Spencer Danielson, Ashton Jeanty Placed Foundation for Boise State To Be Powerhouse

Boise State occupied the college football big stage on Saturday when running back Ashton Jeanty’s contention for the Heisman Trophy put a spotlight on the Broncos.
There’s another bigger moment on the main stage ahead when the Broncos’ Playoff Fiesta Bowl quarterfinal takes place on New Year’s Eve.

Both the opportunity to contend for a national championship and Jeanty competing for the Heisman represent new heights in what has been a meteoric yet steady rise for more than two decades. These milestones are also dramatic departures from just a year ago, when Boise State football reached a critical juncture in its story.

The Broncos ended their 2023 season with a 35-22 loss to UCLA in the LA Bowl, concluding an 8-6 campaign. The six losses were the program’s most in one season since 1997, only the second year after Boise State moved up to Division I-A from Division I-AA.

A down year happens, even for dynasties.
Considering Boise State won 10-plus games 18 times from 1999 to 2022—including five of six non-COVID seasons from 2016 to 2022—the six-loss campaign might seem like an aberration.

However, with a 7-5 record in 2021, the Broncos finished two campaigns in a three-year span with win percentages below .600. The program had not endured such a stretch since its first three seasons of I-A membership.

College football came out of the pandemic and into a landscape wholly different from when it entered.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston on June 21, 2021, allowing athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness (NIL), was just one in a series of transformative changes. The SEC’s announcement one month later of its expansion to include Oklahoma and Texas began a consolidation of power that the Big Ten followed by systematically splintering the Pac-12 starting in 2022.

Boise State defied the odds in becoming a powerhouse over the preceding two decades. In an ecosystem dominated by mega-conferences, NIL collectives, and an essentially open transfer market, how could the Broncos realistically continue to beat those odds?

So far, Spencer Danielson has provided the answer.

The 2023 season ended in disappointment but also foreshadowed the Broncos’ run to the College Football Playoff—and it began at a low point.

Boise State fell to 4-5 after a Nov. 4 loss at Fresno State, facing the very real prospect of its first sub-.500 finish in 26 years. The Broncos routed hapless New Mexico the following week, but then-head coach Andy Avalos’ fate was sealed.

He was fired, and defensive coordinator Danielson was elevated to interim coach. A member of the BSU staff since 2017, Danielson had spent considerable time becoming familiar with the program and the roadmap to success there.

“My No. 1 goal,” Danielson said immediately following last year’s LA Bowl loss, “is to continue to make Boise State a place where players come, they stay, they’re developed, and they play in the NFL.”

That’s a nice sentiment. Actually enacting it is another challenge.

The first step required proof of concept, and keeping Jeanty on the blue turf was the perfect start.

On Dec. 12, two days ahead of the Heisman ceremony, Jeanty received the Doak Walker Award as college football’s best running back. In his address via satellite, surrounded by family, the Texas native said: “This is exactly why I stayed at Boise State, because everything I wanted to accomplish, it would be possible at Boise.”

Jeanty could not have provided a better one-sentence endorsement of Boise State as a continued player in this new era of college football. His place in the first round of many NFL mock drafts likewise stands as a testament to the vision Danielson touted a year ago.

In preparing players like Jeanty for the NFL, structuring the program like the NFL is another step in Danielson’s mission to maintain Boise State’s place among the sport’s elite. In November, the university athletic department announced BroncoPRO, a revenue-sharing entity that includes front-office management comparable to a professional organization.

In just 13 months since Danielson took over, Boise State has evolved from a potentially fading power of a bygone era to a program solidifying its future.