Breaking through
When it comes to stereotypes about Idaho, this one seems too good to be true: The quarterback for Boise State, Jared Zabransky, is the son of a potato farmer. But dig deeper, till the soil more, and discover that 21st-ranked Boise State, a Division I-A program only as of 1996, a veritable Tater Tot compared to the rest of the Top 25, is anything but expected.
If the Broncos (4-0) keep winning — their 15-game streak is the longest in Division I-A — this small-fry team just might become the first non-Bowl Championship Series team to play in one of the four big-money bowls.
“All the stereotypes we live with are hard,” says left tackle Daryn Colledge. “We hear that Idaho is small football and Boise State is just a little mid-major team. We think if you put us in a big conference, we can compete with anyone out there.”
Other Top 25 schools play at places with menacing names such as Death Valley or The Swamp. Boise State plays on a cuddly blue field dubbed Smurf Turf.
Still, no Division I school can match Boise State’s 21-game home winning streak, the longest in the country. Southern Methodist, which just ended a 15-game losing streak with a win against San Jose State, comes to Bronco Stadium on Saturday.
Football is a violent sport full of coaches who scream and demean, but Boise State coach Dan Hawkins, 43, is a scruffy-haired, boyish-looking philosopher who quotes Gandhi and Chogyam Trungpa, a Buddhist author.
“The Zen master,” jokes Colledge, who is from North Pole, Alaska.
“There’s a different vibe here than at a lot of programs,” says Hawkins, who played at Division II California-Davis and coached at his alma mater, then a junior college and an NAIA school before coming to Boise State as an assistant in 1998.
“A lot of kids call me Hawk. I always tell them I’m not your buddy, but I’m also not some deity that hangs out here in my office and you’re my minion. It’s a family situation. We work on mutual respect. I discipline guys and have had to cut some of them loose, but we’re sensitive to them as people and students.”
In a state of 1.3 million people, Boise is one of the most remote cities in the lower 48 states — Salt Lake City, 340 miles away, is the closest metropolis.
But Boise, the state capital, isn’t some snow-covered outpost. With sunny weather just about year-round, a trendy downtown and a stadium near the Boise River, with the Rocky Mountain foothills as a backdrop, the campus rivals college football’s most picturesque spots.
Still, stereotypes persist. According to a recent poll commissioned by the Idaho Economic Development Council, the top three things that come to the minds of out-of-staters when they hear the name “Idaho” are potatoes, white supremacy and “I don’t know.”
So how did this unlikely story happen? How did a school that was a junior college until 1965 become one of the most successful programs in Division I-A? Boise State’s record the past six seasons (59-16) trails only that of Miami (Fla.) and Oklahoma in Division I-A.
How did a program with a football budget ranked 93rd out of 117 schools finish ranked in the top 15 of the USA TODAY-ESPN Coaches’ Poll the last two seasons?
It starts with a tradition of success at every level.
In 1958, Boise went undefeated with a junior college national championship under a blue fedora-wearing coach named Lyle Smith. During his 20-year tenure, the school won 82 percent of its games, including a 37-game winning streak. The official name of the blue turf at the 30,000-seat Bronco Stadium is Lyle Smith Field, and the legend, now 88, is a regular at home games and at booster luncheons on Mondays.
As a member of Division II in the 1970s, Boise State won four Big Sky Conference championships.
In 1980, the Broncos won a Division I-AA national championship by beating Eastern Kentucky and reached the title game again in 1994.
Two days after losing the ‘94 Division I-AA national championship game to Youngstown State, led by current Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, Boise State coach Pokey Allen was diagnosed with cancer. In the program’s first season in Division I-A in 1996, Allen missed the first 10 games while getting treatment. He coached the final two games of the 2-10 season, then died the next month. He was 53.
Boise State athletic director Gene Bleymaier hired a little known I-AA coach from Murray State, Houston Nutt. Not much was expected — Sports Illustrated rated Boise State 112th out of 112 teams in Division I-A football. But Nutt went 5-6, a huge success given the turmoil of the previous year.
Arkansas hired Nutt the following the season. Bleymaier turned to Oregon offensive coordinator and Idaho native Dirk Koetter, who brought his high-scoring offense to Boise. In three seasons, Koetter won two Big West championships and two Humanitarian Bowls at Bronco Stadium. He left for Arizona State in 2001.
Hawkins, Boise State’s assistant head coach since 1998, took over in what was the program’s first year in the Western Athletic Conference, and consistency replaced turnover. Hawkins previously had been the head coach at NAIA Willamette. With Boise State, he has won the WAC the past two years and the Humanitarian and Fort Worth bowls.
With a roster full of western players who were too short or too slow or simply overlooked by Pacific-10 teams, Hawkins has found plenty of success.
“Our coaches have done a phenomenal job of teaching,” says Bleymaier, a tight end at UCLA in the 1970s. “They bring in the type of kids who fit in the program, who don’t need to go to a school with a bigger stadium, a bigger locker room, some place with all the bells and whistles. We don’t pass the ‘getting off the bus’ test. We don’t scare anyone when we get off the bus. But you put us all together on the field and the results are out there.”