Former Flathead football coach Sweeney dies

Jim “Big Red” Sweeney was well-known in college football circles for nearly two decades at the helm of the Fresno State football program.

But Sweeney may be best remembered locally as the man who piloted the Flathead Braves to a pair of state football championships during a five-year reign in the late 1950s.

Sweeney, whose death at age 83 was announced Friday, coached Fresno State’s football team for 19 seasons and retired with a school-record 144 victories.

A native of Butte, Sweeney also coached at Montana State University and Washington State University and spent time as an assistant coach with the NFL’s Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Cardinals.

In Kalispell, Sweeney led Flathead to back-to-back state football titles in 1958 and 1959. 

At the time he left in 1960, his teams had strung together 18 straight wins over his final two seasons.

“He’s very much a motivator, a rah-rah guy,” longtime football and basketball official Bill Redmond told the Inter Lake in 1994. Redmond took over Sweeney’s classes when he left for MSU.

“Jim is the type of individual who would show you how to do something, then get right down on the line with you,” Redmond said. “He didn’t tell you to do anything he couldn’t do himself.”

Sweeney’s first title team at Flathead featured backs Mike Huggins, Ken Christison, Kip Croskrey, Jim Meacham and Terry Mero, while the line featured Dave Peterson, Gordon Schlaabs, Bob Leslie, Dave Counsell, Dave Seyfert, Bob Durado, Dick Vollmer and Cliff Haven.

When Sweeney moved on to coach the MSU Bobcats, many of his Kalispell players — including Haven, Vollmer, Schlaabs, Mero, Christison and Croskrey — followed him to Bozeman.

Christison quarterbacked Sweeney’s Braves to the 1958 championship. They beat Butte 39-0 in the title game.

The next season Huggins and Christison led the Braves to an undefeated season and successful defense of their state title. Huggins went on to a college basketball career at UCLA, where he played on coach John Wooden’s first CAA champion team.

Redmond recalled that Sweeney “had some exceptional kids, some highly intelligent ones, like quarterbacks Huggins and Christison. He knew how to adjust offensively and defensively to what the other teams were doing.”

During his junior year, John Bailey of West Glacier played running back and defensive back for Sweeney at Flathead.

“Sweeney was the ultimate tough guy and exhibited well his background as the son of a Butte miner,” Bailey recalled in an email on Monday.

Bailey also related this story about Sweeney:

“He also would not be intimidated by anyone and when the temperature in Butte was 39 below the day before the state championship game in 1959, he announced that his team would not play in that temperature. The Butte coach Forrest Wilson’s response was, ‘Play or forfeit.’ Sweeney said: ‘Oh, we will play all right if the temperature goes up!’ The next day the temperature warmed to 15 degrees by game time and the rest of the story was Flathead 39 and Butte 0.”

Inter Lake sports editor Dale Burk took note of the departure of Sweeney from Kalispell athletics in March 1960 with a column that called the coach’s resignation “the biggest sports story to hit the city in a long while.”

Burk noted: “Sweeney was more than a coach at Flathead. In his brief span as chief mentor in Brave-land, he compiled a record so impressive and a following so great that it is almost inconceivable for another to so work his way into the hearts of his associates. 

“But above and beyond the prolific won-lost record his teams compiled at Flathead are the by-plays of the sport, this spirit, enthusiasm and pure, inspiring hard work he passed on to his players, and effortless ease with which he succeeded by being a grand fellow on top of masterminding perhaps two of the greatest football teams the state has ever seen.”

After leaving Kalispell for Bozeman, Sweeney coached the MSU Bobcats to three Big Sky Conference titles in his five seasons. 

Quarterback Dennis Erickson and kicker Jan Stenerud were among his standout players at MSU.

In 1968 Sweeney went to Washington State University and coached the Cougars for eight years before he moved on to Fresno State.

Sweeney was hired by Fresno State in 1976. He retired following the 1996 season, and the field at Bulldog Stadium was renamed in his honor.

Sweeney finished with 200 wins in 32 seasons as a head coach.

“Coach Sweeney is an icon in college football who put Fresno State football on the national map,” current Bulldogs coach Tim DeRutyer said. “His larger than life personality and tenacity in which he coached the game are legendary.”

During Sweeney’s time with the Bulldogs, they had 35 players selected in the NFL draft. Trent Dilfer and Henry Ellard were among his most prominent players.

The final words of Dale Burk’s Inter Lake column from 1960 stand as a fitting epitaph for Sweeney: “The Big Red has gone, but the memory of his work and his record will linger on.”