Montana unveils 2026 football schedule, includes Oregon State trip, spring game

Montana’s 2026 football schedule, released by the athletics department, opens with a Week 0 home game against Southern Utah on Aug. 29, includes a spring game Apr. 10 at Washington-Grizzly Stadium at 6:00 PM, and features a nonconference trip to FBS Oregon State that appears on Montana’s calendar but carries a date discrepancy with Oregon State’s schedule listing.

The Grizzlies’ nonconference stretch in Missoula begins with Drake on Sept. 5 and Utah Tech on Sept. 12, before the road trip to Reser Stadium in Corvallis. Montana, listed at 0-0 for 2026 on the schedule page snapshot, follows the nonconference slate with a Sept. 26 trip to UC Davis. Home games are scheduled at Washington-Grizzly Stadium, which FBSchedules lists with a 25,217 capacity, and the team is identified as the Griz with mascot Monte competing in the Big Sky Conference.

Montana’s Big Sky slate pairs the Griz with Northern Colorado at home on Oct. 3, a game KGRZ flags as Homecoming, followed by a trip to Northern Arizona on Oct. 10 and a home date with Idaho on Oct. 17. KGRZ’s week breakdown shows a bye between Oct. 17 and Oct. 31, with Montana traveling to Eastern Washington on Oct. 31, hosting Portland State on Nov. 7 and Idaho State on Nov. 14, then closing the regular season Nov. 21 on the road at Montana State in the Brawl of the Wild, a rivalry KGRZ calls, "THEE game of the year."

Local context from KGRZ’s Ace Sauerwein underscores the stakes: "There are a few games that jump off the page," he writes, noting the additions of Southern Utah and Utah Tech to the Big Sky and the FBS road trip. Sauerwein references Montana’s recent FBS history, including the 2021 upset at Washington, and asks, "Will the Griz do it again?" Those lines provide local framing for an otherwise conventional 12-game regular season.

The Oregon State matchup is the schedule’s unresolved detail. Montana’s official schedule, KGRZ and FBSchedules list the trip to Oregon State on Sept. 19, while a capture of Oregon State’s 2026 page explicitly places Montana on Sept. 12. Both listings are present in the available material, leaving the date conflict unresolved in public schedules. Oregon State’s site also lists its spring game Apr. 25 at 12:00 PM, a separate scheduling note for Corvallis.

FBSchedules’ future-opponents listing reiterates the 2026 nonconference dates but cautions that future schedules and opponents are tentative and subject to change. With the Apr. 10 spring game on the books and a high-profile FBS visit slated, Montana’s 2026 slate provides early benchmarks: an Aug. 29 opener in Missoula, mid-September nonconference tests, and the season finale Nov. 21 in Bozeman for the Brawl of the Wild.