Blanchette: Vandals sidestep Bobcats in season opener

MOSCOW, Idaho – College football’s dating service throws in a sense of humor for no extra fee. A favorite ploy is sending a newly hired coach back to play the school which employed him the year before, for drama real and contrived.

Historians will remember Dennis Erickson wearing that plot device pretty thin all over the West.

Thursday’s snide twist was putting the Idaho Vandals face to face with their future. Which is also their past. Holy funhouse mirrors.

Like many of their FBS lodge brothers, the Vandals opened the 2016 season against an FCS popsicle meant to melt in the summer heat, or even in the climate bubble of the Kibbie Dome. Unlike any of those schools, however, the Vandals themselves are waiting for the elevator back to the FCS mezzanine and the Big Sky Conference.

So Thursday’s meeting with Montana State – soon to be a league rival again, as it was decades ago – could have been fraught with all sorts of subtext and symbolism.

And what do you know? It was.

Well, for everyone but these Vandals, anyway. They’ll take their sweaty-palms 20-17 victory over the Bobcats and soldier on, knowing the transition is not their concern and as oblivious as they can be to the inevitable sniping that such an escape suggests the timetable might as well be accelerated.

Loud music, big headphones and staying off social media will help.

But it underscored this much: the Vandals just don’t have the hang of these purchased victories, even after 20 years’ worth of practice.

Naturally, this was not the gloss we got from home office. Instead we heard “At the end of the day, you’re playing the game to win” (from quarterback Matt Linehan) and “We found two ways to win and at the end of the day, nothing else really matters” (coach Paul Petrino).

And both are absolutely correct – at the end of the day or the beginning.

Though we’re presuming the coaching staff will have a more nuanced take for the players come time for film review.

The Vandals fancy themselves as bowl material and a cruiserweight, at least, in this their next-to-last year in the Sun Belt Conference. And as Petrino suggested, they displayed two elements that will help make that happen, presuming they hold up against better pitching:

• Defense. After getting punched in the mouth a bit by MSU’s big and swift running back, Chad Newell, the Vandals made some adjustments and just toughened up over the game’s last 25 minutes – five Bobcat possessions that resulted in just two first downs. “The best defense since I’ve been here,” insisted Petrino, whose pain-staking build is in year four.


• Running the ball. Petrino’s teams have been able to do that some before, but the 225 yards the Vandals rolled up against MSU – 108 by junior Aaron Duckworth, more than twice his previous best – were achieved without diddly in air support. Kyle Seager digging out smashes down the line doesn’t throw as many one-hoppers across the field as quarterback Matt Linehan did Thursday.

His numbers – 8 of 22 for 128 yards, and a goal-line pick – didn’t say it all (his receivers didn’t give him much help) but they said enough.

“But it starts with me,” he said. “I have to be accurate and hit them when I can hit them, especially with the easy passes.”

It’s why the Vandals spent the entire second half clinging to that narrow lead. But it’s also something Petrino seems disinclined to sweat.

“We haven’t done that in three years,” he said. “We’re going to be able to throw and catch the ball.”

Still, tempering the no-problemo vibe is the mere fact of the opponent: a middling Big Sky team with a new coach and a new quarterback and all of seven players who started last year’s season finale.

“It wasn’t as flashy and as great as I like to see it,” said Petrino, “but that’s how you have to win hard-fought games. There will be games we’ll have to win like that later in the year.”

To say nothing of the next three weeks – road tests at Washington, Washington State and UNLV that will have more to say about Idaho’s ambitions than a hiccup against MSU.

As for the Big Sky business, well, the fan base can continue to wrestle over that done deal. It was something of a surprise to see no effigies of president Chuck Staben, who pulled the plug on big-boy football – and not much of a surprise to see a modest turnout of 11,987 in the house. The FBS loyalists will crow about that – forgetting that 400 fewer fans attended the 2015 opener against Ohio, and that the Board of Education bluenoses just slapped on some new alcohol restrictions for tailgaters.

Putting the pressure on the football team to generate all the fun.