Boise State's legacy includes winning coaches and championship moments

Former Boise State coach Chris Petersen still gets asked about the Fiesta Bowl victory over Oklahoma on the first day of 2007.

That game had everything.

Underdog Boise State took a 28-10 lead over one of college football's blue bloods that was followed by a 25-point Sooners run capped by what could have been a back-breaking interception return for a touchdown with 1:02 left. Then the Broncos used three trick plays that remain sensations to not only force overtime but win 43-42.

And then there was the marriage proposal by Boise State running back Ian Johnson — shortly after scoring the winning two-point play — to cheerleader Chrissy Popadics that was accepted on national TV.

That game put Broncos football on the national map for most fans, but looking back 18 years later, Petersen sees it differently.

“Everybody wants to talk about that Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl game, which is great how it all worked out and all those things,” Petersen said. “But we go back to play TCU (three years later) again on the big stage. It's not as flashy a game, but to me, that was an even better win.”

Going back to the Fiesta Bowl and winning, Petersen reasoned, showed the Broncos weren't a splash soon to fade away, that there was something longer lasting and more substantive happening on the famed blue turf.

The winning has continued with few interruptions. No. 8 and third-seeded Boise State is preparing for another trip to the Fiesta Bowl, this time in a playoff quarterfinal against No. 5 and sixth-seeded Penn State on New Year's Eve.

That success has continued through a series of coaches, though with a lot more of a common thread than readily apparent. Dirk Koetter was hired from Oregon, where Petersen was the wide receivers coach. Not only did Koetter bring Petersen with him from Oregon, Petersen introduced him to Dan Hawkins, who also was hired for the staff.

So the transition from Koetter to Hawkins to Petersen ensured at least some level of consistency.

Koetter and Hawkins engineered double-digit victory seasons five times over a six-year span that led to power-conference jobs. Koetter went to Arizona State after three seasons and Hawkins to Colorado after five.

Then when Petersen became the coach after the 2005 season, he led Boise State to double-digit wins his first seven seasons and made bowls all eight years. He resisted the temptation to leave for a power-conference program until Washington lured him away toward the end of the 2013 season.

Then former Boise State quarterback and offensive coordinator Bryan Harsin took over and posted five double-digit victory seasons over his first six years. After going 5-2 during the COVID-shortened 2020 season, he left for Auburn.

“They just needed consistency of leadership,” said Koetter, who is back as Boise State's offensive coordinator. “This program had always won at the junior-college level, the Division II level, the I-AA (now FCS) level.”

But Koetter referred to “an unfortunate chain of events” that made Boise State a reclamation project when he took over in 1998.

Coach Pokey Allen led Boise State to the Division I-AA national championship game in 1994, but was diagnosed with cancer two days later. He died on Dec. 30, 1996, at 53. Allen coached the final two games that season, Boise State's first in Division I-A (now FBS).

Houston Nutt became the coach in 1997, went 4-7 and headed to Arkansas.

Then Koetter took over.

“One coach dies and the other wasn't the right fit for this program,” Koetter said. “Was a really good coach, did a lot of good things, but just wasn't a good fit for here.”

But because of Boise State's success at the lower levels, Koetter said the program was set up for success.

“As Boise State has risen up the conference food chain, they’ve pretty much always been at the top from a player talent standpoint,” Koetter said. “So it was fairly clear if we got things headed in the right direction and did a good job recruiting, we would be able to win within our conference for sure.”

Success didn't take long. He went 6-5 in 1998 and then won 10 games each of the following two seasons.

Hawkins built on that winning and Petersen took it to another level.

But there is one season, really one game, no really one half that still bugs Petersen. He thought his best team was in 2010, one that entered that late-November game at Nevada ranked No. 3 and had a legitimate chance to play for the national championship. The Colin Kaepernick-led Wolf Pack won 34-31.

“I think the best team that I might've been a part of as the head coach was the team that lost one game to Nevada,” Petersen said. "That team, to me, played one poor half of football on offense the entire season. We were winning by a bunch at half (24-7) and we came out and did nothing on offense in the second half and still had a chance to win.

“That team would've done some damage.”

There aren't any what-ifs with this season's Boise State team. The Broncos are in the field of the first 12-team playoff, representing the Group of Five as its highest-ranked conference champion. That got Boise State a bye into the quarterfinals.

Spencer Danielson has restored the championship-level play after taking over as the interim coach late last season during a rare downturn that led to Andy Avalos' dismissal. Danielson received the job full time after leading Boise State to the Mountain West championship.

Now the Broncos are 12-1 with their only defeat to top-ranked and No. 1 seed Oregon on a last-second field goal. Running back Ashton Jeanty also was the runner-up to the Heisman Trophy.

“Boise State has been built on the backs of years and years of success way before I got here,” Danielson said. "So even this season is not because of me. It’s because the group of young men wanted to leave a legacy, be different. We haven’t been to the Fiesta Bowl in a decade. They said in January, ‘We’re going to get that done.’ They went to work.”

As was the case with Danielson, Petersen and Koetter said attracting top talent is the primary reason Boise State has succeeded all these years.

Winning, obviously, is the driving force, and with more entry points to the playoffs, the Broncos could make opportunities to keep returning to the postseason a selling point.

But there's also something about the blue carpet. Petersen said he didn't get what it was about when he arrived as an assistant coach, and there was some talk about replacing it with more conventional green grass.

A poll in the Idaho Statesman was completely against that idea, and Petersen has come to appreciate what that field means to the program.

“It's a cumulative period of time where young kids see big-time games when they're in seventh and eighth and ninth and 10th grade and go, ‘Oh, I know that blue turf. I want to go there,’” Petersen said.

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Mark Anderson, The Associated Press