100 games in, Bruce Barnum is still chasing the feeling of a good shot
He has the hardest football job in America. And this week he's trying to beat Montana.
HILLSBORO — Bruce Barnum’s 100th game as head coach of Portland State had a familiar feel. The Vikings played hard. They competed. And then they just ran out of gas against an Idaho team with better talent, depth and support.
At Hillsboro Stadium, Portland State’s ‘home’ crowd was matched by fans who made the six-hour drive from Idaho. The Vikings had no band. The Vandals had a guy with a trumpet, which played triumphantly as a Vandal two-point conversion with 1:56 remaining put the ice on No. 9 Idaho’s 39-30 win.
After, as players snagged slices of pizza and staff loaded up the busses for the 15-mile trek back to campus, I found Barnum alone in the coach’s locker room — an 8x8 cell of white concrete with a lone photo of the stadium from 1999 hanging on the wall. Hunched over in a metal chair, Barnum wore all black, his magnetic readers hung open from his ears and he rubbed at the right knee the 60-year-old had replaced earlier in the year.
It hadn’t bothered him much this season because he had bigger concerns. The Vikings have gritted through a schedule that’s featured two top 25 FBS teams and — after this week’s game against Montana — four opponents in the top 10 of the FCS.1
In one of those, a one-point loss to No. 4 UC Davis, the Vikings never trailed until the final play of the game. Against Idaho — a team that gave the Oregon Ducks a run for their $675,000 game check — Barnum lamented a handful of penalties and a muffed punt return that keyed another narrow defeat.
The knee started to stiffen up.
“We’re not getting a lot of penalties but when we get them they’re crucial,” Barnum said, his voice barely rising above a whisper. “I just fucking hate losing.”
Saturday was Portland State’s seventh loss of the season and the 63rd in his 100 games with the Vikings. And I told him I was going to ask him this whether he won or lost on Saturday:
Why, a decade into one of the hardest jobs in America, does he keep doing this?
“Stubborn,” he said.
Then he asked me a question.
“Alger, do you golf?”
I dabble, I said.
“It’s like you hit a bunch of snowmen and then you get a birdie. The struggle is what keeps me coming back,” he said. “Are we the have-nots? Yeah. But winning here is more fun than winning at Oregon and Montana, I guarantee it.”