A little over a month ago, near the end of a particularly somber episode of the Griz Fan Podcast, Andrew Schmidt offered a brutal analysis of what was wrong with this year’s Montana Grizzlies football team.
Schmidt—who played running back for Montana from 2004 to 2008, mostly as a second-stringer on teams that twice vied for national championships—said Griz players today just aren’t as good as they used to be.
“They’ve got a bunch of me’s running around out there,” Schmidt exclaimed. “You don’t want to have a bunch of me’s!”
It was the night after Montana’s devastating road loss to previously winless Northern Arizona to open the Big Sky Conference season. A lot of UM fans were in full-on crisis mode. The 28-14 defeat by the lowly Lumberjacks seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears about the 2023 Griz.
Griz Fan Podcast hosts Luke Alford, Mike Nugent and Brint Wahlberg did not co-sign Schmidt’s opinion. In a town as small as Missoula, you can’t blast the players like that. It’s just something you don’t do.
“We don’t want to come off like we’re criticizing anyone,” Nugent (who is currently running for mayor) told me a week later at the Dram Shop. “But Andrew, he’s a former player—we gave him a platform and it’s a fair take for him to have.”
That’s one of the beauties of the Griz Fan Podcast—sometimes called “the GFP” or just “the pod” for short. You can pretty much say whatever you want.
Mostly, it’s a fun show. The natural chemistry between Alford, Nugent and Wahlberg gives it a laid-back, welcoming quality. These are guys you know. They could be your neighbors, the bartenders who always remember your usual or the dudes you always run into at brunch.
When we met for beers on one of the last sunny Fridays of fall, their easy-going camaraderie was on full display in person. They kept finishing each other’s sentences, bouncing the conversation back and forth like guys who spend a lot—and I mean a lot—of time talking to each other.
When Alford tried to tell me a convoluted story about the genesis of the GFP (something about a road trip, a lengthy text thread and a mutual friend who was one of the original hosts but had to drop out when he moved away from Missoula), Nugent cut him off halfway.
“No!” he said, shaking his head with the half-amused, half-frustrated look common between longtime friends used to giving each other grief. “You’re merging things! He was never in!”
“So, it was just us?” Alford asked.
“It was just us.”
I asked when all this happened—what year they decided to start recording conversations they were already having about Montana football and releasing them to the public—and it took another round of crosstalk and headshaking to figure it out.
It’s that kind of podcast.
Since its launch in 2017—they’re pretty sure it was 2017—the GFP has provided amusing, off-the-cuff deep dives into UM sports to an audience we ballparked around 10,000 listeners per week. It’s celebratory to listen after the Griz win and therapeutic after a loss. Stories are swapped. Jokes are cracked. Beers are consumed. Perhaps not coincidentally, episodes run long—usually between two and two-and-a-half hours per show.
“We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Nugent said. “The whole idea of the show is that it’s like you’re sitting having beers with your friends and talking about the game.”
Don’t be fooled, though. There’s also something more important going on.
Fact is, Schmidt’s take about this year’s team—while a scorching hot one—wasn’t actually that out of line with what you’ll regularly hear on the pod. Alford, Nugent and Wahlberg are slightly more measured, but they also don’t hold back. At least not much. Over the course of 101 episodes, the GFP has given fans something sorely missing from a lot of Griz football coverage:
The whole truth.
And the truth is sometimes uncomfortable.
It’s been a tough couple decades for local news.
Continual budget cuts and layoffs have reduced hometown sports coverage to a trickle. The Missoulian newspaper, which once fielded a sports staff of five full-time reporters and editors, is down to two. Funding has been slashed, print editions culled back and deadlines moved up.
Before the 2022 season, the Missoulian hired a new Montana football beat writer to cover the team. After a single year, the paper laid him off.
Sports sections in towns like Bozeman and Great Falls have faced similar fates. Television coverage still ticks along, and the Montana Kaimin (UM’s student newspaper) provides good coverage, but they can only do so much. The kind of wall-to-wall coverage that used to be common on Grizzly game days is now impossible.
These days, the university’s athletic department itself produces a fair amount of content, which is fine, but doesn’t always give you the straight story. National coverage of Division I FCS football is bare bones. Even the dedicated niche sites don’t offer much beyond listicles, polls and recaps. The Griz are lucky to net a few paragraphs.
This decline has left fans starved for content. But as traditional local news has withered, a new crop of independent platforms—some professional, some more DIY—has sprouted up.
There are the requisite Facebook pages and message boards like eGriz, Montana’s longstanding but often toxic online forum. There are social media personalities—Schmidt among them—who’ve garnered modest followings commentating on games.
Then there is Skyline Sports, a subscription-based platform owned by brothers Colter and Brooks Nuanez. Skyline provides far and away the most professional and thorough Big Sky coverage in the new guerilla media landscape. Colter Nuanez, one of the best-connected reporters in town, also hosts a local sports talk radio show.
The GFP splits the difference between all that stuff. In terms of sheer enthusiasm, depth, detail and truth-telling, there’s nothing else quite like it.
It brings the passion of eGriz without the bitterness and infighting. It also has a conversational, but slightly more buttoned-up tone—with a few adult beverages mixed in. Nugent and Wahlberg are knowledgeable, well-known boosters, members of UM’s Quarterback Club fundraising group, and Alford—the football philosopher of the group—works on campus as an academic adviser.
In other words, they’re hardcore fans. If they spend their Sunday nights occasionally nitpicking the Montana football program’s flaws, it’s because they care enough to criticize it when they think it’s necessary.
“I think the show is massively valuable for fans,” former Montana sportswriter Kyle Sample told me. “The only other place you can get the same kind of talk—sort of in the same realm—is eGriz, but this is way more sanitized. It’s way more focused. You don’t feel like a brawl is about to break out. In that sense, it’s the only place for Griz fans to go to talk about this kind of stuff.”
After the Northern Arizona loss, for example, Alford, Nugent and Wahlberg spent almost exactly two and a half hours rehashing the game on an episode titled, “Post NAU therapy and vent session.”
Topics included Montana’s struggle to settle on a quarterback (let alone an offensive identity), play-calling, pass coverage, recruiting and the big-picture question of whether Bobby Hauck’s second stint as head coach looked like a failure.
Sample—who, like Schmidt, is a frequent GFP guest—mentioned rumors that Hauck had turned down a contract extension in the offseason, fostering speculation this could be the coach’s last year at the helm, however the Griz finish. Sample even tossed out a name or two of potential candidates to replace Hauck.
That’s the sort of conversation you won’t hear on many other platforms. Sure, the GFP guys take pains to say they’re just fans—it’s right there in the name of the show—but their contribution to the discourse around Grizzly football is significant.
The pod gives voice to the very real hopes, dreams, fears and frustrations of a fanbase that’s been waiting for a winner for what feels like a long time. The three hosts have the genuine, honest discussions you’ll hear at the Mo Club or Red’s Bar, but that rarely make it into the newspaper or on TV.
“We don’t like to present ourselves as media,” Alford said. “I think these are just conversations that are happening among isolated groups of Griz fans. Like, ‘Is Bobby really working out?’ or any of the other frank things we talk about.”
Schmidt also joined the post-NAU podcast to give his own hilarious, if occasionally bleak, opinions.
At the time, he didn’t forecast much success for Montana moving forward this year. He was not alone in that, but near the end of his appearance he offered to come back on the show and sit in a “shit-talk dunk tank” (yes, the GFP occasionally carries an explicit rating) if it turned out he was wrong.
“I would love it,” Schmidt said. “It’ll be like the public square. Best insult wins a prize. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I’ve been wrong before.”
The GFP is part of a loosely affiliated network of fan-made podcasts that serve several Big Sky teams, including Montana’s traditional rivals Idaho and Montana State. There is also at least one other unaffiliated fan podcast that focuses on UM, but the GFP remains the highest profile of them all.
During its six-year run, it’s become popular enough to feature a cast of semi-regular guests: ex-players like Schmidt and wide receiver Sammy Akem, as well as local sportswriters like Sample and Colter Nuanez. Griz play-by-play announcer Riley Corcoran has appeared and during the height of the pandemic, the GFP even got an uncharacteristically light-hearted interview with Hauck.
“That’s a thing that’s been kind of fun as we’ve gotten more established is that these people like Andrew like to come on,” Nugent said. “Some of these people like to come on because I think they see it, too—that there is this sort of missing conversation.”
Then there is James, Nugent’s 10-year-old son, who is perhaps the GFP’s most popular regular contributor. James appears for 10 to 15 minutes at the beginning of episodes to critique that week’s game, make picks for upcoming Big Sky matchups and answer general questions about his life as a fifth grader.
“People often point out that his picks are better than ours,” Wahlberg said.
“He’s at times more rational,” Alford said.
Schmidt told me he sees the pod’s success as a smaller version of national personalities like Bill Simmons, Dan Le Batard and Pat McAfee, who break the barrier between fans and media.
“I think people today don’t want to listen to some blowhard who’s talking about sports and probably doesn’t know any more about it than they do,” Schmidt said. “They want to talk about sports with their friends. I think the Griz Fan Podcast taps into that.”
Despite its modest success, the podcast still doesn’t make a dime for its hosts. This year, Wahlberg said, all the Big Sky fan podcasts had the opportunity to take on a corporate sponsor that might have turned the GFP into a profitable venture. The guys turned it down.
“It would have made us more media-ish,” Wahlberg told me, “and I think we like the space that we’re in.”
“We do it because it’s fun,” added Nugent. “It’s one of the few things in my life where we just get to sit down and BS. … It feels like if we tried to turn it into something else, we might ruin it.”
This has been a tumultuous year to host the Griz Fan Podcast.
The week we met up for beers wasn’t quite the worst of the season, but it was close.
The hangover from the NAU loss persisted, even though the Griz rebounded to beat Idaho State 28-20 the next week on homecoming. It was a decent win, but the slim margin of victory wasn’t nearly enough to ease the troubled hearts of Griz Nation.
Especially not with a road game at No. 20 UC Davis up next.
I asked them if the Griz having a down year made it more difficult to host the podcast. Opinions were split.
“It’s not as fun, I don’t think, because we’re bad,” Alford said. “After the NAU loss I was like, God, I’m going to have to go talk about how this team we love is crappy—and the darkness ahead.”
But then something unexpected happened.
Against ISU, Montana settled on senior Clifton McDowell at QB. McDowell’s ascension established that offensive identity the guys had agonized over, and the Griz reeled off four straight Big Sky wins. That included beating UC Davis 31-23 on Oct. 7 and shocking No. 3 Idaho 23-21 the next week in front of almost a quarter million viewers on ESPN2. It was the first time the Griz had scored back-to-back road wins over ranked opponents since 2000.
After flattening Northern Colorado 40-0 on Saturday, they find themselves in a three-way tie atop the conference, No. 3 in the national polls and enjoying a surprising surge of momentum.
The final few weeks of the season—with top-10 matchups on tap against Sac State and Montana State—suddenly don’t look quite as daunting. All Montana has to do is notch one more win (perhaps over middle-of-the-pack Portland State on Nov. 7) and they’ll be a shoo-in to make the FCS playoffs.
The mood of the GFP turned from distraught after NAU to cautiously optimistic after Davis to jubilant after Idaho.
Nobody is comfortable yet. There are lingering issues with this team—whether the offense can score enough points, whether the 3-3-5 defense will stand up to the best teams in the conference.
But it’s possible Schmidt’s dire proclamation about the rest of the season after NAU might be wrong after all.
I asked him if he was getting worried about that, if he was concerned he might have to go back on the pod and sit in that shit-talk dunk tank.
“We’re getting close, aren’t we?” he said. “Maybe I have to go back to Missoula. Maybe we do an actual dunk tank and live stream it. I would gladly do that—I would gladly do that in the middle of winter if it meant we win the rest of our games and beat Bozeman. Sign me up.”
