BOZEMAN — Montana State football started its spring football season on Monday, as the team is coming off a trip in January to the national championship game in Frisco, Texas.
The team said goodbye to a large senior class and had a handful of starters transfer out of the program, but fifth-year coach Brent Vigen is looking forward to the younger group of players returning to step into expanded roles this season.
"For me as the head football coach, to see the 2025 team take on its new form for the first day will be really exciting," Vigen said. "Again, that’s both on the coaching side, and it’s not that we have a ton of new players, but I think we have a lot of players that are continuing to change who they are."
"You quickly look around, whether it’s in our team room or the weight room, there’s plenty of faces that were just in here that aren’t, and that’s just the way any transition goes," Vigen said. "I think real eager, and they’ve worked hard. We really talked about accelerating our leadership because that was a pretty significant void that last year’s departing senior group left."
The newest addition to the team in Justin Lamson, a transfer quarterback from FBS Stanford, who originally started his career at Syracuse.
Vigen recruited Lamson out of high school as the offensive coordinator while at Wyoming.
Originally, Lamson landed on Bowling Green this offseason, but because of a coaching change is now headed to Bozeman.
"He went into the portal from Stanford, and he actually took a visit here in December, and our biggest challenge was he had a quarter left at Stanford, a winter quarter, so he wasn’t going to finish up until about this time," Vigen explained of Lamson's decision-making process.
"And that didn’t allow for us an opportunity to bring him in immediately in January. He was able to work that out with Bowling Green, chose Bowling Green, and then they had a coaching change."
Vigen also talked about promoting Shawn Howe from the defensive line and co-defensive coordinator roles to full time defensive coordinator. Nicolas Jean Baptiste is now the defensive line coach. Vigen also elevated Jody Owens to linebackers coach and Bryan Shepard to safeties coach and defensive pass game coordinator.
"I think it just made the most sense with the guys we returned," Vigen said. "If coach Baptiste hadn’t been working in the program for the years he had, I maybe wouldn’t have done it.
"If there wasn’t this opportunity to move Jody to the linebackers room, or even coach Shepard into the safeties room, I don’t know if it would have made much sense. Those four ... I just felt like shuffling it like we did made the most sense."
The Bobcats will conduct 15 spring practices. The annual Sonny Holland Classic spring game is scheduled for April 26.
