NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Montana State players and coaches celebrating with the FCS championship trophy amid a shower of confetti and streamers will be among the lasting images of the Bobcats’ trip to Music City.
But the sea of thousands of blue-and-gold-clad fans filling the stands at FirstBank Stadium and then rushing the field in euphoria is just as tangible.
“MSU and its people, its alumni, are so proud of everything that is MSU,” director of athletics Leon Costello told MTN Sports after the Bobcats’ walk-through practice the Sunday before the championship game. “It’s fun to work at a place where they know that, they appreciate it, they support it in a way that you need to be successful.”
“No goal is too big,” he added. “They want to be the best in everything that we do, and they put their money where their mouth is.”
Since Costello arrived at Montana State in the summer of 2016 — shockingly, as the university's second choice after Kyle Brennan initially accepted the position and then backed out — everything he’s touched has turned to gold. The department has more championships, postseason opportunities, All-America honors and national academic honors during his tenure than any similar span in the program’s history.
He was named the FCS AD of the year in the spring of 2025. Since then, MSU’s flagship football program won its first national title since 1984, capturing yet another Big Sky Conference championship along the way.
“I think the results speak for themselves,” Costello said. “And in a department like ours, that’s not real big, success breeds success. And I think we’ve got very competitive coaches that, when they see another coach in another program having success, they want to partake in that success and they want to be at that level.
“Our programs are all achieving record levels — and historic levels in many cases — and it’s because of the people that are leading the programs.”
Costello hit a home run in hiring Brent Vigen to lead the football program. Vigen has led the Bobcats for five seasons and already owns the program’s all-time record for career playoff wins.
The Cats have won three Big Sky titles under Vigen and played in three national championship games. They’ll almost assuredly be the No. 1-ranked team in all the preseason polls next summer after Monday’s thrilling overtime win over Illinois State. For fans of a certain vintage, Montana State winning a national title and becoming the premier FCS program in the state, let alone the entire country, might have been unfathomable.
“Expectations are one thing, but do you have the support that allows you to meet those expectations? We do,” Vigen said during his pregame media availability, also mentioning Costello, former university president Waded Cruzado and current president Brock Tessman by name. “Our fan support and the way our donors continue to step up is right in line with our expectations.”
Vigen is still the Montana State coach despite drawing significant interest from FBS programs Washington State in 2024 and Oregon State this past December. Keeping Vigen in Bozeman has been among Costello’s biggest victories.
But he also hired Danny Sprinkle and then Matt Logie to coach the men’s basketball team. The duo combined to take the Bobcats to three consecutive NCAA tournaments, the first Big Sky team to accomplish such a feat.
Costello has multiple times extended the contract of women’s basketball coach Tricia Binford. Her team is coming off a historic season in which it won 30 games, becoming the first Big Sky team to do so.
The track and field and cross country teams are experiencing unprecedented success — Big Sky titles, record finishes at the NCAA championships and All-American athletes — under coach Lyle Weese. Weese, too, was hired by Costello.
“I do measure an athletic department’s success based on how all of the sports are doing,” Costello said. “If we have a sport, we want to support it in a way so we can win a championship. And to see all of the sports achieving historic levels, to me, it does bring a little bit of satisfaction, a little bit of justification on some of the things that we are doing.”
Monday’s national title was the result of a lot of work, progress and big thinking. It’s a trademark of Costello’s Montana State tenure.
To that end, Costello and the department recently rolled out another facilities master plan after already, among other things, building the shiny Bobcat Athletic Complex, expanding Bobcat Stadium’s seating and erecting an indoor practice facility that paid immediate dividends for this year’s football team.
“I hope there are no limits, I really do,” Costello said. “One thing we’re talking about right now is, what does the stadium look like moving forward? I think if the last playoff game (the semifinal matchup with rival Montana) tells us anything, we can fit more people into Bobcat Stadium, and so what’s that going to take?
“We’re in the process of planning that ... to go into all the design phases to see what we can afford, to see how big we can go.”
A sea of thousands of blue-and-gold-clad fans at FirstBank Stadium seem to say one thing:
“No goal is too big.”
