By Robert Wilson
It has been well publicized that first-year Southern Miss head coach Charles Huff made such an impression his Sun Belt Conference championship team at Marshall that 21 of his players followed him to Southern Miss, at team that won only one game last season.
But Huff wasn’t the only new coach at Southern Miss to make such an impression a player came to Hattiesburg from another part of the country.
Southern Miss linebacker Michael Montgomery transferred from Portland State on the West Coast. It is 2,541 miles from Portland State, located in Portland, Oregon, to Hattiesburg.
“I had a super good relationship with (first-year Southern Miss) Coach (Jason) Semore, our defensive coordinator,” said Montgomery in a preseason question and answer story from Southern Miss. “He recruited me back when he was at Georgia Tech (Semore was at Georgia Tech before joining Huff at Marshall for the past two seasons), and I ended up going somewhere else out of high school (Montgomery is from Seattle, Washington). And when I entered the portal after last season, he was the first person to hit me up. He texted me telling me it’s time, and I came down here the next day and signed.”
“Mike and I have a long relationship for a while now,” Semore said in August in a preseason news conference. “I knew him when I was a linebacker coach at Georgia Tech and he was recruited heavily. He is a kid who used to be in the Atlanta area and then moved to the West Coast and was recruited by teams like USC and Washington. I knew a long time ago what kind of player he was. I’ve kept in touch with him and kept my eye on him. I evaluated him as a high school player. I knew what I was getting. From a talent standpoint more importantly in the transfer portal era who can’t get the intangibles of a young man, but I knew Mike as a man and what he brings to a football team.”
“Everybody respects Mike’s preparation,” Huff said. “So, they feel very confident when he makes a call. They feel very confident when they line up next to him. They watch him practice. They love his practice habits that is starting to become infectious in the linebacker room and on the defense, he’s the one guy that doesn’t talk a lot, but when he says something, people listen, and I think that respect has been earned through his consistent work habits.”
Montgomery played in all 22 games in two seasons for Portland State, a G5 school in the Big Sky Conference. He made 80 tackles, second most on the team, as a sophomore. Montgomery also made the second most tackles as a freshman and was named FCS Freshman All-American.
Coming from the Great Northwest to the Deep South was a big change for Montgomery.
“From the viewpoint of the state as a whole, it’s huge,” Montgomery said. “It’s just different in so many ways. The facility, the practice equipment, the passion the coaches have, everything is just so much better. And Coach Huff runs this program like an NFL team, so it’s huge.
“The move was long. I drove down here from Seattle, so that was a long drive. But the transition here was smooth. For the first couple of days, I stayed over at a teammate’s house, and then eventually I got my own place. Moving in was nice and easy. Everything here has just been super, and everything here is just so professional. It’s kind of hard to mess up here. You’ve got to purposely mess up to mess up. Everything here is planned and mapped out for you. You download Teamworks, and it tells you, be here, be here, be here, and be here. Then it tells you this time, this time, and this time. If you do what you’re supposed to do, do it the right way all the time, it’s super easy.”
Montgomery has enjoyed bonding with his defense.
“Our defense has really merged together as a brotherhood,” Montgomery said. “Even the coaches, beyond the business part, which is football, we’re connected together as people. That’s kind of just making our defense stronger overall, so that’s huge. We all train together. The linebackers work out together. We also eat dinner together and we go to church together, so it’s a huge brotherhood for me in that aspect. I feel like as a linebacker unit, even trickling down to the whole defense and even touching the offensive side of the ball, that we have bonded really well.”
Montgomery loves the discipline under Huff.
“My favorite moment has just been the grind,” Montgomery said. “Literally, thinking to myself, one of our standards on defense is to suffer well, and here out at practice, that’s what you’re doing. You’re suffering. Whether it’s defense, special teams, back to defense, back to 7-on-7, back to team run, back to special teams, back to team run, and then conditioning at the end. It’s just a whole bunch of suffering well, and that’s what you need to do to be great. Just embracing the suffering is the biggest and the best moment, and I can really feel that when I’m out on the practice field. Sometimes it gets the better of me, but that’s why we work.”
Montgomery is a leader on the defense.
“My mentality is to lead, have influence on the defense, and do my job all the time,” Montgomery said. “We need to be executing and communicating well. As a linebacker, you have to communicate, and just knowing the ins and outs of the defense and offense is important. Once you know defense, the only thing left to learn is offense, and once you learn offense, it helps you from a defensive standpoint. It helps you adjust the calls and know what to get into. We double-call a lot of calls. So, if it’s open, we want this, and if it’s closed, we want this. So having that many double calls means our linebackers have to know what they’re looking at in order for the defense to have success.”
Montgomery loves more than football.
“I won state my junior and senior year of high school for wrestling,” Montgomery said. “I wrestled at 220 pounds, but in college, there is no 220-pound weight class, so I would either have to lose weight or gain weight. And I’m not wrestling at 285, so I would have to lose weight. I guess something that maybe surprises people is I like to fish, and I like to play chess. I’m really good at chess — I love chess.”
And Montgomery is really good in football.
The 6-foot-4, 250-pound junior has 96 tackles – second best on the team, 10 behind Hartfield Academy alumnus Chris Jones – and has 2 interceptions, 2 pass breakups and 1 forced fumble this season. He has had four games with 10 or more tackles – `13 each against Appalachian State, Louisiana Tech and Arkansas State and 10 against Texas State. Montgomery ranks No. 2 in Sun Belt behind Jones in tackles per game and is ranked No. 12 in the country in tackles per game.
