After taking leap in year one, Jason Eck and Idaho are ‘ready for more challenges’

When he was hired to revive a University of Idaho football program that had not enjoyed a winning season in five years, Jason Eck predicted the Vandals were a sleeping giant. Once stirred to consciousness, he insisted, they could reclaim their winning ways as a Football Championship Subdivision power that saw them win or share six Big Sky Conference championships between 1982-92 and go to the FCS playoffs 11 times between 1982-95.

It turns out Eck may be right. One season is not a trend, but If the giant is still rubbing sleep from its eyes, it definitely yawned and stretched in 2022. For the first year, many Idaho fans probably would have been satisfied with a 5-6 record featuring a lot of close losses. Instead, the Vandals powered their way to a 7-5 season, 6-2 in the Big Sky, good for fourth place, and they made the first round of the playoffs, narrowly losing at Southeastern Louisiana University, 45-42. Redshirt freshman quarterback Gevani McCoy also won the Jerry Rice Award honoring the most outstanding FCS freshman after throwing for 2,791 yards and 27 touchdowns. “I was so happy with how he improved from last spring until now, and he continues to get better,” Eck said.

Now, “we’re ready for more challenges,” Eck said. “We were a playoff team this year. We’ve got to take the next step.”

The new goal is to secure one of eight first-round playoff byes. Every team with a bye this year also won in the second round, Eck pointed out.

With 39 players signed on Wednesday, Idaho hopes to build more depth on the offensive line and throughout the defense. Three of 10 offensive linemen who went to the playoff game were true freshmen, Eck said. Idaho also struggled to contain powerful running teams like Sacramento State and University of California Davis, both losses for the Vandals.

“Running the ball and stopping the run, that’s where we’ve got to keep getting better,” said Eck.

Not all of this involves bringing in new players. Some things can be addressed in offseason conditioning, according to Eck.

“From the beginning of the season to the end, I thought our passing game continued to get better,” he said. McCoy threw to the Big Sky’s first-team all-conference receivers Hayden Hatten and Jermaine Jackson, and Hatten was named All-America, with 83 receptions for 1,209 yards and a school-record 16 receiving touchdowns. “But I think our defense performed better early in the year,” said Eck.

While receivers were able to hold on to preseason weight, defensive backs tended to lose weight as the season wore on, said Eck. This will be the first offseason the Vandals work with new strength coach Caleb Heim, and a conditioning goal is to get defensive players to be as resistant to the grind of a season as the players on offense were.

No FCS team went through what Idaho did near the close of the season, when four UI students were murdered in an off-campus residence – a crime that remains unsolved.

“That was definitely an emotional time,” says Eck. “It definitely affected us the week of preparation for the Idaho State game (won by the Vandals 38-7), and probably even for the next week for the playoff game.” As the year concluded, “I wish there had been more closure and there was a suspect in custody,” he said.

The enduring memories of 2022 for Vandals players and their fans are overwhelmingly upbeat. From the opening game when Idaho was throwing for a game-tying touchdown in the final minute of a 24-17 loss to Washington State, the Vandals signaled they were going to be a different kind of team than they had been.

“We went 3-1 on the road in conference,” said Eck. Idaho had been 2-13 in BSC road games since returning to the league in 2018. One of those road wins was against traditional rival Montana, ranked third in the nation when the Vandals beat the Grizzlies, 30-23. The win allowed Idaho to pry the Little Brown Stein from its longtime home in Missoula and return the traveling trophy to Moscow for the first time since 1999.

Hardly any of that was predicted when Eck first got together with his Vandals last spring. The roots of a surprisingly successful season trace back to then. Eck points to “the buy-in of our team, getting our kids to embrace what we wanted in terms of toughness and resiliency.

“We really focused on relationships, player-to-coach, player-to-player, coach-to-coach, so everybody knew what we were going to expect. I do think the team was able to establish that we were in this together.”

It gave a sleeping giant a powerful nudge.