SPOKANE, Wash. — The Loft is an event space at the Northern Quest Resort & Casino, which sits near the airport on the windswept edge of town. To get to The Loft, you walk past smokers playing slots, hang a right at the Fatburger counter and head upstairs. It’s a boxy room with a bare floor, far more functional than opulent, and on this July night The Loft is hosting a Big Sky Conference football dinner.
The menu is on-brand for the blue-collar Big Sky: burgers, dogs, popcorn—and an open bar. Administrators, coaches and players are free to grab a beer with their food, sit together at round tables and talk ball. There are players from Idaho wearing matching bowling shirts, and players from Sacramento State wearing “GoGo Sacramento” hats. There are cowboy boots and stetsons and jeans.
“This is who we are,” says conference commissioner Tom Wistrcill as he moves through the chow line. He is a round-faced man with a sense of humor and little pretense, which makes him a snug fit for an FCS league that rests on the fault line of the post–House settlement college sports world.
The following morning, the Big Sky will hold its annual media day at the resort, publicizing its 12 football programs from eight Western states. The day after that, the Big Ten will begin a media extravaganza at the massive Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The difference in scale and grandeur between the two casinos is comparable to the difference between the two conferences. Grit vs. glitz.
But if you want to gamble, you can do that every bit as well at Northern Quest as Mandalay Bay. And if you want to watch college football within a traditionally recognizable context, you can do that every bit as well in the Big Sky as in the Big Ten.
“We play the highest level of Division I sports and we strike a balance between education, graduation, student-athlete experience and the ability to compete,” Wistrcill says. “We’re really proud of that. We believe that we’re doing college athletics the right way in the Big Sky. We’re proud to wave that flag and we’ll fight for that.”
The fight is more complex than ever, as the league walks the line between modernizing and cherishing the old-school college model.
The Big Sky is split exactly in half on opting into the House v. NCAA settlement that fundamentally altered college athletics, creating shared revenue for athletes and a higher number of scholarships (while also reducing many roster sizes). For schools at the FBS level, opting in was nonnegotiable. For schools at the FCS level, where funding is tighter, it was a tougher choice.
And in the Big Sky, it’s a literal 50-50 proposition. Six current members opted into the agreement: Cal Poly, Sacramento State, Montana, Montana State, Northern Colorado and Weber State. Six members opted out: Eastern Washington, Idaho, Idaho State, Northern Arizona, Portland State and UC Davis.
It was a striking split for a league of 12 public schools that was formed in 1963 and has enjoyed core stability for about 30 years. It illustrates the current tension points for schools that could be considered tweeners on the D-I athletic scale.
The Big Sky schools that have opted in will distribute nothing close to the $20.5 million annual cap—maybe 1/20th of that, or 1/40th. (The highest-paid athletes in the league might well be distance runners from Northern Arizona, which has won six of the last nine men’s NCAA cross country championships.) But for an aspirational conference that trails only the Missouri Valley Football Conference in terms of FCS national competitiveness, Wistrcill and others would love to see all Big Sky members jump into the House pool by 2026. From a conference office staff of 12 people to the individual athletic departments, this is a try-harder league. Part of trying harder is getting everyone on the same rev-share page and at least taking a swing at it.
“It’s not a great spot from the conference office standpoint to have people doing different things,” Wistrcill says. “I think we all need to be in. I mean, there’s only 40 schools in D-I who didn’t opt in. We have six of them. So that tells me that we need to be there and that’s the commitment that we need to have to our student-athletes and to Division I as a whole. And I think we’ll get there for next year.”
This is a league that celebrates its strong regional identity out West, especially with the Pac-12 diaspora being scattered to conferences across the map. But it also has compelling diversity, from the rugged beauty of Montana to the city schools in Portland and Sacramento to the high desert of Flagstaff, Ariz. And across that north-south bandwidth, they do support their football.
The Big Sky operates at the high end of FCS. The schools have smaller athletic budgets (ranging from $18 million to $34 million in 2024) than most of their FBS brethren. They have less TV exposure (though four games will be on ESPN networks this season, up from two last year). They’re losing Sac State, which has tried to grandstand its way to relevance, to the FBS Big West after this season, but will add Southern Utah and Utah Tech in 2026.
Regardless of money, the top league programs play at a higher level than many FBS Group of 6 conference members. The Big Sky is generally regarded as the No. 2 FCS league behind the Missouri Valley Football Conference, which is powered by the Dakota schools—and the Big Sky is arguably deeper. Five of its teams earned bids to the 24-team FCS playoffs last season and four won at least one game, with Montana State advancing to the championship before losing to North Dakota State.
The Big Sky starts this season with six ranked teams in the FCS coaches poll: No. 2 Montana State, No. 7 UC Davis, No. 9 Montana, No. 12 Idaho, No. 14 Sacramento State and No. 18 Northern Arizona. When it comes to fan backing, the league is surpassed by only the SWAC—and for those fans, halftime is often the main event. In the Big Sky, it’s more a football purist pursuit.
“We have many places in our conference on a football Saturday where none of the fans would know who USC, Ohio State or Alabama is even playing,” Wistrcill says. “What they care about is what’s happening with their local school.”
Montana was second nationally in FCS average attendance last year at 24,174 fans per home game—a figure that ranks ahead of what 50 FBS programs averaged. Montana State was third at 20,788, better than 40 FBS schools. Sacramento State (14,047), Idaho (10,808) and UC Davis (10,559) also were in the FCS top 20. The league’s playoff attendance numbers also were the best in FCS.
“I played at Texas, I played at Oklahoma, I played at Florida State,” says Idaho State coach Cody Hawkins, who was a multiyear starting quarterback at Colorado from 2007 to ’10. “There’s no better place to play than Wash-Grizz [Washington-Grizzly Stadium at Montana]. It’s incredible there.”
Hawkins was a graduate assistant under Urban Meyer at Ohio State in 2014. Like many programs, the Buckeyes snapped the ball on the quarterback clapping his hands, because shouting signals was futile in loud opposing stadiums. Good luck trying that at Montana, Hawkins says.
“White-out game at Penn State, you clap and it works,” he says. “Well, you can try that at Wash-Grizz and it may not work.”
Indeed, the Brawl of the Wild, as the Montana–Montana State rivalry is known, has taken on an Iron Bowl–level intensity. Annually played on the final Saturday of the regular season, the Bobcats vs. Grizzlies game—Cats-Grizz, for short—is constantly cussed and discussed in the Treasure State.
“It’s one of those things where people talk about it for 364 days before it happens, and then it’s bragging nights for the whole next year,” says Montana State defensive end Kenneth Eiden IV. “It’s an identity—you’re a Cat or a Grizz. And it shows every day.”
Adds Montana State coach Brent Vigen: “It is the pinnacle of sports in our state. You get on one side or the other of the rivalry that we have, that in itself drives that passion. We have this in-conference, in-state rivalry and we’re really fortunate because a lot of those have gone away with conference realignment. I think it’s pretty unique. That doesn’t happen everywhere.”
What does happen everywhere—and perhaps more deleteriously here—is player poaching. Coaches in the league agree that the top-end talent is considerable, but there’s just less of it. So the FBS schools come after the standouts.
“From my time in the Mountain West and the Pac-12 [as an assistant at Boise State and California], I can tell you from the starter to starter, there’s not a big drop-off,” UC Davis coach Tim Plough says. “The depth of the teams is the difference. The backup right guard is way better in the old Pac-12 than it is in this conference. But guy-for-guy, there’s not a huge drop-off there.”
Plough has one of the rarer players at the FCS level: a four-year starter who has kept turning down FBS offers to remain at Davis. Safety Rex Connors was a COVID-19 prospect who didn’t get to take official visits and went underrecruited. Davis recruited him hardest and he wound up there; he’s racked up 264 career tackles, intercepted eight passes and broken up 25 more to earn FCS All-American honors. “I really just kind of wanted to build my legacy at Davis,” Connors says.
Legacy matters, but money often talks. Big Sky schools are doing what they can to provide NIL opportunities and revenue shares to their athletes, yet everyone understands that the stars of the league will be sought by FBS programs with deeper pockets.
“I’ve had my center bought the last two years,” Portland State coach Bruce Barnum says. “A tailback got bought. All my good ones are getting bought. You recruit all the time. Have to. It’s just a different world and it affects us differently than the big ones. Now we’re their shopping ground.”
There is a resignation to the current system—and truth be told, Big Sky coaches aren’t exactly refusing to get into the transfer portal themselves. But one of the problems that comes with playing guarantee games—a road game against an FBS program for a sizable check—is providing those opponents with scouting and recruiting access to their own players.
“They’re shopping at our game—at the game,” Barnum recalls from a pregame episode last year, when he knew an opponent was interested in one of his players. “I help [the opposing coach] out, I tell him, ‘Our kid’s not ready, let him get a little bigger before you buy him. Just get the f--- off of my sideline.’”
Beyond player retention, there is coach retention. Power-conference athletic directors are probably more open than ever to hiring coaches who have proven themselves at the FCS or lower levels, given the recent successes in the market.
Curt Cignetti, who won most of the national coach of the year awards last year at Indiana, spent his first 11 years as a head coach at the Division II and FCS levels. Kalen DeBoer, who took Washington to the 2023 College Football Playoff championship game and is now at Alabama, was nearly unbeatable coaching Sioux Falls at the NAIA level. Lance Leipold, now at Kansas, went 109–6 at Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Are there more coaches like that just waiting for their shot? Yes. And the Big Sky would be a good place to look for them. Vigen has gone 47–10 at Montana State; Northern Arizona coach Brian Wright went an overachieving 8–5 in his first season; and Plough had a similar instant impact at Davis, going 11–3 and advancing to the FCS quarterfinals.
“There are great coaches, and usually most of the coaches are young,” Plough says. “They’re guys that are getting started and you’re going to see these guys in the Power 4 conferences soon, but they get to be creative in this conference. There’s not as many eyes on them, so you can try new things.”
As the high end of college football hurtles into a more professionalized mode of operation, the Big Sky is a reminder that there is more than one way to play the game. There is still an educational component to the mission at this level, and there also is deep fan fervor and intense competition. The league has something to sell without trying to pretend to be something it’s not.
The Big Sky is comfortable in its own boots-and-jeans skin. Burgers and beers for everyone.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as How the Big Sky Is Staying True to Old-School Roots in a Modern College Football World.