Humbowl Anything But Ho-Hum

This should have the people running topless through the streets of Moscow.

Wait, they’ve already done that.

Well, then, some other irrelevant revelry will have to be concocted to properly celebrate the most amazing afternoon - the most amazing autumn - in the University of Idaho’s backloaded football history.

Give it some thought. Nothing traditional will do, for if anything, Wednesday’s absurd 42-35 upset of Southern Mississippi in Humanitarian Bowl II - the Roman numerals are on loan from the Super Bowl - was a break with tradition, a redefinition of what counts, who counts and how and where great memories are made.

At the HumBowl. Who’d have thunk it?

They throw a funky little football game here. Vandals fans partied beforehand on a flatbed truck. One tailgater brought his motor home with a For Sale sign in the back window and threw an open house. At halftime, a Bronco Stadium maintenance worker was out driving roofing nails into the turf, securing the work-in-progress end zone overlay which was getting a heavy workout.

And it was Idaho giving it the workout. Who’d have thunk it? “Only us,” said Vandal nose tackle Wil Beck, “The only ones who believed all year long.”

In this part of the country, we don’t know Southern Miss from Southern Mrs. But we saw the heights and weights and 40-yard dash times and the 16-point spread the oddsmakers had set, and our doubts were firmly established.

Just for sport, Idaho spotted the Golden Eagles a two-touchdown lead, giving the afternoon the overtones of a zeppelin crash or a bad movie.

Oh, the Humanitarian.

And at that point, the Vandals had us right where they wanted us.

What followed was madness. Freshman quarterback John Welsh throwing for four touchdowns. Vandals linemen manhandling wannabe All-Americans. One-time walkons making big-time plays. Fumbles flooding the ocean-blue turf. Wild-and-crazy notions from a coach who is not nearly as button-down as you might think a man who worked 12 years for Don James should be.

Right now, Chris Tormey should forget about recruiting and get himself to a craps table, because the man can’t miss.

Surely you heard about his nervy two-point conversion call that beat Boise State a month ago. On Wednesday, after the Vandals had played their way back into a tie and found themselves on the Southern Miss 2-yard line with just 2 seconds left before halftime, Tormey tore up his textbook and went for six instead of the sure-thing field goal.

Even better, he turned to the big bloc of Vandals in the crowd of 19,664 and gave them the raise-the-roof pump of the arms.

“I was just having fun,” he said. “Probably not a smart thing to do when the offense was on the field. But we were having fun, the crowd was having fun - shoot, what the heck? You’ve got to take some time to smell the roses.”

Or whatever it is they grow here.

Later, he ordered up a screen pass on fourth-and-6 when, again, a field goal would have sufficed - and wound up rolling another seven. Sometimes his defense would have just one lineman in a three-point stance. None of it made any sense, especially the four-play drive Welsh engineered after the Golden Eagles had grabbed the momentum by the throat and tied the game in the fourth quarter.

Weirder still, almost all the key points Tormey outlined before the game came true. He insisted Idaho needed “to run the ball some” to have any success, and it wasn’t until Joel Thomas broke an 11-yard run in the second quarter that Idaho started rolling. He said the Vandals “had to keep the ball in front of us” on defense - and the Eagles managed just one play longer than 30 yards.

“But mostly,” he said on Tuesday, “if we can be in the game at halftime, we’ve got a legitimate chance to win - especially if it gets to be a fourth-quarter game. Because our kids really believe if the game is close in the fourth quarter, we’ll find a way to win.”

But how?

“Dumb luck,” shrugged Vandals tackle Rick DeMulling. “Destiny. Something.”

Some of that. All of that. None of that.

The magazine that made Idaho the 112th and last team in its Division I-A rankings before the season was this team’s MVP. Motivation made all the difference in a way that bench-presses and big-time recruits simply could not.

How else to explain that the biggest swing of momentum Wednesday turned on a one-on-one tackle of Southern’s best receiver, Sherrod Gideon, by backup Ricky Giampietri, who initially paid his way to play at Idaho.

“You can draw a big circle around our team and everyone inside that circle believes that we can achieve whatever we set our minds to,” said Giampietri. “What we believe is all that matters, and that more than anything has made the difference.”

Common sense tells you football is more than just raw emotion, and Beck - the true-freshman from Central Valley - conceded the physical superiority Southern Miss was touted to have was very much evident.

“Their guard and tackle were the biggest guys I’ve seen in my life,” he marveled. “Their center was small, but he was lightning fast. I’d never seen a center as fast. I was just shocked.”

Idaho’s answer?

“We just played our hearts out,” Beck said. “This is a season of fate. I knew that on my recruiting visit last winter. I knew this team was going to prosper. I even told the coaches I knew we could be a Top 25 team and some of them laughed at me. Really, I would have ranked us in the Top 25 before the season.”

And now, frankly, they’ve achieved something beyond a trivial ranking - and with a lineup of raw rookies, unrecruited and local heroes. Beck, Giampietri and tight end Mike Roberg played in the Greater Spokane League. Center Jeremy Wallace walked on from Post Falls. DeMulling was once a quarterback at Cheney. Defensive end Ryan Knowles from Sandpoint demurred when asked to come off redshirt a year ago because he felt he wasn’t ready. Lewiston’s Ryan Skinner, the “44 magnum from L-town,” made 20 tackles on Wednesday - none of them any bigger than the six made by another old walk-on, Tom Rayner of tiny Pierce, Idaho.

“Not many of us thought by going to the University of Idaho that we’d ever play in a bowl game,” admitted Roberg. “To win it, man, it’s unbelievable.”

Hey, he said it, not us.