Montana trips have been unkind to Eastern Washington in recent years

Like most of his Eastern Washington teammates, defensive end Tariq May has never played at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula. So, Saturday’s game there will be his first.

But he has fond memories of a different time the Eagles played the Grizzlies: in 2021 in Cheney, when EWU held off Montana’s final drive for a 34-28 victory in a nationally televised game between two nationally ranked teams. On that night, May, then a high school senior, stood on the sidelines of Roos Field on an official recruiting visit.

“That was a perfect night,” May said this week. “That game alone sold me.”

Eastern Washington will not have any of its recruits patrolling the sidelines on Saturday. But it could certainly use a program-selling performance like the one that drew May to Eastern.

Such a performance would also be a reversal of recent history, because it has been a while since Eastern Washington ventured two states to the east and came back with a victory – or even anything close to one.

“This game will be remembered by everybody in that locker room forever and ever,” EWU head coach Aaron Best said during media availability on Tuesday. “So will Bozeman. So will Boise. Some are just more memorable than others.”

The trouble for the Eagles has been that at least recently, those memories have not been fond ones.

Since earning back-to-back road wins over the Montana schools in 2017 (a 48-41 victory over the Grizzlies in Missoula) and in 2018 (a 34-17 victory over the Bobcats in Bozeman), the Eagles have lost five straight games in the state of Montana, and none have been particularly close.

In fact, they have gotten progressively worse.

In 2019, the Eagles went to Missoula, took a 14-3 lead, and then allowed the Grizzlies to score 31 of the final 34 points and secure a 34-17 victory.

Unlike the Eagles, neither Montana program fully participated during the shortened spring 2021 season. But the following fall, two months after that victory May found so thrilling, the Eagles played a second-round playoff game in Missoula and were beaten 57-41, ending Eastern’s most recent winning season with a 10-3 record.

The Eagles returned to Missoula in 2022 and lost an early November game 63-7. About a year later they went to Bozeman and were blitzed by the Bobcats, 57-14. And, after a year hosting (and losing much more closely to) both Montana schools in Cheney in 2024, the Eagles returned to Bozeman earlier this season and were beaten 57-3.

All told, the Eagles lost those five games by a combined score of 268-82, and half of Eastern’s points scored came in the playoff loss of 2021.

“There’s got to be a toughness level. There’s got to be a competitiveness level,” Best said of what Eastern needs to do this weekend. “There’s got to be a swing-first mentality and then, ideally, a swing-last.”

The stakes in Saturday’s game are, from a single-season standpoint, much different for the two teams. Montana, 9-0 overall and 5-0 in the Big Sky, is ranked No. 2 in this week’s FCS Stats Perform Top 25 but is, crucially, a spot lower in Division I Football Championship Committee’s rankings released on Wednesday.

The committee rankings – not the polls – are meant to be predictive of what the playoff seeding would look like should the playoffs begin now. A top-two seed in the playoffs guarantees that a team would host all the way through the national semifinals. Montana State (7-2, 5-0) is ranked second, behind No. 1 North Dakota State (9-0).

The Eagles (4-5, 3-2) are a longshot to make the playoffs, and any hopes of doing so hinge upon them beating the Grizzlies, then the Northern Colorado Bears and finally the Cal Poly Mustangs over the season’s final three weeks. And even in that scenario, there is no guarantee the Eagles would be included in the 24-team field.

During his weekly news conference on Monday, Montana coach Bobby Hauck expressed his respect for the Eagles and the job Best has done in his nine years as EWU’s head coach.

“They’re a team that’s been on a roll. They’ve won three of their last four, four of their last six,” Hauck said. “I know that they think they probably should have won two of their first three. … They view this as a rivalry game, so we have to anticipate that again this week.”

May didn’t travel to Missoula the last time the Eagles played there, in 2022. But he watched it, and he said “it wasn’t a fun game to watch.”

“It felt like it was explosive (play) after explosive (play),” May said. “The vibe when that team came back wasn’t great.”

But, May pointed out, there are not many players still on the team – just seven – who participated in that game.

“It’s a newer team, a younger one,” May said. “We’re going there with something to prove.”

May said the team has been pumping in extra noise at practice to simulate the crowd. And redshirt junior linebacker Myles Mayovsky, another 2022 high school graduate who was on the team but didn’t make the trip to Washington-Grizzly Stadium that season, said he was excited for the energy, for the noise, that is sure to greet the Eagles when the game starts.

“That’ll just be more energy for us to go out there and beat these guys,” Mayovsky said. “We’re all really excited. We believe in ourselves. We believe in our team. We’ve just got to go do it on Saturday.”