David Rules: How Boise State Changed College Football

The current state of college football (i.e. chaos, anarchy, fear) is all Boise State’s fault. 

Sorry, BCS conference teams.  Apologies to you, Myles Brand.  Deepest condolences, LSU, USC, and especially, Oklahoma.  But the world you all live in now has no caste system, pecking order, or hierarchy thanks to the heroics of the Broncos.
 
The 2007 college football season was one of the wildest in recent memory.  Starting with Appalachian State’s win over Michigan and not stopping until Pittsburgh was through with West Virginia, no team was safe from an unexpected loss.  National champion LSU had two such encounters: overtime L’s to Kentucky and Arkansas.  Runner-up Ohio State stumbled at home against Illinois. 

Across the country big-name schools felt the bite of underdogs, and the results were telling: College football has changed…for the better.
 
All of this upheaval created palpable excitement every week of the season as fans couldn’t wait to see which Goliath was next to fall.  The Davids were not necessarily small-conference schools, but they might as well have been considering how much respect and opportunity they were given beforehand. 

Sure, Stanford plays in the Pac-10, but not even some Mountain West schools would have been 41-point underdogs.

The results screamed for equality, and the mounting losses of BCS schools only seemed to have increased the inevitable march toward a fairer championship system.  If a team like Hawaii—having defeated everyone who had the guts to play them in the regular season—was not given a chance to play for a national title, in a year when a national champion participant came in with two losses, then it will never happen. 

But with enough wins like App State over Michigan and Louisiana-Monroe over Alabama, things are bound to change.

This seismic shift would not have been possible without the Boise State Broncos.  A little more than a year ago, they changed college football’s landscape for good with an improbable victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.  No one took small conference schools seriously before the game, but afterwards, everyone saw the Boise States of the world differently. 

They were dangerous.  They were plucky.  But most importantly, they were equals.

Several months later, as the 2007 college football season was just underway, the changing atmosphere was evident when the Broncos traveled to play the Washington Huskies.  In years past, Husky fans would have considered the game a warm-up to the Pac-10 schedule, believing BSU to be nothing more than a speed bump on the way to an easy win. 

But last year, winning was far from a sure thing in the minds of many.

The Broncos carried respect and admiration for what they had done and what they were capable of doing, and Washington was wise not to take them lightly.

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