The
Boise
Junior
College
School
of Truck Driving?
The
University
of
Oregon
doesn’t have one. The
University
of
Oregon
doesn’t have a
School
of
Engineering
…either.
Boise
State
University
has one of the finest schools of engineering in the country.
U.S. News and World Report rates the program as the twelfth best
in the nation. MIT,
Stanford
,
Cal
Berkeley, and Harvard must also agree. They
are partners in research programs with
Boise
State
.
This writer got tired of the denigrating
Boise
Junior College
“dumb speak” coming mostly from the fans of the so-called
BCS
elite schools around the west. This
writer decided to do some Internet snooping into the founding history of the
likes of the UCLA’s, the
Oregon
’s, the
Arizona
’s, and
Washington
’s. What this writer discovered is
humbling, hold-my-hat-in-hand stuff, for many of the stuffy western university
elitists.
In their beginnings,
Boise
State
University
, UCLA, the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, the
University
of
Washington
, and
Arizona
State
University
were two-year colleges or high schools.
Boise
State
was founded as St Margaret’s Hall in 1892 as an Episcopal Church two-year
institution of higher learning for women desiring to be nurses or teachers.
UCLA was founded 27 years later than
Boise
State
as a stepchild of their parent to the North in 1919.
California Gov. William D. Stephens signed Assembly Bill 626,
establishing a southern branch of the
University
of
California
(
Berkeley
). The
Los Angeles
campus opened offering two-year undergraduate programs to 250 students and
1,250 students in the Teachers College.
The
University
of
Oregon
was founded in 1876 as a two-year institution, and graduated its first class in
1878.
Oregon
State
University
was founded as
Corvallis
College
in 1856 or 1857 by alternating organizations of Episcopal-Methodists and
Southern Baptist’s but closed its doors after one year.
The institution was referred to as a “
Pioneer
Academy
”, a common term describing a high school in the mostly rural west.
The
University
of
Washington
was founded in 1861 but closed its doors the first time two years later in 1863
for lack of students.
Arizona
State
University
was founded in 1885 and was named, The Territorial Normal School at
Tempe
. Entrance was open to sixteen year
olds. Degrees were granted after
completion of a two-year course of study. Course
of study requirements for a degree were extended from two years to three in
1899.
The
University
of
Arizona
was chartered in 1885, twenty-seven years before
Arizona
became a state. It was founded not
as a university, but a two-year normal school, with the prime function as a high
school because there were no high schools in the territory.
The “institution of higher education” was about to be abandoned until
two gamblers and a
Tucson
saloonkeeper donated land for a permanent school site.
The
University
of
Utah
was founded in 1850 as an LDS institution given the name,
University
of
Deseret
. The institution closed in 1853 for
lack of students and feeder schools. The
school was reestablished in 1867 and in 1892 became the
University
of
Utah
.
BYU was founded in 1875, not as a university, but as a high
school named
Brigham
Young
Academy
, a feeder school subservient to the parent institution in
Salt Lake City
, the
University
of
Utah
.
Granted, the schools listed are fine institutions with
excellent football programs. All
have aspirations of winning a (Football Bowl Subdivision) National Championship.
Boise
State
has the same goal of winning a national championship, an idea scoffed by many
as impossible.
Let’s look at the record.
Of the nine western schools discussed above, five have no football NC’s
and three, UCLA, BYU, and Washington have one each.
Boise
State
has two.
Let’s look at
Boise
State
’s record from the beginning. The
Boise
State
football mystique began in 1947. A
young coach by the name of Lyle Smith took over the program, which had won only
36 games since 1933. Smith and his
new team won their first game together and the next 36 in a row, including a
25-7 blowout victory in 1949 against heavily favored
Taft
Junior College
before 12,000 of their fans.
Boise
brought 300. The game was played in
the Potato Bowl in
Bakersfield
,
California
, thirty miles from Taft, and was the first postseason game in the school’s
history.
In the beginning
Southern California
junior college football folks laughed at Boise JC and the suggestion the team
from rural
Idaho
could beat them, much less win a national JC football championship.
This attitude was not surprising. The
city of
Boise
had a population of 30,000 and Boise JC had a student enrollment of only 850.
The Broncos proved them wrong over and over, compiling a record of 209
wins against 61 losses, and winning a Junior College National Championship in
1958 against Tyler (
Tex
) Junior College.
The football nation laughed again when they became a 1-AA
program with a goal of winning a National Championship at that level.
The Broncos won one in 1980 against
Eastern Kentucky
. In 1994 they beat
Marshall
to reach the NC game again. This
time they lost to
Youngstown
.
Boise JC became a four-year college in 1968 and a
university in 1974. They continue
their amazing winning ways to this day with close to an 85% winning percentage
since their first game in 1932.
Since 1999, the Broncos' record is 108-20 with eight
conference titles: Big West
Conference 1999-2000, Western Athletic Conference 2002-06, 2008, and five wins
in nine bowl appearances. The
Broncos finished the season in the Top 25 polls in 2002 (12th), 2003 (15th),
2004 (13th), 2006 (5th), 2008 (14th), and started the 2005 season ranked 18th,
the 2007 season ranked 22nd, and the 2009 season 12th.
The Broncos have had three undefeated regular seasons in the last five
years, the only team in
America
to accomplish that feat.
Now…a question college football fans...don't you think a
team with a record of winning like
Boise
State
will someday reach the NCAA D-1 pinnacle of achievement and win an FBS national
championship?