By CHRIS WALTERSKIRCHEN
With the Big Sky preseason football polls released, the Montana Grizzlies will be able to settle the Conference fate on the field as they will face each of the other school voted in the top 7 in the poll. It will require some road work for the Griz if the projected are true. The Griz will need to take care of 4 of the other 6 on the road with only Eastern Washington and Cal Poly slated to play at Washington Grizzly stadium. The Griz this season will have rematches with 5 of the six schools they lost to last season, with only Southern not back from a year ago.
While the Missoula Ospreys have struggled on the offensive side of the game early this season their pitching has shown through. Missoula has 3 of the top 10 ranked pitchers in ERA, Blayne Weller, Felipe Perez and Carlos Hernandez. Weller and Perez are 1-2 in the Pioneer league in innings.
Apparently Madison Square Garden in New York is booked for Friday November 8th so Garden regular, the St. John’s Red Storm, must open their men’s basketball season outside NYC. The Red storm will open the 2013-14 seasons facing the Wisconsin Badgers in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
On the PGA golf tour the John Deere Classic is not a big attraction coming the week before the British Open, but this weekend the tournament had a couple of different side stories. First the winner was 19 year old Jordan Speith who is the fourth youngest winner in PGA history (if you are wondering Tiger Woods was a month short of his 21st birthday when he claimed his first tour title.) One of the men Speith defeated in the play-off after 72 holes was David Hearn who played his college at the University of Wyoming. Hearn’s performance at the John Deere is believed to be the best finish ever by a former Wyoming Cowboy golfer.
When the folks at ESPN were looking for just the right location for their Halloween night game for Thursday October 31, they chose Pullman Washington home of the WSU Cougars (a team that over the last decade has been accused of masquerading as a Division1 football team). Halloween will have the Arizona State Sun Devils in Pullman. The last time the Sun devils came to Pullman was November of 2011 and the home standing Cougars upset Arizona State in a snow storm ( it was a tough night for WSU athletic Director Bill Moos, whose son Bo was a defensive lineman for ASU). The last time WSU played a Halloween game was 2009 in San Antonio where they lost to Notre Dame in what was Charlie Weiss’ last win with the Irish.
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Chris Walterskirchen has been an observer of Montana sports for nearly half a century. A Kalispell native, Chris has worked in various capacities for professional and college sports organization of at various times: ranging from announcing and statistical work to the concessions and even a stint as a costumed mascot.
Chris has academic degrees in communications and elementary education. His style of sports trivia involves more than just who won and who lost, but also focuses on the obscure or human side of sports. In this blog you will learn things like the Grizzly football team has won 210 games over the 19 seasons since they have had Monte as their mascot or that UNLV is the only school that both the Griz and Lady Griz have both faced in the NCAA basketball tournament
When not following sports Chris enjoys taking care of animals of all kinds (a peacock rescue?) and reading to pre-schoolers.