Cledus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 19, 2026 9:25 am
Any chance you could copy/paste the text so that those of us without a subscription can read it?
Have fun !
After 41 years, the Bobcats did it — the Natty. And believe it or not, there were plenty of UM folks (well, some) rooting for MSU — pulling for the entire state of Montana — because a rising tide lifts all boats.
Yet what stood out wasn’t the prideful jubilation or the euphoria of a long-overdue title, but the crowd chanting “Eat Sh** Grizzlies” to the tune of a dive-bar staple during the postgame celebration on national TV.
Bobcat fans: it’s time to retire “Mony Mony.”
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On perhaps the greatest night in Bobcat football history, glory took a backseat to MSU fans’ habit of chanting bathroom graffiti during a decades-old party track aimed at an in-state adversary that wasn’t even on the field. I’m hesitant to use that cliché of someone living “rent-free” in your head, but Montana State — the Grizzlies haven’t just moved in; they’ve demolished a wing and are drawing up plans for a ballroom.
The optics were disastrous. ESPN’s coverage, paired with endless social media loops of Cat fans on airplanes and in Nashville bars crowing along to this unofficial Bobcat anthem, stripped the narrative of its greatness. What should have been a testament to Bobcat excellence devolved into a scatological fixation on a rival school — a vulgar choice that shrunk the magnitude of the win to the size of a grudge.
I get it. When you spend a fair amount of your program’s history in the shadow of the other guys, that bitterness doesn’t just evaporate overnight. It’s a reflex born from years of frustration. But the shadow is gone now. Has been for a while. You’re standing in the sun, and the view is better when you aren’t looking over your shoulder.
And here’s the thing: Playing Billy Idol’s campy yet undeniably catchy cover of “Mony Mony” — with those infamous shout-back gaps so notorious for teenage riffing that it was banned at plenty a Reagan-era homecoming dance — once prompted a response at Bobcat games so unimaginably wholesome as, “Hey, hey, whattaya say? Go Cats, go!” A slightly corny, but rollicking, harmless call-out.
Bear with me as we go back a bit, before the Cardiac Cats won the national championship on Jan. 5 on the back of a redhead named Taco and because Illinois State’s kicking game had the reliability of an on-time Allegiant Air departure.
Let’s go back to the ‘90s, when Bobcat football coach Cliff Hysell roamed the sidelines in a duster and round-toed Justin boots like a reluctant Deadwood lawman. Back when Mick Durham coached Bobcat basketball in a suit and Oxfords, not in the quarter zips and sneakers of today’s hoop coaches, who look more likely to be hawking timeshares in Telluride than selling team culture to recruits.
We’re not looking back just for a misty-eyed detour to memory lane, but an overdue appraisal of honest heat devolving into corrosive vitriol, swapping a hard tackle for a cheap shot. I’d never call this rivalry a tea party, but it used to at least abide by a communal standard that understood certain things were beneath the dignity of the fight.
Somewhere along the line, Bobcat Nation lost the code. It didn’t begin on Jan. 5, but it certainly crescendoed there — and that should’ve been the night it stopped. Instead, when handed the keys to the kingdom, Cat fans used them to carve obscenities into the neighbor’s car.
In that earlier era, the rivalry could still sting without the vulgarity. It had a spicy bitterness with an aversion to such things as Steve Martin’s scorched-earth tirade from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And sure, vulgarity is woefully everywhere now — from restaurant marquees to hallowed institutions — so it’s no shock that sports would absorb some of it.
But if you rewind a bit, before all that cultural sludge seeped into everything, the Cat-Griz discord had a distinct tenor. It was sharper. Still rowdy, but not radioactive.
And here’s the heart of it: There’s a world of difference between passion and coarseness. Passion is losing your voice to two blocked kicks, a miraculous OT catch, and wild joy spilling over the stadium rails. Coarseness is marking that occasion with an obscene tribute in front of millions.
There was a time when 19th Avenue in Bozeman was a two-lane dirt road and not the line to the Lincoln Tunnel, and The Hinky Dinky, KO’s Club, and Rax were still kicking. Back when the rotating palomino statue on the old Powder Horn sign on Main Street had, to say it genteel, a lot more horsepower in the undercarriage — until someone decided it needed corrective action for decency.
None of this is to say we need a hyper-sanitized rivalry. We’ve already seen that failure with the Powder Horn, where someone thought trimming the horse’s … “stallion-ness” would church it up, but instead the poor fella just spun there, half-gelded for years, drawing even more attention.
Rivalries should have bite and swagger. Throw up a “No Grizzlies” sign on the MSU SUB doors if you want. Take turns covering each other’s Go Cats or Go Griz signs along I-90.
Yet on the biggest night in 41 years, when MSU finally set foot in the promised land, a sizeable slice of the crowd spent that finite, glorious energy shouting into the gutter instead of owning the whole avenue. That’s not the flex you think it is.
We don’t need to hold the doors for each other — just lay off the gas a bit. Jawing has always been part of the deal in this conflict, but it used to hit different.
Case in point: The old heads on both sides may remember well the refrain after a Bobcat loss: “Pooooor Bobcats … Pooooor Bobcats …”
This was a knife twist that lingered on the edge of iffy sportsmanship in a heated battle after a tough loss, but didn’t cross into that boorish realm primarily occupied by Raiders or Eagles fans. But “E.S.G., Go Cats Go?” and “F the Griz?” After you won the whole thing against Illinois State in Nashville? That’s an insecure 3 a.m. social media post tagging your ex-girlfriend’s new man after you got a promotion, and they think of you never.
Full disclosure: I’m from Bozeman but a UM alum. And sure, now you’re thinking, ‘Well, there ya go — classic Griz fan sour grapes.’ To be fair, UM had my major, and for a while, I rooted for the Cats on the low.
Still, after enough crowd-surfing in the student section of arguably the greatest stadium atmosphere in college football, I figured my loyalty ought to follow my tuition money — and my blue and gold started to run.
And though I’ve gone fly fishing with Cliff Hysell and my favorite childhood athletes were Bobcat Hall of Famers Sean Hill and Nico Harrison (long before Nico tanked the Dallas Mavericks), as the saying goes, you don’t hang around the barbershop all day without eventually getting a haircut.
So yeah, I’m a Griz fan with a Bobcat past. I don’t see a conflict of interest, as I still believe in the intellectual health of my hometown university — a belief I put into practice by serving on the MSU Library advisory board.
Still, as a late ’83 baby, I’m also in that blurred lane between Gen X and Millennial, where I shake my head at the TikTok-lobotomized young’uns and roll my eyes at Facebook-rot Boomers, both of which teamed up to sully the Bobcats’ jubilee in Nashville with their lack of celebratory subtlety.
And being a Bozeman Grizzly puts me in a similar middle lane for all things “Brawl”: I see the caricatures on both sides — Griz fans grumbling that Cat Nation is fueled by monied carpetbaggers in MSU hoodies purchased last Sunday, and Cat fans imagining Griz supporters as crunchy liberal-arts meadow sprites with more pronouns than there are gas-station casinos in Butte. (The reality is that for every one of those typecasts, there are plenty of Belgrade Bobcats who spend their Saturdays rebuilding diesel engines, or Griz loggers from Libby who go down mineshafts for fun.)
I’m not calling for a truce; I’m calling for situational awareness. There is a time for the trenches, and there is a time for the throne. When you confuse the two, you end up looking more bitter than triumphant.
When Michael Jordan stood at the podium for his Hall of Fame induction, he spent a bizarre amount of time berating the high school coach who cut him from the varsity team decades earlier. It was an all-time great displaying bottom-shelf pettiness.
Cat fans weren’t far off. You summited a formidable peak after more than a generation of climbing, only to spend your time peering through binoculars at the trailhead, hoping your rival’s truck got towed.
And if you want a historic example of realizing the scoreboard already says everything — look at the U.S. Navy victory at the Battle of Midway. This wasn’t a ball-bounced-our-way win. Midway was a tide-turning, war-altering win.
Afterward, several officers wanted to ‘spike the football’: Mock Japan’s overconfidence, turn it into a big ‘told you so’ for the home front. Admiral Nimitz shut that down. Refused to gloat. He said, basically, “We’re celebrating our courage and our triumph.” When a win is that big, taunting the other guy only diminishes something epic into a failure of decorum born from misplaced priorities.
Sure, both sides have shown poor form. To Bobcat fans, Griz coach Bobby Hauck has long been the patron saint of arrogance — a habitual line-stepper whose dismissive jabs in the past at the Cats and even Bozeman itself have given plenty of ammo for a missive or three. And Griz fans aren’t exactly innocent either — I’ve seen a few FTC hats and know there’s no shortage of online invectives.
But at some point, “they do it, too” becomes a weak whataboutism for a champion. Singing obscenities about your nemesis during a seminal event (not to mention all the unrelated home games) shrinks the achievement, even as the Bobcat program grows. It turns a monumental climax into a sophomoric subplot in what should be your own defining story.
Don’t MSU fans want to stand on their own legs and say, “Our story’s big enough. We don’t need to drag the Grizzlies into every chorus?”
I’m not proclaiming any of this from across enemy lines. Being a “dual-citizen” in a sense gives me a foot in both camps, and I feel I can call this somewhat down the middle — I’d say the same to the UM contingent in a reverse situation. I even remember my dad almost coming to blows with a Griz fan who nearly sent 10-year-old me falling through those barely-up-to-code wooden end zone bleachers the Cats used to have.
But those are local skirmishes. Bellowing it on ESPN on multiple broadcasts is incompatible with how we do things in Montana.
• • •
Nope. Crass taunts at a consequential event aren’t some blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots moment, they’re the equivalent of walking into your own knighting ceremony in a tux and foghorn belching throughout.
Lookit, I’m no pearl-clutcher, but I am a code-switcher. Four-letter words have their place, but this growing vulgarity creep on shirts, bumper stickers, flags, and even championship celebrations has worn thin.
Sure, when you’re 19, having the grungiest apartment in the zip code feels rebellious. But before long, you grow up and realize wallowing in the mess doesn’t make you a rebel — it just makes you kind of a loser. In sports, and really in society, we act like this coarseness is some unavoidable weather pattern, but it’s actually a choice.
One we can unmake.
As a former longtime middle-school teacher, I know when to let the bombs fly and when to close the weapons bay. Our staff lounge at lunch often sounded like an episode of HBO’s Veep, but the second that bell rang and we hit the hallways, it was straight to PBS Kids. Similarly, I’d urge folks to know when it’s appropriate to talk like you’re playing cards at the Pony Bar, and when it isn’t.
But who’s kidding who: This isn’t just a one-night celebratory slip-up. That song — and the odious chant that comes with it — has become as predictable at Bobcat games as a trust-fund kid starting a brewery. And this isn’t just on the student section or season-ticket holders; it’s also on the game-day operations crew and the athletics department, who lean on “Mony Mony” as a crowd-engagement crutch while ignoring the fact that the crowd is engaging in a race to the bottom.
By continuing to pipe that specific song into the stadium speakers, the university isn’t just ‘playing the hits’; they’re effectively handing the microphone to the mob.
At some point, leadership has to decide whether this is the soundtrack of a champion. Bobcat world—is this who you want to be?
Here’s the deal: MSU, move on from “Mony Mony,” or at least resurrect the 1990s Aw-Shucks Version, and I’ll tell my Griz stalwarts to mercifully stop playing the old VHS tapes of “The Streak” — those 16 straight wins that ended before 99% of today’s players on either team were even born. I’ll gladly admonish them to quit leaning on an overall win record built in the ancient past, with half of the victories tallied back when players wore leather helmets and ripped Lucky Strikes on the sidelines.
The reality is the inertia of the rivalry now tilts toward Bozeman, and the Griz can either dwell in the past or use this shift as fuel. And the Cats? They’d better bring that thunder to defend the trophy next year, or they’ll be screaming “Phony, Phony” in Missoula.
Bobcat faithful, it’s time to start acting like a heavyweight and lose the Call of Duty lobby vocabulary — or at least build an above-ground swimming pool for your swear jar. At this rate, the marching band should have a few Gulfstreams to get them to the next championship game.
More importantly, at the victory parade Saturday, when the trucks roll through Bozeman, blue-and-gold fans clamoring as the sirens bounce off Main Street storefronts, Bobcat Nation has a choice to make. You can stand tall and let the world see what a champion looks like, or you can spend the afternoon shouting profanity into the wind at a foe that isn’t even there.
Because if you’re still chanting about the Grizzlies while players hold the trophy, you aren’t building a dynasty — you’re just a headline act that refuses to play anywhere but the dive bar.
Lose the tune. Keep the title. Let the silence from Missoula be the best music you hear all day.
Besides, the Bobcats just brought home a national championship. That should be more than enough music for now.
