College Football's Crossroads Intersect at Boise State

LOS ANGELES — No program through the first two decades of the 21st Century more consistently ran up against but also chipped away at college football’s glass ceiling than Boise State. With the sport amid a period of more major changes in a shorter span than any time since in modern history, the Boise States of the world perhaps face an even stronger barrier between them and the game’s upper echelon.

Following a 35-22 loss to UCLA in the L.A. Bowl, Broncos coach Spencer Danielson — upgraded from interim head coach following Andy Avalos’ firing in November to the permanent position after leading Boise State to the Mountain West Conference championship — unintentionally addressed the uncharted territory for programs like his.

“My number one goal is to continue to make Boise State a place where players come, they stay, they're developed, they play in the NFL,” he said.

Danielson and BSU will be one of the most interesting programs to follow in the coming years, navigating the new landscape, because of all Broncos football did to gain relevance in the previous 20 years.

Boise State was long the greatest Cinderella story college football had to offer; a program that, less than a decade after moving to Div. I-A from the former I-AA, repeatedly threatened the Bowl Championship Series power structure.

Anyone who was even somewhat cognizant of college football at the time knows the 2007 Fiesta Bowl. In many ways, it was a result that proved moments comparable to the aura that’s made March Madness so popular could play out on the gridiron.

The Broncos’ 43-42 defeat of Oklahoma wasn’t the first time a non-BCS conference program beat an automatic qualifier in the old postseason system — it only feels like it. Utah’s blowout of Pitt two years earlier felt more like the BCS throwing the outsiders a bone condescendingly, pairing a Utes team that arguably would have put up much more of a fight in the national championship-determining Orange Bowl than Oklahoma mustered, against what was at that time¹ the worst automatic qualifier in the BCS era.

The 2007 Fiesta Bowl marked the first opportunity for an outsider to prove its mettle against a true powerhouse. In that sense, Boise State proved both its potential and the feasibility of a college football playoff.

Really, though, a case can be made that the Boise State team two years prior was the first Broncos squad to be party to a leading case-study in favor of a playoff.

Boise State upsetting Fresno State in 2001 set the wheels in motion for the 2003 Broncos, a 13-1 team that lost only a 26-24 nail-biter to Oregon State and closed out the regular season ranked No. 16 before a win over a fellow top-20 ranked TCU.

The next year, Boise State ran the table in the regular season with a blowout win scoring revenge over Oregon State, a rout of a Fresno State team that finished ranked No. 22, and a 69-3 pasting of a Hawai’i bunch that went 8-5.

Regular readers of The Press Break know that I’m no fan of the College Football Playoff. However, there was a lot I disliked about the BCS, not the least of which was it begrudgingly invited outsiders and only in its 11th year invited more than one per season.

Because the BCS had room for only one, Utah went to the Fiesta Bowl while both Boise State and Louisville were relegated to the Liberty Bowl.

Now, I write relegated, but the truth is, the matchup of the 11-0 Broncos from the Western Athletic Conference against Conference USA’s 10-1 Cardinals produced one of the best bowl games in my time following the sport.

The 2004 Liberty Bowl serves as one of the arguments in favor of a playoff larger in scale than just the four the College Football Playoff has invited in its existence, so there’s some fitting symmetry in the Playoff going to 12 teams on that campaign’s 20-year anniversary.

To wit, both the Broncos and Cardinals would have qualified for the field using the criteria of automatic bids assigned by conference, then the most highly ranked at-large candidates taken thereafter.

A 12-team 2004 College Football Playoff would have shaped up as follow:

Automatic bids:

• Virginia Tech (ACC)

• Oklahoma (Big 12)

• Pitt (Big East)

• Michigan (Big Ten)

• USC (Pac-10)

• Auburn (SEC)

• Utah (Non-AQ automatic bid)

At-large bids:

• Texas

• Cal

• Georgia

• Boise State

• Louisville

The bracket would have looked as follows, which is enough to excite even a traditionalist like myself.

Talking with a friend at SoFi Stadium before kickoff of the L.A. Bowl, I suggested that if FBS is moving away from bowl games altogether, I prefer a larger scale and more inclusive playoff format than a half-hearted compromise between tradition and demand for a “true” champion.

I also love the FCS Playoffs, in part for its integration of college football’s spirit with on-campus games. A postseason that uses campus contests but weaves in the Rose, Sugar, Cotton and Orange bowls as part of the semifinal and championship is actually appealing, assuming it’s executed with opportunities for programs like Boise State.

And I adamantly believe it wouldn’t be. Expect the 12-team playoff’s inclusion of an automatic qualifier from the Group of Five conferences to be the spiritual successor to Utah getting paired with Pitt in the Fiesta Bowl, or the pat-on-the-head those leagues were given in the four-team Playoff with a single qualifying bid.

A playoff bracket akin to the one above, featuring teams from three non-AQ leagues, will not happen and it’s by design. The changes college football have undergone in the last approximately two years have reinforced the glass ceiling against which Boise State smashed for the last two decades.

Playoff expansion is one in a series of changes the public pushed for with good intentions, but that’s increasingly felt like a Trojan horse for the deepest-pocketed programs to further monopolize the sport.

Specifically, the realignment and growth of the Big Ten and SEC are direct responses to the growth of the playoff. More teams translate to more chances at landing playoff bids, and more bids mean more revenue from the astronomic TV money the Playoff commands.

UCLA coach Chip Kelly being asked about heading into the offseason in preparation for the Bruins first Big Ten season was just one more surreal moment for this longtime Western who still hasn’t come to terms with the Pac-12’s impending collapse.

If an entire conference with more than a century of history, countless contributions to shaping college football’s prominence in the zeitgeist, and an unrivaled presence on a huge swath of the country can just die in the course of two weeks, what in the sport is truly safe?

Reading or hearing comments from power-conference athletic directors and commissioners is increasingly like listening to a monologue from V.M. Varga.

Player-empowerment rules changes in the wake of the pandemic — most notably, the relaxing of rules on transfers and a conspicuously placed transfer window — have a similar feel of being exploited for more nefarious means.

At this summer’s Mountain West media day, talk of power-conference programs tampering with their players was a topic broached repeatedly.

Spencer Danielson didn’t make this assertion following the L.A. Bowl; I personally couldn’t help but think of the tampering buzz this summer when he talked of making Boise State a place players “stay” his top priority.

On the same day Boise State took the field without the quarterback who captained the Broncos to the Mountain West Conference — Taylen Green, announced as a commit to Arkansas last Monday — an Indiana fan account tweeted that newly minted Hoosiers coach Curt Cignetti spoke of “silent verbal commitments” from players currently on other teams.

Athletes having less restrictive options has undeniable positives. I touched on the topic some in this look at UAlbany’s historic season at the FCS level. The Great Danes lost Jared Verse to Florida State, where Verse became an All-American and a likely 1st Round NFL draft pick.

UAlbany coach Greg Gattuso praised Verse’s story as a positive one for the transfer portal. Likewise, the Great Danes restructured their roster with transfers — including at Verse’s old defensive end spot, where former Div. II player AJ Simon had an All-America caliber 2023.

Players have options is a good thing; programs brokering silent commitments behind the scenes isn’t, and especially not if it’s used to reinforce a college football caste system where all but the Big Ten and SEC exist only as farm clubs for the next tier up.

A trickle-up structure can’t last long before the lower-level athletic departments are forced to close altogether.

That’s not to suggest a program the level of Boise State is at risk. Boise State’s place in this ecosystem promises to be a telling exercise in combating the further partitioning of Div. I, considering how consistently the Broncos achieved against odds stacked against them.

But I do fear rot that begins with Div. II — and it’s a noteworthy coincidence that Spencer Danielson came to Boise State by way of Azusa Pacific, a once-successful D-II program relegated to the graveyard of Los Angeles-area college football.

And eventually, that rot will spread to Div. I, costing more athletes opportunities than the number of athletes it helps, while also denying the game a future success story comparable to Boise State’s.

1. The 2004 Big East champs Pitt lost that distinction to UConn in 2010.