Boise State football regained its crown in the Mountain West in 2017. Can the Broncos go a step further and return to Group of Five supremacy in the upcoming season?
The college football landscape was flipped upside down in 2014 for Boise State. With the shift to the College Football Playoff, the dynamic changed for Boise State in terms of access to major bowl games. No longer did they have to be perfect as they did in the BCS Buster days. More significantly than that, however, was the departure of Chris Petersen to take the head job at Washington.
Petersen took the Broncos from emerging power to arguably the most consistently dominant program of the 21st century. While 2014 had a huge impact on Boise State’s present and future, though, change first erupted with the shift from the WAC to the Mountain West three years earlier. The step up in competition was a blessing and a curse, as it helped to further legitimize the Broncos while at the same time making it harder to get to the top of the mountain.
In that first year of life after the BCS, Boise State earned the Group of Five’s automatic bid into a New Year’s Six bowl as the Mountain West champ. They knocked off Arizona in the Fiesta Bowl, helping validate the hire of Bryan Harsin as Petersen’s replacement. But getting back to that point has been elusive.
Boise State lost out to undefeated UCF last year. They did, however, still manage to snag their first Mountain West title since their most recent Fiesta Bowl appearance. A few key players are no longer in Boise, but for the most part the bulk of the 2017 team returns for the title defense. Let’s look at the offense and defense before evaluating the schedule and seeing if there will be celebrations on the Smurf Turf in December.