Petersen not too excited for opener

SEATTLE – Skip Hall had to be honest.

It’s not that he necessarily wanted to see Chris Petersen, his close friend, leave Boise State.

But when Hall, who coached at both Washington and BSU, received a phone call from UW in December of 2013 asking what he thought of Petersen as a candidate to fill the Huskies’ vacant head coaching position, he didn’t need long to respond.

And the Huskies didn’t need long to offer Petersen the job.

“I just thought it was a great fit,” Hall said earlier this week via telephone from his home in Boise. “Well, of course, all the people in Seattle were happy, and all the people here in Boise were scratching their head.

“There was some shock in Boise, but I think everyone kind of expected that one of these times, he was probably going to go.”

So there he went, to Washington, where in his second season as coach he finds himself preparing for a season opener that he describes, likely accurately, as “awkward.”

It will be awkward for Chris Petersen to stand on the opposing sideline Friday night at Albertsons Stadium. Awkward to scout Boise State this week and analyze game film of players he recruited, players he once vowed to guide through their formative years.

Asked this week to describe what that atmosphere might be like, Petersen quipped: “I think when a game is billed as the biggest game in school history, I don’t think you have to do a lot of describing.”

That might be overselling it a bit, given that during Petersen’s tenure as head coach the Broncos twice went undefeated and won two BCS bowl games (and won another last season after he left).

But his point stands: this is a big one. It’s unique, too. Coaches leave for new jobs all the time, but it’s not often that a coach leaves for a different school in a different conference and then winds up facing his old team just two years later. Especially after leading the old team to 92 wins in eight seasons.

And it’s not just weird for Petersen. Eight of UW’s nine assistant coaches worked with him at Boise, and six of them were there during Petersen’s final season.

Plus, Bryan Harsin, Boise State’s second-year head coach, was Petersen’s offensive coordinator at Boise for five years, and five of Harsin’s assistants – Marcel Yates, Andy Avalos, Julius Brown, Scott Huff and Lee Marks – either worked or played for Petersen over the years.

Because of those connections, Pete Kwiatkowski, UW’s defensive coordinator, doesn’t try to conceal this game’s significance. He played at Boise. He coached at Boise. He’s in Boise State’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

So, he said, “it’s not just another game, because a lot of those guys we recruited, and I went there, and I have a lot of friends that went there. … So from that standpoint, it’s not another game for me. But at the end of the day, it is another game, because we’ve got to go out there and we’re going to play our tails off and compete and see what happens.”

Petersen shows little interest in questions about how the Boise crowd might greet him come Friday night, terming the matter “totally irrelevant.”

“I have so many good friends and there’s so many awesome people over there, and I know that,” Petersen said, “and so the others that would be saying (negative things) – there are a lot of things I think about, but that is not one thing I think about.

“And I get it. I mean, hey – they’re always going to be Boise fans. If Bryan Harsin leaves, they’re going to be down on him. So I get that. They were down on Dan Hawkins when he left. That’s just the nature of that position, and that’s how it is.”