Presented by ZAMZOWS.
This Day In Sports…October 24, 2020, five years ago today:
For obvious reasons, it’s the latest opener in Boise State football history. The COVID-delayed 2020 season kicked off in empty Albertsons Stadium, save for almost 700 cardboard cutouts, with a 42-13 rout of Utah State. It was the strangest of games on the Blue, which was as neutral as it could be for a Broncos game. The running gag was that there would be no false starts amid the peace and quiet, but each team was called for one.
For Boise State, quarterback Hank Bachmeier rebounded from a nightmarish 2019 Las Vegas Bowl by throwing for 268 yards and three touchdowns, two of them to Khalil Shakir. Bachmeier went without an interception and completed 71 percent of his passes, including the first seven of the night. He did take some hits, but they weren’t egregious ones like he absorbed as a freshman. And, by jove, Bachmeier did slide a couple of times while scrambling. His favorite target, of course: Shakir, who had seven catches for a career-high 123 yards and two TDs.
The Boise State defense held Utah State to 45 first half yards and 203 for the night—pretty impressive in the first game of the post-Jordan Love era. For the Aggies, current Pittsburgh Steeler Jaylen Warren rushed for 89 yards and both of USU’s touchdowns before transferring to Oklahoma State the following year and rushing for 1,216 yards and 25 touchdowns. The Broncos’ win was the 17th in their last 18 games versus USU. It’s now 21 out of the past 22 going into next month’s game in Logan on Black Friday.
As the dog days of August stretched into September in 2020, we had wondered if this game would even happen. And why couldn’t Boise State figure out a way to safely spread out a few hundred parents of players and coaches in a 36,387-seat facility? Especially when Central District Health had given Spectra Productions the go-ahead for its fall shows at Expo Idaho. But the Broncos just wanted to get this game in without a hitch and play it from there, because there was no guarantee there’d be eight of them by mid-December. And as it turned out, there were only seven, with Boise State finishing 5-2.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
