How Boise State slipped from its BCS-buster peak — then climbed back to the top

The day Spencer Danielson became Boise State 's interim head coach, Nov. 12, 2023, he called his mentor, legendary Boise State coach Chris Petersen, for advice. He got it in the form of a hard truth.

"Don't think you're getting this job," Petersen told him.

Interim coaches rarely get the full-time job, and thinking about what might happen in December would distract from Danielson's main role of caretaker. The Broncos were 5-5 overall, in danger of their first losing season in 26 years. Players were thinking about transferring, and coaches were trying to find their next jobs. Danielson had to focus on retrieving a proud program from what amounted to its dark ages.

Boise State used to be the crown jewel of the non-power conferences, back when Petersen was winning Fiesta Bowls and developing first-round NFL Draft picks. The program has the second-most wins among Football Bowl Subdivision teams since 2000, behind only Oklahoma , and the highest all-time winning percentage as an FBS program of anyone.

"You will never walk down the street in Boise and have someone ask you how the team's doing," Danielson said. "They're going to tell you how the team's doing and where you should be better."

But the Broncos have gone a decade without a New Year's Six bowl berth . The three-season stretch from 2021 to 2023 was the program's worst in more than two decades. They saw other Group of 5 programs cut them in line for Power 4 conference invitations. They'd fallen behind.

A year later, Danielson's still here, and the Broncos are 8-1, ranked 13th and in the driver's seat for a spot in the 12-team College Football Playoff.

"He went about it the right way," said Petersen, who still regularly talks with Danielson. "That's Spencer. He's connected to those players."

Behind a Heisman Trophy candidate in running back Ashton Jeanty , Boise State is back in the conversation. With Danielson and company winning games, and with athletic director Jeramiah Dickey making aggressive moves in everything from fundraising to conference realignment, Boise State is trying to make sure it doesn't fall behind again.

"Once you do it, you can't stop," Dickey said. "You can never settle. We're not settling."

Boise State knows winning and quite literally only winning. Over its entire 88-year history, the football program has just 11 losing seasons, and five of those came before 1947. That's when Lyle Smith, fresh off spending World War II in the U.S. Navy, took over. As head coach of Boise Junior College, Smith went 156-25-6 over 19 years. That record would've been better if he'd coached more than three games in 1950 before being recalled by the Navy during the Korean War .

"His average season was like 10-1," said Gene Bleymaier, Boise State's athletic director from 1982 to 2011. "It made football important to the community and that winning tradition. Coaches knew you could win here."

Boise State became a four-year university and an NAIA football program in the 1960s and moved up to NCAA Division II in 1970, then Division I-AA in 1978 and Division I-A (FBS) in 1996. The winning continued, with a I-AA national title in 1980, and the standards didn't change. They still haven't.

"It's similar to Alabama and Georgia at their levels," said former head coach and current offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter about the expectations.

Koetter, an Idaho native, took over in 1998. When he left for Arizona State , offensive coordinator Dan Hawkins took over, and every Boise State head coach since was either an internal promotion or a former player and coach.

Petersen took the program to the next level. Much of the world was introduced to Boise State on New Year's Day 2007, the famous upset of Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, with the hook-and-lateral, the Statue of Liberty play for the game-winning two-point conversion and running back Ian Johnson 's marriage proposal to cap it off.

"It was a roller coaster for nine months after that," said Jared Zabransky, the quarterback who delivered that win. "You go from awards shows to the video game (cover), it was fantastic."

Boise State was the little school with the blue turf knocking off the blue-blood Goliath, the classic sports story. To this day, Zabransky says people see his name and ask if that was him. What most forget is that the Broncos led that game 28-10 in the second half before a fumble changed the momentum.

"We could've won that game by three scores, and then no one's really talking about it the way they are today," Zabransky said.

Nevertheless, Boise State went from Cinderella to perennial top-10 team. It beat Georgia and Virginia Tech in high-profile season openers. The Broncos finished in the top 10 three straight years from 2009 to 2011, including another undefeated season and Fiesta Bowl win. They were the BCS busters.

But without a College Football Playoff, they hit a ceiling. Then, eventually, they started to slip.

There wasn't any one reason, and it didn't happen all at once.

After Petersen left for Washington, Bryan Harsin took Boise State to a Fiesta Bowl win in 2014, the first season of the four-team CFP. The Gene Bleymaier Football Center had just opened. They'd come a long way from team meetings in the wrestling room under Koetter, rolling up mats and unable to practice at night. The Broncos were big-time and looked primed to continue atop the Group of 5.

But they didn't.

Harsin kept winning 10 and 11 games a year. But Boise State was now losing two or three, rather than one or none. They weren't always winning the conference. Other schools had begun jumping onto under-the-radar recruits the program offered, especially quarterbacks. If Boise State wanted them, there must be something there.

Fans had gotten a bit spoiled. Maybe the players did, too.

"The expectation outside the building was to win every game by 30 to 50 points, run seven trick plays and make SportsCenter's No. 1 play or it's a failed season," said Mike Sanford, a former player under Koetter and the offensive coordinator on that 2014 team. "That was a real thing."

Some felt the blue-collar edge was missing. Others say staying at that level was impossible to maintain.

"Winning all your games and going to BCS games, that's really hard and it's not going to happen all the time," Petersen said.

Right as Boise State took a slight step back, others jumped into the opening. Houston went 13-1 in 2015 and beat Florida State in the Peach Bowl. UCF went undefeated in 2017 and the 2018 regular season, claiming a national championship. Cincinnati reached the four-team CFP in 2021. When the Big 12 scrambled to backfill in summer 2021 after losing Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC, Houston, UCF and Cincinnati got invitations, along with BYU . Boise State didn't.

It was geography. Or it was academics. Or it was market size. Or it was that Boise State football wasn't what it once was. What was the reason? Had the school not taken enough advantage of the success of the 2000s or 2010s? Was it coasting on its reputation and staying too much within the family? Left behind by realignment again, it couldn't fall further back.

"I don't think it's complacency, but so many things have to go right in any program to win at that level," Zabransky said. "There was a period there where some figuring out needed to be done."

Dickey arrived from Baylor as Boise State's new athletic director in 2021 with an overhaul in mind. This had to be run more like big business. He created a major donations team. He created a new ticket sales team. He reworked the school's multimedia deal with Learfield. It all has quickly paid off.

Boise State athletics broke its fundraising record in 2022. Then again in 2023. Then again in 2024. On Oct. 31, the athletic department received a $25 million estate gift earmarked for football, the largest one-time gift in the history of the school. While attendance has always been good, football recently sold out its remaining games, marking the first time that every home game is a sellout. Men's basketball season tickets are expected to sell out.

"We were an inbound office; we waited for the phone to ring," Dickey said. "When you're winning for so many years, it helps. But over time, good becomes OK becomes average. We've always won, but if you're not intentional in investing back into your product, it's going to take a step back."

Dickey announced an athletics village master plan in 2022. Some of that is still years away, but the football stadium has a $65 million renovation it hopes to begin in 2025. That's all possible through fundraising, vision planning and team-building. Boise State announced last month it plans to opt into the House v. NCAA settlement and share some revenue with athletes, though it won't be at the full amount of around $20 million.

"We set out very specific goals we held ourselves accountable to and we were very public about that," Dickey said. "We had to tell our story."

All of that is necessary to keep competing at the highest level, but athletic directors are ultimately judged on their football coaches. Six days after Dickey was named AD, the school hired former player and assistant Andy Avalos as head coach. Less than three years later, Dickey fired him. Avalos had a 10-4 season in 2022, but his 22-14 record was the lowest winning percentage for a multi-year Boise State coach at the FBS level.

? It's more unpredictable than ever

As soon as Danielson took over, the increased energy in the team was obvious. Boise State won its last two games, beating a nine-win Air Force team, and got into the Mountain West championship game. It won the conference championship, and the longshot Danielson was named full-time head coach the next day. "We made it very clear who we wanted," said Jeanty, who was among several key Broncos receiving offers to enter the transfer portal.

Danielson is 11-2 as head coach. The first loss was last year's bowl, using a third-string quarterback. The other was in September at current No. 1 Oregon on a last-second field goal, a game in which Boise State led with 10 minutes to play. The Broncos have been so impressive that it's possible they could end up with a top-four seed in the CFP if they win out and get some help along the way.

Boise State is back where people expect it to be. That's the now. The future, however, is in the Pac-12.

Or at least a Pac-12. On Sept. 11, Boise State, along with Colorado State , Fresno State and San Diego State , announced they would leave the Mountain West to join Oregon State and Washington State in rebuilding the Pac-12 in 2026. No one's under the impression it's the same century-old Conference of Champions. But they believe there is value in the brand, the Pac-12 Networks production studio and, more than anything else, an opportunity to consolidate the highest-spending Mountain West schools to create a conference that can aim higher and set up its champion to contend for a CFP spot in most years.

"My job is to position us for what the future holds and a lot of the future is based on opinions and projections," Dickey said. "I felt that move would elevate us that much more. It would align with everything I've done since the day I've arrived."

Others around Boise State have mixed feelings about the school's future home. They know it's not the old Pac-12, but anything that can help even a little bit in this new world is worth trying. The future conference is currently at seven football members plus Gonzaga, needing one more football school by 2026 to be an eligible FBS conference. The league is currently working with media consultant Octagon to find a framework for a television deal. After striking out in its attempt to pull schools from the American Athletic Conference with projections of the Pac-12's future media revenue, having tangible numbers could help its next pitch to prospective members. Who those could be is not obvious after the remaining Mountain West locked itself together with a binding agreement through 2032.

No one really knows what the future of college sports will be. But Boise State football has won big for the last 88 years and plans to for the next 88. It's all the Broncos have known. Their 27 consecutive winning seasons are five more than the next closest active team (Wisconsin). It's not the plucky upstart program with the funny-looking turf doing more with less. It's a school taking control of its path from conference realignment to paying players to winning.

Whatever the future, Boise State plans to be there.

"We can't afford to wait and see," Dickey said. "... I don't see us ever going back."

(Photo: Loren Orr / )