Pflugrad rules over Missoula empire with dose of charm

Time to meet the new commissar of the Evil Empire.

“I like that,” laughed Robin Pflugrad. “Evil Empire. I’m going to use that, thanks.”

All yours. And you’re welcome.

If there’s anything that signals a change at the top in the football program at the University of Montana, this may be it. The previous coach might have betrayed an uneasy smile at the “Evil Empire” reference – or he have might just furrowed his brow and issued a frosty stare. It’s not that Bobby Hauck didn’t bring a sense of humor to the job, but he usually unleashed it only as often as his Grizzlies showed an empty backfield with five wide.

But Robin Pflugrad’s game face apparently goes on come game day.

“I remember starting out as a graduate assistant at Portland State,” he said. “I had my Vikings shirt and it was all about the Vikings. I didn’t like anybody else – I didn’t want to talk to anybody else. After about four or five years of that I thought, ‘That’s pretty stupid.’ ”

Not that this is an ideal week for collegiality. If you haven’t heard, the Grizzlies are due in Saturday for a hastened showdown with Eastern Washington, and it might as well be the Super Bowl – or Christmas – in Cheney. The christening of the new Rudolph’s-nose turf would normally be enough, but that the schedule-maker threw Montana into the mix certainly made it more than a party. Let’s just say no Big Sky team gets under Eastern’s communal skin quite like the Griz.

Of course, that’s true at just about every other Big Sky stop, too.

That was not yet the case when Pflugrad did his first shift at UM under Don Read. The Grizzlies won just one Big Sky title during that time, and he left just before Read steered them to the NCAA Division I-AA – you know it as the FCS now – title in 1995. Pflugrad then embarked on a typical assistant’s odyssey to Arizona State, Washington State and finally Oregon before returning to join Hauck’s staff last year, and discovered that things had changed.

“The thing I noticed is that, for whatever reason, people don’t like us,” he said

Yep. The Evil Empire. The Yankees, Microsoft, Wal-Mart – and the Griz.

“That’s been interesting to me,” Pflugrad continued. “Throughout my career, I’d get to know assistants and people from other schools and you’d recruit against them or see them at conventions and they’re good people. Even at Washington State, we had relationships with guys on the Husky staff, and the same between Arizona and Arizona State. You’d fight them like crazy when you played, but there were times you could call them to talk football or even family stuff.

“But I noticed that everybody just … hates us. That’s the kindest word I can use. And it’s just weird to me.”

Well, it’s hard to stay likeable when you win as much as Montana has – not since 1997 has someone other than the Grizzlies won the Big Sky outright. There’s the 25,000-seat stadium, perpetually packed with fans perpetually on hiatus from humility – but given their team’s tradition, what can you expect? And for the last seven years, Hauck presided over the operation with some imperiousness – as in his freeze-out of the student newspaper – though he was also underappreciated as a coach, in no small measure because he didn’t win a national championship.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to achieve the win-loss record Bobby had here, I really don’t,” Pflugrad said, “for a number of reasons. For one, he did just a great job. I also think the league had changed – some good programs left and some of the teams coming in were not as prepared to play as Montana, and Montana was smart enough to take advantage of that.”

Pflugrad is certainly a different animal. He cheerfully admits to having pursued the job three times previously; he received “courtesy” interviews when Read and Mick Dennehy left, and lost out to Hauck in 2002. WSU was prepping for a Rose Bowl and dealing with Mike Price’s defection to Alabama, and Pflugrad – the recruiting coordinator – had 16 recruits on campus the weekend he was supposed to interview.

Now the challenge is even greater. All but the Sky’s bottom third have made program gains, and Pflugrad found UM’s depth so depleted in the spring that he and his staff brought in eight players – five FBS transfers – over the summer. Which will ratchet down the demands not a bit.

“Even my boss says expectations are unreasonable here, so I feel a little better,” Pflugrad said. “But you know that going in. There’s not much wiggle room and no excuses.”

Not in the Big Sky’s Evil Empire.