FRISCO, Texas — Rob Ash has always been proud of what the Montana State football program accomplished on his watch.
Ash coached the Bobcats from 2007-2015, and the middle part of that nine-year stretch was especially impressive. In that meaty portion of the curve between the 2010 and 2012 seasons, MSU went 30-8 overall and 21-3 in the Big Sky, and captured three straight conference championships.
"I think our run was pretty spectacular," Ash told MTN Sports during an interview at Toyota Stadium on Thursday, five days before the Bobcats face North Dakota State for the FCS championship. "We did set a standard for consistent success."
In all, Ash's Bobcat teams compiled a 70-38 overall record (a .648 winning percentage), made the FCS playoffs four times and advanced to the quarterfinals twice.
Ash's 70 wins are the most for any coach in Bobcat history.
Ash, who was let go following the 2015 season, now lives in Frisco, Texas, with his wife Margaret, and life seems good for the 73-year-old. His son Scott lives just minutes away, and that allows Ash to spend quality time with his two young grandchildren, Quinn, 4, and Avery, 8 months.
"My wife and I actually went to California for three years. We lived in the Palm Springs area on a golf course, an ideal situation," Ash said. "And then grandchildren came along, and so we needed to be closer to them."
Still, football is integral to Ash, who won 246 games in 36 seasons as a college head coach at MSU, Drake and Juniata in Pennsylvania.
Ash currently holds the title of director of coaching development for Championship Analytics Inc. CAI is a company that provides football coaches with in-game decision-making support via its patented CAI Game Book to help them make crucial choices like when to go for it on fourth down, and other strategic judgments, based on metrics.
Ash said Championship Analytics is currently contracted with more than 130 FBS football programs. Scott Ash is also on the staff, and he served as Montana State's liaison to CAI when the Bobcats became one of the first programs to utilize the service in 2014 and 2015. (Montana State does not currently contract with CAI).
"We provide a book every week that tells the coaches in real time during the game what they should do in every strategy decision — fourth downs, timeouts, two-point conversions," Ash said. "And then at the end of each game we write a report and send it out to all of our teams.
"So we're very busy on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, providing materials and then evaluating the strategy."
After leaving Montana State, Ash spent one season at Arkansas serving under coach Bret Bielema as an offensive analyst for the 2016 season. He joined the CAI staff in 2017.
He now lives in The Colony, just adjacent to Frisco, but the Lone Star State was key to Ash's professional life as a coach long prior.
It was Ash and his staff at MSU — in particular assistant coach Justin Gaines — that opened a recruiting pipeline to Texas that brought quarterbacks DeNarius McGhee and Dakota Prukop, linebacker Jody Owens and many others to the Bobcats.
The Texas players, along with a standout crop of local Montana recruits, helped kick-start the Bobcats' resurgence beginning in 2010 and put the program on a much more consistent track of winning.
"It made a huge difference for us once we opened up that pipeline," Ash said. "There's just good football here. What can happen here is you can find a good FCS player who's really an outstanding player, but there's so many good players in Texas that the bigger schools take all those other players and these guys are left.
"Plus the fact that if you compare FCS in Montana, you're going to have way more people in the stands, way more emphasis, way more publicity and way more support. And so if a guy is choosing an FCS program, they can play in a bigger stadium with more support and more chance to win."
That pipeline to MSU is still open; there are 15 players from Texas listed on MSU's current roster, including defensive backs Andrew Powdrell, Dru Polidore and Simeon Woodard, and kicker/punter Brendan Hall.
Ash said he's happy in his current professional endeavor rather than having to maneuver through an era of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness as a head coach in today's college game.
"I'm glad I'm not coaching right now. It's all core football strategy for me, which is outstanding," he said with a laugh. "I'm not opposed to the players being paid. With all the money that (is) coming in, I think they deserve to be paid. But let's make sure there are some standards and some rules for how it's executed."
Ash said he plans to attend Monday's FCS championship game, where he's likely to reconnect with Montana State fans an alumni. He said he may also attend some events in the next few days leading up to kickoff, perhaps one of the team's practices.
He'll also get a closer look at what he helped cultivate.
"There were some tremendous highlights and consistent success," Ash said. "But I guess really the big piece for me was just being able to get the program to the point where it had the respect of everyone on campus, in the community, in the state as being a high-character, high-quality program."
