On this date in 2009, Boise State beat Oregon in the season opener for both teams, 19-8. The game's mostly remembered for LeGarrette Blount punching Byron Hout afterward. Some facts about that game in this thread.

This was Chip Kelly's first game as head coach at Oregon. The previous season with Kelly overseeing the Blur under Mike Bellotti, Blount rushed for 1,002 yards on just 137 carries; an average of 7.3 per carry. He scored an absurd 17 rushing touchdowns in 2008.

Blount was suspended & prospects for the Ducks to build on a 10-win '08 seemed grim. Next up was the No. 2 RB...LaMichael James. LMJ rushed for 1,546 yards and scored 13 rushing touchdowns, was a Heisman finalist in 2010 and arguably should've been again in 2011

The 8 points to which BSU held Oregon were the fewest of the Kelly era, and the least any Ducks team scored until a 45-7 loss to Stanford in 2017. The 2009 Boise State team may have been Chris Petersen's best in an incredible tenure.

Boise State went undefeated in the 2008 regular season, but because the BCS stunk for non-AQs, a Utah team that should have been named split national champions got the Sugar Bowl bid; BSU went to the Poinsettia Bowl to play TCU, following an unfortunate pattern of this era.

Boise State went from the tail end of the 2007 season until Thanksgiving Weekend 2010 without losing a regular season game. That included two wins over two 10-win Oregon teams (one at Autzen) and beating Virginia Tech in an ostensible road game.

I often wonder how the BCS would have handled the championship game in '09 had Texas not gotten that fortunate bounce on an OOB pass at the end of the Big 12 Championship. Does undefeated Cincinnati from the AQ Big East get the invite? Or does Boise State? Or neither???

I tend to think it'd have been Cincinnati for this reason. The BCS absolutely hosed both WAC champion Boise State and MWC champion TCU, making them play in the Fiesta Bowl instead of giving them shots at AQ name-brand programs. So lame and gross. https://twitter.com/NotMooseBigelow/status/1301545540316925953?s=20

From when Utah in 2004 became the first non-AQ invited to the BCS, the system really slighted those teams repeatedly. The 2010 Fiesta Bowl may have been the most egregious, considering that '09 Boise State may well have been the second-best team in the nation that season.

For talk still repeated today that if you're an outsider who wants a title shot, you need to play/beat the big dogs, consider BSU's resume:

- '08: Oregon at Autzen
- '09: Pac-10 champ UO
- '10: Va. Tech in an effective road game
- '11: Georgia in an effective road game

Going back to the Thanksgiving Weekend Boise State loss to Nevada, that UNR team finished with one loss and ranked in the top 12. Colin Kaepernick tied to be the second QB ever to score 20/20 rushing/passing TDs in 1 season. The other two, Tim Tebow & Cam Newton, won Heismans.

(Kap should've been a Heisman finalist in 2010 & UNR would have been a much more interesting pick for the Sugar Bowl than Arkansas, but ymmv)

Back to BSU, from '08 through '11 it lost TWO regular-season games: 12-win UNR in '10, 11-win TCU in '11, both came down to the end

The 2007 season is rightly remembered as the wildest in modern history; I wrote this a few years ago positing 2008 was close https://theopenman.com/2015/04/23/tbt-unraveling-the-2008-bcs-mess/.

2009 flies under the radar, but was approaching the nuttiness of ‘07 and ‘08. BSU-UO set a fitting tone.

*hand hovers a big dial that reads “Do A 2009 Season Retrospective” as I turn to the audience looking for approval*

Anyway, I don't like the Playoff. It's controlling broadcast partner has hyped it in a way that dismisses literally anything else going on in the sport, and 2017 disproved its own usefulness by rewarding a non-conference, non-division champ w/ a SoS in the mid-50s. BUT...

This thread is an exercise in why I don't want to return to the BCS system, either. The BCS was a trash fire that repeatedly punished non-AQ programs and rarely worked as a championship model.