Boise State will bring the spotlight back to one of the sport’s most iconic nights when it honors its 2007 Fiesta Bowl team during Saturday’s Pac-12 opener against Utah State.
The Broncos’ current team will celebrate the group that helped turn Boise State into a national name, with kickoff set for 5:30 p.m. against the Aggies, who enter at 1-3 and 0-0. Boise State is 3-1 and 0-0, ranked 22nd.
That 2007 Fiesta Bowl still lives in college football lore for good reason. In Chris Petersen’s first season as head coach, Boise State ran through a 12-0 regular season and claimed its fifth straight WAC title before earning a trip to face Oklahoma. The Broncos became the second team from outside the Bowl Championship Series, now the Group of Six, to reach a BCS bowl game.
What followed was the kind of finish people still remember instantly: Boise State beat Oklahoma 43-42 in overtime on Ian Johnson’s walk-off Statue of Liberty two-point conversion run. The Broncos had already kept themselves alive in regulation with a 50-yard hook-and-ladder on the tying touchdown drive.
That win capped Boise State’s 2006 season - the Fiesta Bowl was played on Jan. 1, 2007 - and left the Broncos as the only undefeated team in Division I.
For head coach Spencer Danielson, the game was personal long before he became the man leading the program. Danielson graduated from high school in 2007, and he said Monday that he was one of the millions who watched Boise State stun Oklahoma.
“And I remember where I was watching the Fiesta Bowl,” Danielson, a San Diego native, said during Monday’s press conference. “Knew nothing about Boise, Idaho, whatsoever. But I think I was one of millions that watched that game and just fell in love with a team that was counted out, chip on their shoulder, undefeated, going against a renowned Oklahoma team, and found a way to win.
“And obviously coach (Petersen) to this day is a huge mentor of mine, we talk once a week. At Boise State-even for me-I stand on the shoulders of elite coaches, players that won when none of this was here. When this was a grass field and the locker room was maybe two showers … and I don’t ever want to take that for granted.”
Boise State has gone back to the Fiesta Bowl three more times since that breakthrough and is 3-1 in the game. The program left the WAC for the Mountain West in 2011, then won seven MWC titles over 15 years before moving into the Pac-12 this summer.
Danielson said honoring that team matters because of everything it meant beyond one game.
“That’s why I think honoring that team that did so much-not only just for this football program, but for this state-(is important),” Danielson said. “When we talk about The Blue being the front porch of Idaho, it started there.
It was obviously started way before that game, but that was the game that the nation, the world, was on the edge of their seat and saw ‘Oh, something’s different about that community.’ And I was one of those.”
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