Remembering a Play: When Boise State Brought Cinderella to College Football

Boise State University is in the midst of what could be a historic season, and if the 10th ranked Broncos can win the Mountain West Championship tonight against the 20th ranked UNLV Rebels, they will likely clinch a first-round bye in the brand-new expanded College Football Playoff as one of the four highest rated conference champions. While the program has grown to such an impressive point where it is not at all surprising that they could steal a bye from a power five conference, if you were to travel back to the beginning of the 2006 college football season and read those two sentences to people, it would sound less believable than the notion that America was about to elect its first Black president whose middle name is Hussein.

Back then, Boise State was barely a decade old as a Division 1 football program. Sure, they had dominated the Big West and the WAC since 1999, compiling a preposterous 86-11 record, but the idea that they could walk into Glendale and compete with mighty Oklahoma was specious at best. Cinderellas are for March Madness, and even though Boise State entered the season with more returning starters than any other team in all of college football, the mission that Boise had, BCS or bust, still seemed ambitious. Once they made it to the Fiesta Bowl, people took them more seriously, albeit as a fun story that was about to get a reality check against a football program that knew a thing or two about BCS or bust aspirations.

But the oddsmakers in the desert thought Boise had a chance, and they made them just a touchdown underdog going into a game against a team which began the season with national championship hopes. The Broncos jumped on them right away, scoring two touchdowns in two minutes in the first quarter and punching Oklahoma in the mouth. After Marty Tadman took back a 27-yard interception return in the 3rd quarter to make it 28-10 Boise State, panic surely swept across Norman. Sure, a “BCS Buster” had crashed the party once before, as Utah beat the University of Pittsburgh in 2004, but Pittsburgh is not Okla-freakin-homa and this felt like the first time that Cinderella had really sat down at the adults table in college football.

The Sooners and their prodigy running back Adrian Peterson roared back to tie it at 28 with 1:26 left, and this is where remembering a play kicks in. While Boise’s heroics from here on out are what most folks remember from this game of the decade, this all began with Broncos quarterback Jared Zabransky and his wide receiver miscommunicating and throwing a pick-6 to Oklahoma on the very next play after the Sooners came back from 18 down to tie it. The rest of the game is filled with so many wild plays worth remembering, it’s impossible to just pick one. I’ll just embed the entire crazy ending here and let you choose (for my money, the hook and ladder on 4th and 18 is about as perfect as football gets).

This isn’t a football game, this is a made-for-TV Disney movie you watch with your family over the holidays. The plucky little underdogs from the middle of nowhere suffer a crushing collapse against the mighty storied program, only to rescue it at the last moment with a trick play, then win on another trick play where the running back who scored proposed to his cheerleader girlfriend afterwards? Come on, man. I know that we’re probably in a simulation that’s actively messing with us but sometimes I wish it was a little more subtle.

College football peaked here. There have been more dramatic and important plays than Boise’s walkoff, like Auburn’s kick-six against Alabama, but when you start listing all-time great moments in college football, you inevitably wind up with a list full of blue bloods. March Madness is where the Boise State’s of the world are typically able to shine, but not on the gridiron. When Adrian Petersen took the first play of overtime to the house it felt like the college football world trying to course-correct, as the dominant athletes began dominating like they always do in this sport.

But from the failed throwback to the quarterback to the fake screen then screen to the opposite side of the field to the handoff to the wide receiver to the wide receiver throwing a touchdown pass on 4th down to successfully executing a Statue of Liberty play with their undefeated season on the line, Boise State proved in overtime that one way to beat a heavyweight is to bludgeon it with the entire kitchen sink. Football doesn’t get much cooler than Boise State made it on New Year’s Day in 2007, and because of that I will be rooting for them tonight to position themselves to do it all over again in a college football season that has produced the exact kind of chaos they thrive in.