I did not attend the University of Idaho.
I’ve never even been to the state of Idaho, but it looks lovely in pictures. I’ve seen the rolling plains, the towering mountains, and curious landmarks of this proud state, like the blue turf at Albertsons Stadium in Boise... or the square, architectural oddity that is the Kibbie Dome in Moscow, ID.
The fact that the drop-down has happened without much fanfare at the national level, or even on a site devoted to covering the Sun Belt, among others, should give you some sense of the level of interest in this little program that couldn’t. We do, though, have a writer regularly covering their beat, during their time in the Sun Belt. You can read his preview of their season finale here.
My connection to Idaho is through my own alma mater, North Texas. As I got to know these teams, and this conference, I instantly picked the Vandals as my runner-up favorite team in the conference, and hoped they would set the world on fire. “Vandals?” I remember thinking. “That is the coolest nickname in football, if my school tanks it, then I hope they go out there and win every game.”
In a perfect world, these schools wouldn’t have anything to do with each other, and would play each other as often as, say, Akron and Fresno State. But through a quirk of availability and the need of the Sun Belt to get back into football, way back in 2001, Idaho found itself a football only member during that inaugural season of Sun Belt football.
They had big ideas, this Vandal athletic department. Boise State wasn’t yet the powerhouse it is today, but they were growing, and the Vandals wanted in on that action. It must’ve been difficult, saying goodbye to their decades-old rivalry with Idaho State, but they were willing to make that sacrifice in their quest for greater glory. Glory that their neighbors Boise State would one day achieve. Glory that the Idaho Vandals, as it turns out, never would.
Where Boise State committed money, time, and effort into their recruiting, in an effort to grow the brand of Boise State and showcase a winning program on the football field, Idaho— by accident, or by design— failed at all of these things. In 1996, their first year at the D-I level, their head coach was Chris Tormey, previously a defensive coordinator at Washington. He coached there for four seasons, and had winning records in three of them, going to a bowl game in 1998, his penultimate year there. He finished second in the conference in 1999, and was hired away by Nevada, where he was terrible. The woes of the Vandals would continue.
Their next head coach is a name you might have heard, but not for a good reason. Prior to the 2000 season, the Vandals hired a hot young offensive coordinator out of Colorado named Tom Cable. And you could say Cable steadily improved, only by the technical definition of the word, winning one game his first year, two games in his second, and three in his third year before being let go. Anyone who noticed this surely banged their head against the wall a few years later, when a proven failure at Idaho was inexplicably hired as head coach of the damn Oakland Raiders. Maybe that could have been avoided if Underdog Dynasty had been around then. I guess we’ll never know. (I doubt Al Davis had even heard of the Vandals, either).
No one really wanted this job, and the university never really made an effort to sell it. Sure, there might be people who worked at the university who can attest to long hours or emails sent, or something, but zero of that work showed up on the field, or court, or arena, so does it really matter? That next year they dug all the way down to USC linebackers coach Nick Holt, who unsurprisingly lasted only two years.
Since that 1998 season, Idaho only went bowling twice more, both times in their home state. The next wasn’t until 2009, again in the Humanitarian Bowl (now the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl), with Rob Akey as their coach, and— still a member of the Sun Belt— in 2016, with Paul Petrino.
Paul Petrino was supposed to be their savior.
Paul Petrino is 3-8 this year, headed into the Vandals last FBS game against Georgia State.
Were Idaho the only game in town, excuses would be an easy sell. They could blame the small population and lack of notable alums, at least not enough alums to get the money together to improve the situation. Unfortunately, there’s those darn Broncos (and, for that matter, the Wyoming Cowboys) showing that yes, it CAN be done, with some competence and basic know-how.
The Vandals were happy to skate by on the bare minimum. Like a lot of schools making the D-I transition, their stadium was woefully unprepared for D-I numbers, their indoor gym, aka the Kibbie Dome, seating 16,000 people. The goalposts were mounted on the walls at the far end of this airplane hangar, immediately behind the end zone. The stands, such as they were, were on the long ends of the field, allowing zero room for expansion. In ensuing years, we’ve seen upstarts like WKU, FIU, North Texas, Texas State and now even Coastal Carolina make commitments to expanding their stadium, to go above and beyond the FBS mandate of a 15,000 attendance average over a two year period.
The Vandals kept that 16,000, and have made no significant changes to this monstrosity in over twenty years.
You know how when you’re a kid, and your parents ask you to take the trash out? Were you, or a sibling, or did you know the kind of kid who would walk just outside the door, and leave it on the stoop? There’s doing the bare minimum, and then there’s doing the bare minimum and being a dick about it.
The Vandals athletic department, inexplicably, has opted for that second option for 22 years straight.
Look. I don’t have the expense reports, I haven’t seen stat sheets or market research, or any of the hundreds of other things that go into running a major university, or an athletic program. But I do know going FBS costs money, a lot of it, and staying FBS costs even more. What in the world was this school getting out of this? Even at the height of the Sun Belt, their closest geographic rival remained New Mexico State, an astounding 1,453 miles away. This year, in their only year in the league together, Coastal Carolina traveled to play in the Kibbie Dome, at 2,736 miles. The distance from Moscow, ID to Honolulu is 2,874.
This was a bad idea. This was a bad idea in the mid-1990s when some dictionary definition of “optimist” pulled the trigger in the athletic office, and it’s a bad idea now. It literally would’ve been easier to stay an independent after this year, and schedule west coast FBS and FCS teams, than stay in the Sun Belt, considering travel costs of not only the football team, but every other sport the school offers. Finally, mercifully, a realist decided to put the school back where it belongs. You don’t get to share Appy State’s bowl money, Idaho. You haven’t done the work.
It was a good run, and better than some other schools have had. FCS Savannah State announced earlier this year that they would return to D-II next year, after 19 seasons of not even making it in FCS. Back in the early 2000’s, Florida A&M tried the same thing, and spent a year as an independent, before returning back to their FCS conference the very next year. Charlotte recently brought their football program back, and decided it was cheaper to keep the same underachieving coach for nine years than try and win any games. It’s a tough business, this whole football thing.
So to make it for 19 years, even with that brief stint in the sinking ship that was the WAC, that’s no small thing. Three bowls in 19 years is a bit more than some other Sun Belt schools can claim (and even some Power Five schools, if we’re honest). But their lack of commitment to winning, their lack of spending one thin dime on anything other than getting to the FBS-required number of scholarships... this was an experiment that was always doomed to fail, unless either (a) some school between Las Cruces and Moscow miraculously decided to make the FBS jump, or (b) the Mountain West took total leave of its senses and invited a school with no history of winning, nor noted attempts to do so. Shockingly, neither of those things ever came to pass.
Idaho was a pesky opponent in the years they shared the Sun Belt with North Texas. The Vandals won every year from 1997 to 2000, as Big West opponents, but once in the Belt, UNT had the upper hand, barely, including a 10-0 victory in 2002. The Vandals haven’t beaten North Texas since 2000, and now it seems the two will never meet again, though the same can probably be said for most of their other Sun Belt conference foes.
Despite some FBS teams still on the roster over the coming years, particularly Missouri next year, and Penn State in 2020, it has come time for the Vandals athletic department to admit they bungled this, and fade back into the comfort and relative obscurity of so many other FCS programs.
The Vandals program will retire with winning records against only four Sun Belt foes, and six FBS programs overall. They’re 16-8 against NMSU after last weeks game, 6-3 against ULM (another football-only member in the early days of the Sun Belt), 5-4 against Texas State, and 1-0 against Georgia State (whom they play on Saturday). Three Sun Belt teams— Appalachian State, Coastal Carolina, and Georgia Southern— they never even beat once. And now never will.
Goodbye, Vandals, it was fun, and as an underdog we rooted for you, but others have done it since, and done it better. You’re not without your share of NFL players over the years, but FCS players still get drafted all the time.
