Boise State players, coaches on edge ahead of UNLV game; defense loses another key piece
Boise State football coach Bryan Harsin said the decision to cancel Saturday’s game against San Jose State came down to player safety.
“This is bigger than football,” Harsin told reporters on Sunday. “We’re going to take care of the guys in this program. At the end of the day, I do think we made the best decision for our student athletes.”
It wasn’t a decision that was made lightly.
San Jose State (4-0, 4-0 Mountain West) is off to its best start to a season since 1939, and the Spartans and Broncos (4-1, 4-0 MW) were two of three teams undefeated in Mountain West play.
They’re now the only teams who haven’t lost a conference game after Nevada (5-1, 5-1) fell to Hawaii on Saturday.
The game was a rare opportunity for both programs to play in front of a national TV audience on Fox and had major Mountain West championship implications, especially in a season that was shortened to eight games because of COVID-19. The conference abandoned its two-division format, and participants in the title game will be decided by conference winning percentage.
Boise State was also one of just three Mountain West teams that hadn’t had a game canceled this fall because of COVID-19, which was a fact that Harsin said he and the team took particular pride in. Nevada and Hawaii are now the only teams in the conference without a cancellation.
“It’s frustrating as hell, but we made the right decision,” Harsin said. “We wanted to play San Jose State. They’re undefeated for a reason. They’re good, and we’re coming off a pretty darn good win at Hawaii against a good team.”
Boise State has experience with games being altered or canceled. In 2018, the Broncos’ game against Boston College in the First Responders Bowl was canceled because of a severe thunderstorm. Last fall, their season opener against Florida State was relocated at the last second because of Hurricane Dorian.
“We’re very sensitive to not playing games around here,” Harsin said. “At the end of the day, we made a decision that was right for our football team and the situation that we’re in.”
The Broncos were expecting to miss fewer players on Saturday than they have in the past two games. The program confirmed Saturday morning that five players were going to miss the game because of positive COVID-19 tests and another four were going to be out because of contact tracing.
Boise State was missing 14 players against Colorado State on Nov. 12 because of testing results and contact tracing, and 12 were out for the same reasons last week at Hawaii.
But Harsin said on Sunday that it isn’t all about the total number of players out. Sometimes it’s about which positions are hit the hardest and how teams have to adjust to compensate for a lack of bodies.
“You can have 60 players,” he said. “It’s just if you don’t have the right ones at the right positions.”
Thin in the trenches
Boise State has been thin on the defensive line for weeks.
The Broncos dressed just five interior defensive linemen against Colorado State, and offensive lineman Ben Dooley had to switch to the other side of the ball.
Versatile defensive lineman Demitri Washington (knee) and reserve defensive tackles Keeghan Freeborn (ankle) and Herbert Gums (ACL) are out for the season. Starting nose tackle Scale Igiehon missed the Colorado State game and played limited snaps at Hawaii, and Utah transfer Jackson Cravens has missed the past two games for undisclosed reasons.
The Mountain West requires that teams have no fewer than seven offensive linemen, four interior defensive linemen and one quarterback available to play a game.
“Our trenches are thin,” Harsin said.
The defensive front got a little thinner last week after Harsin confirmed that STUD Sam Whitney suffered a season-ending injury at Hawaii.
Harsin said the team wasn’t notified of the severity of Whitney’s injury until the middle of last week. This is the latest in a long string of injuries for the sixth-year senior, who missed all of last season and most of the 2017 season.
He’ll likely be replaced by redshirt freshmen Isaiah Bagnah and Casey Kline, but with so many bodies to replace at a position as physically demanding as the defensive line, Harsin said in an effort to play San Jose State, the team would have had to move players around again like when Dooley made the switch for the Colorado State game.
The difference this week, Harsin said, was that with a delay in receiving the team’s COVID-19 testing results, there wasn’t time for Dooley or anyone else to spend the week practicing at their new position.
“You’re kind of making things up to go out there and play, and is that the right thing to do?” Harsin said. “It’s where they are. That’s what it comes down to. Do you have a body? Sure you do. You have a body, but that body is not built (for the position), nor is it anywhere close to the right thing to do to that particular player.”
Unlike defensive backs and linebackers, who can switch positions without any physical consequences, teams can’t just throw anyone in a game on the offensive or defensive lines. Harsin used 183-pound senior nickel Kekaula Kaniho as an example, saying he’s not going to play defensive end.
“At the skill positions, you’re able to utilize guys in different areas,” Harsin said. “When you start talking about the O-line and D-line, every single play, there’s contact. There’s no way you’re on the back side of a play covering nobody. You’re in the middle of it.”
Timing of the decision
Harsin said he’s frustrated for his players, who worked hard all week to prepare, and for San Jose State, which arrived in Boise on Friday only to find out Saturday morning that there would be no game.
But the source of frustration for coaches, players and fans is the timing of the cancellation. The announcement came less than five hours before kickoff, which was scheduled for 2 p.m.
“We feel really bad about the timing of it,” Boise State interim athletic director Bob Carney told reporters on Sunday. “Had we had our test results back earlier in the day like we were supposed to, I think the process would have gone a little differently for us. We would have had more time to dive into it during the day and really be able to navigate the process and communicate better with (San Jose State).”
Like all Mountain West teams, Boise State is required to test players, coaches and trainers for COVID-19 three times a week, and those results must be in prior to a game.
The Broncos held their final round of testing last week on Thursday — Thanksgiving Day. Carney said testing began at 6:30 a.m. in an effort to expedite the process, but Boise State’s tests are sent to Quest Diagnostics in Seattle for analysis, according to a team spokesperson, and because of a delay at the lab, the results weren’t available by 9 a.m. on Friday as scheduled. Instead, they came in around 5 p.m. on Friday.
Harsin said his players and staff got the results just before their regularly scheduled team meeting on Friday, and instead of spending time talking about senior day and the Spartans as planned, trainers and medical personnel spent about 45 minutes on contact tracing.
Carney said after seeing that just nine players would be out, Boise State indicated to the Mountain West and San Jose State on Friday that it was prepared to play the game, but further contact tracing left trainers concerned about how many players were available at certain positions — defensive line presumably being one.
He said trainers and medical personnel worked on contact tracing until about midnight on Friday, and the staff decided to sleep on it before making a final decision Saturday morning.
Carney was on the phone with Boise State’s head of sports performance and wellness Marc Paul by 6:30 a.m. on Saturday and with Harsin a little after 7. He said the medical staff then made the recommendation to cancel the game, and he informed the conference office around 8 a.m. before calling San Jose State Athletic Director Marie Tuite to let her know the news.
The game was canceled around 9:30 a.m.
“Our players and coaches were looking forward to this game with great anticipation,” Tuite said in a statement released Saturday on sjsuspartans.com. “It is a big disappointment to everyone that we are not able to play this game.”
Hitting the pause button
Since canceling the game, Boise State has paused all football-related activities, pending the results of its latest round of testing on Sunday morning.
The Broncos are scheduled to practice on Tuesday in preparation for Friday’s game at UNLV (7:30 p.m., CBS Sports Network), and given the short week, they will be tested just twice this week prior to the game (Sunday and Wednesday). They’ll be tested again on Saturday.
Boise State has just two regular-season games remaining: at UNLV (0-5) and at Wyoming (2-2) on Dec. 12. Both programs have had games canceled because of COVID-19 this fall, and the Rebels opened last week with just 49 players available for Monday’s practice.
Though the Rebels did play on Friday in a 45-14 loss to Wyoming, neither of those games is a guarantee at this point, meaning the next time the Broncos take the field could be on Dec. 19 in the Mountain West championship game, assuming they’re among the top two teams in the standings and that game isn’t canceled.
“By no means are we out of the woods and good to go,” Harsin said. “I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t concerned daily.”
The Broncos won’t take the practice field before Tuesday, but Harsin said he’s confident his team can still begin to prepare for UNLV using game film and Zoom meetings, similar to how coaches and players communicated over the spring and summer when campus was closed because of COVID-19.
“We have a mature enough team and the leadership on this team is strong enough that guys will do that,” he said.
Harsin also said he’s open to rescheduling the San Jose State game and even went as far as to suggest pushing back the championship game in an effort to be “fair to everybody.”
But the Mountain West has maintained that games canceled because of COVID-19 will be declared a no contest and will not be rescheduled, meaning the next time Boise State and San Jose State meet, the conference championship could be on the line.
That championship game would likely be held in Boise even if the Spartans are ahead of the Broncos in the standings because of a temporary suspension of all contact sports in Santa Clara County, which is scheduled to run through Dec. 21.
No coaches have tested positive
Harsin confirmed on Sunday that no Boise State coaches have tested positive for the virus this fall. He also said contingency plans are in place if one were to miss time, and trying to replace players in a game is a much bigger deal than trying to replace coaches.
“If the head coach is out, you’re fine. If your coordinators are out, you’re fine,” he said. “But you start talking about maybe one side of the ball, then you’re going to have some issues. Let’s just be honest, our players are much more important than coaches in that moment.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2020 at 3:17 PM.
