'All-American guy'

Bill Oram
GameDay Kaimin

Under the fluorescent lights of the University Center Commons, Kyle Ryan looks just like any other University of Montana student cramming for a midterm exam. He sports a blue zip sweatshirt and a white Notre Dame ball cap backwards. The hat is a nod to his Irish Catholic roots and his love of Fightin’ Irish football – a religion of its own.
Huddled in a corner of the room, little about him stands out.
Ryan is used to blending in. Of the three senior starting linebackers for the top-ranked Griz – Ryan, Loren Utterback and Tyler Joyce – the Billings West High School product is the one who has flown the most under the radar.
His No. 46 holds little prestige compared to the hallowed No. 37 Utterback wears, and he’s not as brash or, frankly, as violent as Joyce.
“Kyle’s kind of quietly put together a great career,” said Griz linebackers coach Ty Gregorak. “In my opinion Kyle’s been unbelievably consistent.”
As a three-year starter, Ryan has accumulated 234 tackles. But just a year removed from tying the team high with 115 stops, he has recorded only 23 to start this season.
“This year I’ve kind of struggled to make the plays I have in years past, but I just have to be patient and it will come,” Ryan said.
One of those plays in which patience paid off came last weekend.
In the third quarter, with Weber State clinging to a 10-9 lead, Ryan stepped in front of a Cameron Higgins pass for his first interception of the season. He stuck out a hand, first tipping the ball and finally corralling it.
The Washington-Grizzly Stadium crowd, restless and anxious for a reason to cheer, exploded.
Gregorak was planted on the sideline near where the play happened.
“His eyes just got huge because there was nothing but green in front of him and it looked like he probably thought he could score and next thing you know he gets whacked from the side,” Gregorak said. “I was just so happy he didn’t fumble the ball.”
The interception led to Montana’s lone touchdown of the game, a one-yard run by Greg Coleman.
“It was a heckuva play,” Gregorak said. “It was a game-changing play. It set up a score and ultimately we ended up winning the game.”
It’s fitting that Ryan has spent his college career at Montana, though it might have been more so had he landed at Notre Dame.
His father was a rugby player for the Irish, and Ryan grew up a Notre Dame fan. His bedroom in Billings was equally plastered in Notre Dame and Montana posters, he said.
His brother Casey played offensive line for the Griz in the late ‘90s, and his brother Pat was a reserve linebacker for Notre Dame from 1999-2002.
Naturally, the youngest Ryan wanted to play for the Irish too.
He saw how hard Pat worked in high school to earn a chance at Notre Dame, so he said he tried to put in that same effort. He attended a camp at Notre Dame his junior year. Future Irish players, including current Cleveland Brown quarterback Brady Quinn, surrounded him there.
But when the recruiting period got into full swing, Notre Dame showed little more than cursory interest in Ryan.
“Kyle thought he was going to be a teammate with those guys, but it just didn’t work out that way,” his father, Bill Ryan, said.
Other schools showed interest – Montana State, of course, Colorado State, Stanford and a handful of Ivy League schools – but Kyle Ryan had essentially already pared his list to two.
“I’m glad it ended up that I’m a Griz,” he said. “I don’t regret that for a second. Growing up, I had thought about it (playing for the Irish), but when my brother played at Notre Dame, I kind of realized that I’d be better off at Montana.”
The Grizzlies offered Ryan the opportunity to play closer to home, and, as he said, to have a greater chance of success.
Ryan made his splash with the Griz as a sophomore in 2005 when Utterback broke his foot at Oregon. Ryan started the rest of the season at middle linebacker.
Ryan would not have likely had the opportunity to start as a sophomore at Notre Dame or another big school.
Pat Ryan said he is happy that his brother ended up with the Griz.
“I loved my experience (at Notre Dame); Kyle’s loving his experience,” he said. “I don’t think he’d give up what he has now. I think he’s in a perfect spot for him.”
Even if Notre Dame had offered him a shot, Kyle Ryan isn’t certain he would have taken it.
“I would have had to think about it,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been the clear choice that it would have been earlier in my life.”
Kyle Ryan was not the prototypical star-to-be. He was “mushy-faced little four-eyed guy,” Bill Ryan said.
However, continuing in the mold of Casey and Pat, Kyle Ryan slowly developed into a force, the biggest of the football-playing brothers, his dad said.
According to Bill Ryan, his son’s offer to join the Griz came the spring of his sophomore year of high school. The season was highlighted by a game against Flathead High School when Ryan recorded an eyebrow-raising tackle against another future Grizzly standout – running back Lex Hilliard.
One Ryan brother never played football, but Kyle Ryan looked up to him as well. Bill Jr., who his father said was actually the best athlete of the group, went to Stanford for his undergraduate degree and is a lawyer in Billings.
“Kyle kind of went down that road academically,” Bill Ryan Sr. said. “And then with Casey and Pat right in front of him, that was a huge motivator (to play football).”
Gregorak said Ryan’s reputation as an “all-American guy” sometimes may earn him some teasing from his teammates.
“My wife loves him,” Gregorak said. “He’s a big, good-looking dude. He is a smart guy, he is a gentleman, he is ‘yes sir, no sir.’ I think he takes some flack for it, too.
“He’s a great student. He’s a student of the game, I bet he does real well in his business school.”
Ryan is an accounting major and has few illusions about playing football beyond college. When his career is over, he plans to take a year off and apply to law school. He’d like to stay at UM.
But before Ryan gets too caught up in his long-term goals, he’s focused on a more imminent one: winning a national championship.
In Ryan’s four seasons, the Griz have been close to winning the title twice. He was a redshirt freshman in 2004 when they were painfully close, losing in the championship game to James Madison 31-21.
“We kind of felt invincible for a while up until that last game,” he said.
The other near-championship run was last season, when, after a season-opening loss to Iowa, the Grizzlies were undefeated until faltering at home against Massachusetts in the national semifinals.
“It definitely left a bad taste in our mouth,” Ryan said. “It just makes us better, makes us work harder in the offseason.”
While he said the No. 1 national ranking means little now, it would mean everything to be on top at the end of the season.
“My whole thing is I want to go out with a national championship,” he said. “That’s the most important thing to me. All the personal accolades are great, but nothing would compare to a national championship.”