George Ferguson Column: Frontier football keeps changing with the times

Here’s a piece of trivia for you. Who was the last Frontier Conference football team to win an NAIA national championship, not named Carroll College? Stumped. The answer is, no one.

Since the Frontier became a conference of the NAIA, only the Fighting Saints have won a national championship, well actually, they’ve won six of them in all.

OK, fine, how about, who was the last team from Montana to win an NAIA championship in football, not named Carroll College? That would be the Montana State Fighting Bobcats. Really? You didn’t know that? Yes, the Bobcats tied for the 1956 NAIA national title, a 0-0 game against St. Joseph's, in what was the inaugural NAIA championship game.

So obviously, a lot has changed in NAIA football, especially in Montana. And it’s about to change again, because I wouldn’t bet against the Southern Oregon Raiders bringing the NAIA national championship back to the Frontier Conference for the first time since 2010. The Raiders play Marian University in the national championship game Dec. 19 in Daytona Beach, Florida, and if they win, it will be the league’s first national championship by a team other than Carroll, and of course, its first outside of Montana.

And that my friends, is the new Frontier Conference. It’s only SOU’s third year in the league and here the Raiders are, on the doorstep of a national championship. That’s quite impressive, and they’ve done it by unseating the Saints. Not only did SOU open the season with a win over Carroll, but the Raiders beat the Saints again in the second round of the NAIA playoffs, in a blinding snowstorm in Helena last month.

But it’s not just SOU’s march to the national championship game that signals a shift in Frontier Conference football. The bigger shift has come from the fact that the league now has three teams that reside in a league that once was made up strictly of Montana schools. In this season alone, SOU tied for the regular season champions, while Eastern Oregon finished third. And then there’s the College of Idaho. The school hadn’t played football for almost four decades, and yet, the brand new Yotes’ program marched into the Frontier and won three games and finished ahead of longtime Frontier members Montana Tech and MSU-Northern.

And the three out-of-state teams aren’t going anywhere, at least from a competitive standpoint. SOU has a large recruiting base in Northern California, and also seems to be a great landing place for transfers from NCAA schools like Oregon and Oregon State. Meanwhile, EOU heavily recruits southern and eastern Washington and has a foot-hold in the Boise area, which is also the recruiting base for the Yotes. Yes, those three schools have a lot of talented high school football players to draw on, and it’s changing the entire landscape of the conference.

Transfers are changing the league as a whole, too, and will continue to do so. On Monday night, Montana Tech, which stumbled to a 1-9 record this season, got an early Christmas gift when Montana State backup quarterback Quinn McQueary announced he was leaving MSU to play at Tech. That’s a huge get for the Orediggers, who have certainly had a QB conundrum since talented head coach Chuck Morrell arrived.

And Tech might not be the only school to get a big QB transfer. Don’t be surprised if Rocky Mountain College lands an NCAA dropdown, too, and with SOU great Austin Dodge about to finally play his last game of what is the greatest statistical career in NAIA quarterback history, the Raiders will need some immediate help at that position, and it might not come in the form of anyone on their current roster. That’s the nature of the best anymore, and just like bigtime drop downs have always helped Montana and Montana State, they are starting to pay big dividends in the Frontier Conference as well.

Yes, there’s no doubt the Frontier is no longer the league where Carroll, Tech, Northern, Rocky and Western just played each other twice a year and never had to leave the state. No, the league is much bigger now, and honestly, it’s better.

But does the new-look Frontier’s future look better? It’s no secret that Carroll is exploring its options as far as making a move to NCAA Division II. And there’s no question that one day, Southern Oregon could do the same. Actually, Rocky is another school that could do the things necessary to make that move one day. And that begs the question, what will the Frontier look like in five years? In 10 years?

I don’t know the answer to that. I just know that right now, the Frontier looks a lot better than it did even when I became the sports editor at the Havre Daily News and that wasn’t all that long ago. It’s certainly different, and one thing I can say is, with the recent expansion, the trend of dropdown players and schools in races to upgrade facilities, in football, this is the land of a new Frontier, and there’s no going back.

So good luck to Southern Oregon next weekend. Do the new Frontier proud and bring a national championship home.