Chris Petersen has won at least 10 football games in each of his six seasons as a head coach at Boise State. He expects nothing less this year, despite a transition year during which the Broncos must replace nearly all of their star power.

The goal, as always: Win the conference championship, “which we couldn’t get done last year with a really good team,” Petersen said.

“Our kids are very motivated for a lot of different reasons,” he said. “One, that we didn’t get it done last year. Two, that there’s a lot to prove with all the guys who left us. Those kids have a lot of pride. I know they’ll work their tails off and fight hard.”

That effort has been ongoing for months — but it took on renewed urgency Saturday, the first day of fall camp. The opener is Aug. 31 at Michigan State.

Last month in Las Vegas, Petersen sat down for about an hour with print reporters to discuss the challenge he faces this year, the quarterback derby, his kickers and the move to the Big East. Here are highlights from that conversation:

ON REBUILDING A TEAM THAT LOST MOST OF ITS STARTERS

“Competition is what it’s all about. If there’s one theme that possibly runs through our program, that would be the one that I get most excited about. So I hope we have a lot of competition at all groups. … When you have someone breathing on you and challenging you every day, that’s good. That’s healthy, and we like that. That’s one of the reasons that we are excited about this, because I think there are a lot of unknowns, but there a lot of guys that are hungry and ready to go hard.

“… There are so many guys who are going to play. We’re going to need everybody. … Everybody wants to talk about, ‘What’s a name (we) haven’t heard?’ There’s going to be a lot of those guys, and I don’t know who they are. We’ll just wait to see who steps up.”

• Reasons for optimism: “We’ve got some good players. They’re inexperienced. They’re pretty focused. Also, I think that we’ve got some seniors that might not have some notoriety that the old seniors had, but they know (the systems). They’ve been around. They know how it goes. So we’re really counting on those guys to take the next step themselves and bring some of these young guys along.”

• Cause for concern: “We’ve just got a lot of new guys that are unproven. They’re going to work hard and all that, but they’re going to have to go out and do it in the game. That’ll be fun. As long as we go back to the base fundamentals of this program, of giving your best effort and improving and just focusing on those two things, and forget about the rest of it, we’ll be OK.”

ON THE SENIOR CLASS

“What I’m really excited about is to see them take the next step — not to play the same as they did in the past, and they played very well, but to have that excellent senior year where it’s like, ‘They got better.’ And we say this many times, for these guys to get better, that’s something. We know the young guys are going to get better. We need these guys to take the next step. And when that happens, then we’re doing what we need to do.”

ON THE QUARTERBACK RACE

“You want to get it right, and as right as you can. And the guy who deserves the opportunity to go with it. I don’t think about it in terms of time. I think about it in terms of when we know and when it’s right and that’s just kind of been our approach.

“… We’ve been lucky and the kids have produced when we put them in there. But that doesn’t mean we always will be that fortunate. You hope you don’t get yourself in a situation where you’ve got to change guys and all that stuff, so that’s why you don’t want to rush the decision. If you’ve got time, let’s play it out.”

• On the potential for a QB rotation: “I don’t think we’d do that. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that.”

• On whether past QB choices were obvious: “No. I remember even back to (Jared) Zabransky (in 2004). No, we weren’t 100 percent sure. He hadn’t played in games that mattered. Certainly with Kellen (Moore, in 2008), we were like, ‘I don’t know. He looks pretty good in practice.’ So did Bush (Hamdan). It hasn’t really ever been clear cut.”

ON THE KICKER JOB

“We’ll just see how it goes. They’re no different than our left tackle, than our nose guard. We’re expecting those guys to improve. And if they can, then we’re good. We’re headed in the right direction. And they’ve been putting a lot of time in to do that.

“… I’m not really losing — maybe I should be — a lot of sleep over that because I think we’re going to get an accurate gauge of where we feel comfortable and wherever that is we’ll kick field goals from there. And if it’s very close, it’s very close, and we’ll go for it from (beyond) there.”

ON THE MOVE TO THE BIG EAST IN 2013

“I think it’s good. I have total confidence that it’s the best thing for our university to move forward. That’s really as far as I’ve thought about it.

“It’s a really hard decision. That’s why it went down to the wire. … I was good either way.”

• On whether the Broncos are chasing a moving target, with each new conference getting weakened as they arrive: “I haven’t thought about it like that but I can see what you’re saying. There’s just been so much movement, so much chaos, in college football. That’s what makes some of these decisions so hard to know. But I think everything has been thought out a gazillion times and you really can’t predict the future, but you’re just trying to make educated guesses to hey, I think this is what’s going to be best for all of us.”

ON THE NEXT UPGRADE FOR THE BOISE STATE FOOTBALL PROGRAM

“I’ve always liked that, appreciated that about Boise, that we’re always progressing and doing what we need to do. The next thing for us always is we’ve got to take care of business. We have to continue to reload our program. … What’s going to happen now is the budget is going to be a problem. There’s always something. You go into this new conference and now the budget is an issue, so we’re going to have to do some things there to keep up with the people in that conference. I don’t have exact figures in front of me, but I know that conference has a lot more money than where we’ve been.”

Chadd Cripe: 377-6398, Twitter: @IDS_BroncoBeat