Size is a stupid way to analyze linemen. Watch their feet. ## Montana’s run game will flex its muscles The Ducks run a 4-2-5 with almost no pre-snap movement or disguise. Watching the game, it stood out to me that the safeties’ eyes and alignment tip the coverage. Out wide, man. On the hash, zone. Eyes on a man at the snap, man. Eyes in the backfield, zone. The defensive line has four new starters and did not hold up well last week. The corners lined up in press often, which would not be a good recipe this week. Drake could do little to slow Mines’ run game, with the line consistently getting sealed and blown off the ball. The Ducks gave up 241 sack-corrected rushing yard to a D2 opponent who got 4.2 yards per carry. And as I was watching it, it was not a fluke. Montana should have a banner day rushing. Watch for the Griz to debut Hashim Jones in the second half, the 6-foot, 200-pound sophomore from Hartford, Connecticut who ran for 131 yards in six games as a true freshman. Jones’s position coach, Dominic Daste, said in August that he has “done a great job of mimicking Eli a little bit,” which is the nicest thing you can say about a running back. ## How the Yellow Hat Crew should play it I expect Montana’s base defense Saturday to be the 4-2-5 with heavy dime often, and perhaps, hold onto your hats eGriz, a 3-3-5 if Eric Sanders is ready to tempt fate. Should we start calling him Old Yeller? I still haven’t come up with a great yellow hat bit; I think I’m still recovering from seeing coaches in non-team color hats again. Isn’t that something they should warn us about? Both Old Yeller and Bobby 3.0 have said they want to be multiple up front, but we did not see much of it in week zero because Southern Utah was not the matchup for it. Drake is. I do not expect much base 4-3 outside of short yardage and inside the ten; with no Drake run game to stay big for, this will be a heavy sub-package game. The Top Gun offense is built to isolate the third receiver and the tight end against the sub-backer, and Montana’s sub-backer, on the evidence of week zero, is Braeden Orlandi, a safety by trade, who led all of NAIA football in tackles last year with 136 at Carroll College, was the Frontier Conference’s West Division defensive player of the year, and led Montana in tackles in his Division I debut with eight. Saturday he has to make correct decisions against a quarterback who reads the hook defender’s eyes and throws around him. Here is why I am not worried. Everything Drake does depends on Warzynski being comfortable. Make him uncomfortable, slow his reads, wreck the timing on the choice routes, and you have not stopped part of Drake. You have stopped Drake. Last week a D2 defensive line pressured him with three and four rushers on almost every snap but he escaped constantly, because nobody on that D2 front could keep a lane. Our line is going to get pressure against this offensive line, our speed is going to be a problem for them, and our edges have to hold contain against a quarterback stepping up past a rush that got too deep. Lane discipline is the afternoon. Drake allowed two sacks in 58 dropbacks against Mines, and by the FCS single-game table that is a better-than-median protection day, so the number does not say their line is soft; what I saw on film says the interior lost straight up consistently, failed to pass off twists and other line games, and the center watched many of the plays just like you or me. If our four cannot get home against that line I will start worrying about this season, but not before. The corners and safeties must display better scheme discipline than last week, because choice routes punish exactly the discipline failures Montana exhibited at times. A choice route is a receiver reading post, dig or comeback after the snap, off your safety’s leverage, with the quarterback reading the same thing and both of them having to arrive at the same answer at the same instant; if the safety is late or outside himself, the answer is a dig for 80\. Mines’ safety fell down. Ours had better not. Then there is the weather, which turned Thursday. The NWS gridpoint for the stadium now says a 60 percent chance of rain Saturday, fog before 3 p.m., 66 degrees and one mile an hour of wind at kickoff. If it rains, and the odds say it probably does, that’s not good for the Ducks. A wet ball and a wet surface under an offense built only to throw. With the wind not blowing this week, it hopefully won’t be in my eyes like it tends to be at night, and I should have keener eyes for the game. ## Bobby Alert! This one has a siren. Any time an opposing staff carries a Bobby, a Bob or a Robert, it goes off, because you can never have too many, as our program’s history suggests. Drake’s special teams coordinator and defensive line coach is Bobby Cade Mornhinweg, and yes, he is Marty’s son. Marty Mornhinweg, Griz Hall of Fame quarterback, longtime NFL coach and more recently the color analyst on the MTN broadcasts, has a kid on the other sideline. Bobby Alert, level one. ## The Name Scout New weekly feature, scouting the opponent’s name strength. The rules were supposed to be a top five. The rules have been suspended. Casey Midcap, defensive back, sounds like a small Texas oil stock your uncle is sure is about to go to the moon. Dax Wiskur is in. Dustin Disney and Parker Tune, surely that’s a musical. Wait, it was actually a trio, with Willis Nofsinger, who caught the 80-yarder. Judah Mallette. Owen Pins, who started on the defensive line. Zach Proffitt, a defensive lineman in the NIL era. Josiah Rainey, receiver, no relation as far as I can determine to the man who reports on the Griz for a living, but I will be asking. Tyson Shivers and J.R. Flood, a weather system at defensive end and linebacker, and Flood made 18 tackles against Mines. Walker Tart. Kellen Haverback. Two Lincolns, DeLaere and Oltmann. Dave Applegate is listed on the staff directory as Minister of Culture, which is a real title held by a real man and the best job in Iowa. I think I may have to declare the Ducks the season champ all-name team in week 1. One deduction. Skylar James, a graduate linebacker from Des Moines, loses points for the spelling. It’s Schuyler. Pronounced Skyler. I’ve been explaining it for 34 years and I will use this column to do it one more time. ## The Brother Index Second new weekly feature, and this one is a metric, in the sense that I made it up. Teams with multiple sets of brothers are always dangerous. The reasons are obvious to anyone who grew up with one: a brother knows when you are lying about being open, a brother will block for you out of guilt, and a brother cannot be traded to another team by his mother. Drake’s roster carries two Hendrickses, Will and Wyatt, both offensive linemen, both from Lawrence, Kansas, both from Lawrence High School, a junior and a freshman. Neither bio mentions the other. There are also two Wards, Jack and Zion, a linebacker from Houston and a 5-foot-7 defensive back from Chicago, which rules them out without a phone call. Week 1 Brother Index, Drake: confirmed 0, suspected 1\. If a Hendricks tells me otherwise I will correct the record and raise the threat level. ## Portal recruit of the week Third new feature. Each week the column identifies one opposing player it would like the Griz to steal. Hank Foley, junior receiver, Santa Monica. Seven catches for 146 yards and a 73-yard touchdown against Mines, the top returning receiver on the roster with 19 catches for 332 last year, and on the film the best athlete Drake has. Here is the pitch. On third down against Mines, in fourteen snaps, Foley’s involvement in the offense was zero. Not low. Zero. The receiver who burned them for 73 was not part of the plan on the down that decides drives. Hank, if you are reading this: we throw to our guys on third down. Ask anybody in the room. ## Can the Ducks party? An Investigation Between losing to a Division II school and not being able to party, it was a tough week for the Ducks. The second half of that sentence refers to the [Iowa City radio report](https://www.1630kcjj.com/2026/08/30/drake-football-player-arrested-after-allegedly-urinating-in-ped-mall-alley/?ref=bobbyball406.com) that alleges a Drake freshman offensive lineman was arrested early Sunday morning in an alley, urinating, two hours from campus, on charges of public intoxication and possession of a fictitious license—which is to say the young man’s fake ID did not survive its first road trip either. Allegedly. He was 18\. Nobody was hurt. Hell, he may have gotten himself a bail bondsman NIL deal after all. eGriz, to its credit, mostly shrugged: “He’s a kid making a mistake kids make.” Correct, and the column’s only interest is that it calls into question the Ducks’ ability to party. However, I dug deeper and the roster assuaged my concerns. Drake’s specialists include a kicker named Jaylen Bender and a kicker-punter named Ben Jameson. A Jameson Bender sounds like a good night in Butte. On the subject of Butte, our own Tanner Huff, the Griz safety out of Butte High, is a distant relative of mine; he knows what I mean. All in good fun. Hydrate, boys. ## The prediction Every scouting report ends with one. Drake moves the ball until the field shortens, and nobody in Wa-Griz should panic about it. The drives stall in the fringe and the red zone, and Walker goes for it on fourth down there more than once. Montana’s front gets to Warzynski with four and closes down escape lanes most of the time. We pick off one of the outside curls. Montana runs fly motions and feints early, because Drake’s backers and safeties flow hard on everything, and we hit the tight ends and backs in the flats, where the Drake defense kept losing players against Mines. A heavy dose of Eli with the line getting an excellent push all day. He’ll break one long one. Ah Yat has at least one long bomb off a play-action, Drake’s safeties get downhill fast. Our receivers will regularly separate against Drake’s press corners and man to man schemes. The Griz offense can keep it simple, pound the rock, and score most every possession. While the D keeps the Top Gun holstered, at least in the red zone. The cannon operators had best bring that extra powder we talked about. Griz 49 Drake 13 [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup) [Subscribe](#/portal/signup) [Subscribe](#/portal/signup)