Tag: Finalist

EVERY SUNDAY DURING the football season, Spencer Danielson logs onto a Zoom call.

Danielson, like many coaches, has crafted a life built around routines. It is the way the 36-year-old Boise State head coach is able to make sense of his job and still find time for himself, his family and important individuals in his life. This call, however, holds a special place in Danielson’s busy week. It has become an essential part of his routine and journey in his first season as the Broncos’ head football coach.

As Danielson enters the virtual meeting room, on the other end, Chris Petersen does the same.

“We Zoom for an hour, no matter what,” Danielson said. “He’s my mentor.”

Life changed quickly for Danielson last year. One minute he was the defensive coordinator, and the next he was being ushered into a room with Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey and named the Broncos’ interim head coach after they fired Andy Avalos.

One of the first people Danielson turned to was Petersen, the former Broncos head coach who went 92-12 from 2006 to 2013 and had two undefeated seasons. Having started his career at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California and joined Boise as a graduate assistant in 2017, Danielson knew he needed help and wanted to get it from the individual responsible for the program’s greatest years.

“I called him and was like, ‘Coach, I want your help. I want to make this something consistent,’” Danielson said. “I knew that when I became a head coach, this is how I want it to be.”

After reenergizing the team and leading it to its fourth Mountain West title last season, Danielson officially got the job, but he knew that the task at hand went beyond a single season. One of the Mountain West’s premier programs had lost some of its luster and failed to secure a major bowl victory since beating Oregon in 2017. Danielson wanted to build something that would last, and Petersen became the ideal sounding board.

“I don’t see my role as solving his problems. My role is helping him think about his problems, maybe even in a different way and asking him questions so he can get to the solutions.” Petersen said. “It works pretty good because he’s so wide open to really everything and getting the best answers for his team and his program.”

The thread between Petersen and Danielson is a reflection of what Dickey and those now leading the program knew it needed: a return to the kind of cohesion Petersen fostered that made Boise State great, with an eye toward what will position it to be even better in the future.

Danielson, who is now 15-2 as head coach, has continued the program’s winning tradition while taking the team beyond where it has been before. This season, the Broncos produced a Heisman Trophy finalist in running back Ashton Jeanty, won the Mountain West for a fifth time and earned a spot in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff. They lost only once — to Oregon, the undefeated No. 1 team in the country — and grabbed an improbable first-round bye in the process.

“We were going to be prepared for that success when it happened,” Dickey said. “Now, there’s a momentum that’s contagious.”

But even though the Cinderella of the late aughts is ready to embrace the underdog role yet again against No. 3 Penn State in the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl tonight, the Broncos don’t want to be satisfied with just having a long-awaited seat at the table.

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THERE IS SOMETHING in the Arizona air that seems to attract Boise blue.

Over the past 17 years, the Fiesta Bowl has become as much a part of the school’s lore as the bright blue field on which its football team practices and plays. It has been the site of some of the program’s greatest moments, a place where legends have been made and trick plays have been embossed in the sport’s history.

Despite hundreds of players and a handful of coaches cycling through Boise over the years, the destination in the desert keeps beckoning the Broncos back for more.

“There’s definitely some good energy there,” said Jared Zabransky, Boise State’s quarterback during its 2006 season.

Even after all these years, it doesn’t take much to unearth the chip on Zabransky’s shoulder. He recalls how the rhetoric surrounding Boise State was that its undefeated season was a farce and a product of a weak schedule.

“No one gave us a shot in that game against Oklahoma,” Zabransky said of the 2007 Fiesta Bowl against the Sooners. “But we knew what we had.”

The Broncos shocked the world, taking down Big 12 champion despite being 7.5-point underdogs. Petersen and then-offensive coordinator Bryan Harsin called three crucial trick plays: a hook-and-ladder touchdown that tied the game in regulation, a direct snap touchdown thrown by a wide receiver in overtime and the famous “Statue of Liberty” play where Zabransky faked a pass and handed the ball to running back Ian Johnson behind his back for the winning 2-point conversion.

“Every year, they start playing clips of that play,” Zabransky said. “If it’s not the most memorable game of all time, it’s definitely in the top three.”

Three years later, Boise State made it back to the Fiesta Bowl and beat No. 3 TCU by a touchdown. Five years later, it returned to the bowl and won again, taking down No. 12 Arizona by 8 points.

As Zabransky watched the final College Football Playoff ranking come out a few weeks ago, he could only smile and accept a familiar fate. It was fitting that the inaugural 12-team playoff would not just include Boise State, but that it would send it, improbably, to yet another Fiesta Bowl as the underdog with a chance to do something the Broncos could not back in the BCS days: play for a national title.

“I never got hung up in the old days about not getting an opportunity. To me, the opportunity was could we get into BCS games,” Petersen said. “But now that the system’s changed a little bit, I think it’s great that they have struck when they’re hot. It’s tremendous.”

Zabransky knows what they did in 2007 helped showcase the foundation the program had built, centered around an identity of relentless work ethic and a quest for perfection that Petersen preached.

“It was a special time,” he said. “And I see some of that in this [year’s] squad. There’s a connection and a complete unity going in the right direction.”

Tonight, Zabransky will walk back into State Farm Stadium, this time as a fan. With Boise State set to wear the same uniform combination of white jerseys, orange pants and blue helmets it has in each Fiesta Bowl appearance, Zabransky will allow his mind to wander into the past, in hopes of trying to will the future to bend in favor of the Broncos again.

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DICKEY KNEW THAT Boise State had plateaued. It was 2021, and he had just taken the job as the Broncos’ athletic director. As he surveyed both what the Broncos had internally and the landscape of the sport beyond Idaho, Dickey knew he had to push the program forward.

The Petersen era was well in the rearview mirror. The game was changing with name, image and likeness. The Broncos’ last Fiesta Bowl win and appearance had been 10 years ago. And the sport’s most storied programs were shape-shifting via conference realignment.

“We set the bar really high with three Fiesta Bowls, and maybe the perception is we hadn’t done enough from the last Fiesta Bowl to present day,” Dickey said. “But Boise State is, in the grand scheme of things, in the infant stages of being a university and being an FBS program. So what I saw was opportunity.”

Dickey quickly identified what he referred to as “low-hanging fruit” and implemented a plan to address the issues. Boise had to pay its coaches and coordinators more, and it had to improve the fan experience, the stadium and the team’s facilities, too. It had to set up an infrastructure for large donations and create a vision that Broncos fans could buy in to, literally and figuratively.

“We were living too much in the past and not enough in the present and future,” Dickey said. “And this is an industry, as soon as you stop, you die a slow death. So we had to mature as a program and grow up really quickly.”

The former Baylor administrator quickly instituted a new mentality among his staff and turned it into the department’s mantra: “What’s next?” It’s also the name of the fundraising initiative Dickey started.

“The job that has been done by Jeremiah has been amazing,” Petersen said. “I think sometimes people don’t understand really how hard that is to do at a place like Boise, to be able to then compete on a national stage.”

For Dickey, this has been a year of reaping. Not only are the Broncos competing in the CFP, but they are set to break ground Saturday on a north end zone renovation. They have added new video boards as well as a ticket sales team that has broken program revenue and attendance records. The capital campaign is ongoing with a $150 million goal for athletics, and in October, Boise State announced it would be moving to the new Pac-12 conference in 2026.

“If I can make a decision that is going to drastically impact my resources and revenues that I can then invest back into the department, to me it was a no-brainer,” Dickey said of the move. “Now, time will tell and ultimately I’ll be judged off that, but I’m always going to bet on myself. I’m always going to bet on our team and I’m going to bet on our community.”

Since the move to the Pac-12 was announced, Dickey has seen the response materialize in sold-out season tickets for basketball and six sold-out football games this season. It helps, of course, that the Broncos are in the playoff, but Dickey is adamant that the results are secondary.

“A lot of the success you’re seeing in the present day started four years ago,” Dickey said. “It all started before we knew what this season would be. So whether the CFP changed or not, we were always looking forward to how to better position ourselves. And sometimes you get lucky.”

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DANIELSON HAD 45 minutes to prepare his speech. He had just been named the Broncos’ interim coach and had to deliver a message to the team. He knew that Avalos’ firing meant players could enter the portal at will. He knew coaches on the staff were thinking about where they’d end up once a new coach was hired.

So, he simply asked for two weeks.

“At that point, everything is telling you to look out for yourself,” Danielson said. “So I told them, I don’t know what’s after these two weeks. I don’t know what my future looks like, your future, but I do know we got a great group of seniors that have been through a lot: COVID, multiple head coaches, tough seasons. We owe it to each other, and we owe it to our team to finish these next two weeks.”

With the football team staring at its first losing season since 1997 (a year after the program moved up to Division I), former players such as Zabransky could tell, even from the outside, that something was wrong.

“I love Andy, but when you get to a place where things just aren’t working and you press and press again, there has to be a change,” Zabransky said.

Dickey took the temperature of the situation and made what he believed was a necessary move, firing Avalos and installing Danielson as interim coach. In retrospect, Dickey’s move now looks like a stroke of genius, but even he admits that he didn’t go into the process expecting to make Danielson the permanent head coach.

But players and coaches bought into Danielson’s message, won their remaining two games and turned what was a slim chance into another conference title. Over the course of those two weeks, Dickey saw how Danielson’s approach had, even in such short order, reinjected Boise with the kind of energy the program had been missing.

“The guy just didn’t have bad days,” Dickey said of Danielson. “I just saw [him] embrace the challenge and show up differently than I had seen a coach show up, and I saw a team respond at a level I had not seen.”

Initially, Petersen delivered a blunt message to Danielson: “You’re not going to get the job.” But Petersen noticed that instead of focusing on securing the position, Danielson turned the focus toward the players. Once he secured the job, Danielson, with Petersen’s help, knew he wanted his approach to be unique. He knew Boise State’s competitive advantage couldn’t be found inside a playbook or a checkbook.

“We’ve got to be different, we’ve got to be efficient and specific,” Danielson said. “Maybe we can’t pay this or that. Let’s capitalize on what we do better than anybody else, which is development, which is taking care of our players. We’re involved in every part of our players’ lives.”

In some ways, it’s hard to view this season as a proof of concept. The Broncos had a once-in-a-lifetime player in Jeanty who had a once-in-a-lifetime season. But Dickey and Danielson are focused on ensuring that Boise is able to not just recruit and develop the next Jeanty, but that it’s able to keep him. Danielson isn’t naive; he wants players who want to be at Boise State, or as Petersen used to call them, “OKGs — our kind of guys.” but he knows the right infrastructure has to be in place, too.

“Jeramiah asks me, ‘What do you need to be one of the best teams in the country consistently and not just a flash in the pan? How do we do this consistently?’” Danielson said. “And that’s funding. There is support here. This is one of the top growing cities in the country. There is money here bringing it in to support our players, not only financially, but in all facets of their life as college football becomes even more professionalized.”

Over the past 12 months, Danielson’s message to his staff has been a consistent one that has bore out in the 12 wins the team has compiled this season.

“We have more than enough to succeed here,” Danielson tells them. “We have enough at Boise State.”

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On Dec. 6, Boise’s blue field was swarmed by a tsunami of fans wearing blue. The chants of “Heisman” for Jeanty filled the stadium. A portion of the goal posts even ended up in the nearby Boise River.

As the clock hit zero and the program won its second straight Mountain West Championship over UNLV, punching its ticket to the College Football Playoff, a smiling Petersen, wearing a Broncos hat, stood on the field and soaked it all in. He doesn’t get to many college football games these days, working as an in-studio analyst for Fox Sports, and he doesn’t remember the last time he was in Boise for a game on “the blue” either.

“In some ways it felt like, boy, that was a long time ago that I was there, but on the other hand, it felt like it was just yesterday,” Petersen said. “Just being in that stadium with those awesome fans … that place is underrated.”

Few know that sentiment better than Dirk Koetter. The current offensive coordinator for the Broncos left Oregon in 1998 to become Boise’s head coach before Petersen. It was the beginning of what would be the program’s golden era, but Koetter remembers how he felt one particular day during that year as he stood inside a room at the local hotel and watched snow blanket the city while handling an off-the-field situation in which one of his players stole books from a bookstore.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘Why did I leave Eugene, Oregon, to come to this?’” Koetter said. “That press box wasn’t there. This theater wasn’t here. That indoor [field] wasn’t there. Boise State was probably averaging about 19,000 fans a game.”

Koetter kept at it. The next season, the Broncos went 9-3, won their conference title and beat Louisville in their bowl game. They went on to win four bowl games in a row and lose no more than three times in a season through the 2004 season under Dan Hawkins (53-11), a year before Petersen became the head coach and took the team to another level. When Petersen left for Washington, his offensive coordinator, Bryan Harsin, ensured the winning continued, going 69-19 over the next seven seasons.

“I’m very proud of where this program has gone and how we’ve been able to keep the chain of coaches and of the culture in this program,” Koetter said. “To be in this playoff, I think it speaks volumes about the administration here, the fans here, the players here and the coaches here.”

Koetter has come full circle by ushering this season’s offense to success. After 42 years of coaching at the college level and in the NFL, this might be Koetter’s last run. At his pre-Fiesta Bowl news conference last week, Koetter acknowledged that it could be his last news conference ever.

“I hope it’s not,” Koetter said. “I hope we keep playing.”

Boise State’s season isn’t over; another Fiesta Bowl where the odds (Penn State is favored by 10.5 points on ESPN BET) are against its favor awaits. And as Koetter and every other coach and player who has worn the Boise blue since the turn of the century knows, it would be foolish to count the Broncos out in the desert.