College football's wacky 2007 season took another bizarre turn Sunday night at Bronco Stadium — OK, a dozen or so bizarre turns — but one constant remained.
Boise State won at home.
Don't ask how. Don't ask why. This one was impossible to explain.
Boise State 69, Nevada 67. Four overtimes. Seventeen touchdowns. The most points (136) in a Division I-A game since the NCAA began keeping records in 1937. Two baffled defenses. And one nutty finish, followed by a mob of Broncos on the field.
"Too many different ways to describe it — exciting, craziest game I've ever been a part of," Boise State quarterback Taylor Tharp said. "… I don't think you can describe that feeling at the end there. That's the Fiesta Bowl excitement right there, when you get to run across the field."
The Broncos won on the blue turf for the 53rd consecutive time against a non-Bowl Championship Series-conference team and for the 32nd straight time in conference play. They are 56-2 at home since the start of the 1999 season.
The Broncos (5-1 overall, 2-0 WAC) kept those streaks alive by overcoming a defensive meltdown, athree-point deficit in the final seconds and seven- and three-point deficits in overtime.
Junior linebacker Tim Brady finished a game for the ages with a sack of Nevada's slippery freshman quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, on the Wolf Pack's two-point-conversion attempt in the fourth overtime. Kaepernick rolled right and reversed his field, where Brady was fighting off a blocker.
Brady's reward for the biggest sack of his life: A dogpile. "I almost suffocated," he said. "I was already out of breath."
All of the Broncos' home-domination stats and streaks date back to the Broncos' last overtime home game — a 36-35 loss to Idaho on Nov. 21, 1998.
Ever since, even in the face of seemingly certain defeat, the Broncos have found a way to win — and Sunday night they found a bunch of them.
A 256-yard, three-TD night from tailback Ian Johnson. A 320-yard, four-TD night from Tharp. A 12-catch, 140-yard night from wideout Jeremy Childs. That's when the game was normal.
Then there was the abnormal. BSU offensive tackle Dan Gore blocked a PAT in the fourth quarter after a false start forced Nevada to kick from 5 yards farther out. Freshman Kyle Brotzman was 4-for-4 on field goals and 7-for-7 on PATs (19 points), including three kicks on which the game would have ended with a miss. The Broncos scored a TD on a fake field goal, a pass from holder Tanyon Bissell to tight end Ryan Putnam in the first half.
And, despite the worst night imaginable for the nation's third-ranked defense, Brady made the play of the game — finding a way to corral Kaepernick, who rushed for 177 yards and two TDs in his first college start, almost all after halftime.
"Many times, even when I was the offensive coordinator, the defense has bailed us out," BSU coach Chris Petersen said. "Tonight, we're a team and the offense had to come through at crunch time. There were many, many times where our offense had to come up huge."
Nevada (2-4, 0-2) had some tremendous performances of its own. Kaepernick (243 passing yards, three touchdowns), tailback Luke Lippincott (187 yards, four TDs) and wide receiver Marko Mitchell (161 yards, one TD) made the Broncos defense look hapless. And linebacker Ezra Butler nearly stole the game when he stripped Johnson and recovered the fumble with 8:41 left in the game, setting up Nevada's go-ahead field goal.
"I'm proud of our guys," said Nevada coach Chris Ault, whose team trailed 21-7 in the second quarter. "They stood up. They fought."
The Broncos took a 69-61 lead in the fourth OT on a 1-yard run by Johnson and a swing pass from Tharp to freshman tailback Jeremy Avery for the two-point conversion that is required by NCAA rules starting in the third OT.
Nevada, which decimated the BSU defense, answered with its sixth touchdown run of the night before the failed two-pointer. The Wolf Pack had 639 yards of offense, topping the Broncos' 627 yards.
Nevada scored more points Sunday than it managed in six previous WAC games with BSU — six losses in which the Pack managed just 59 points.
"When guys are peeking (at other gaps) and not doing your job, you saw what happens— problems happen," Petersen said. "Sometimes, to get better, it's good to eat a little humble pie."
Ault wasn't any happier with his defense, or his special teams. The blocked PAT might have prevented the Pack from winning in regulation — Boise State would have gone for a touchdown instead of a field goal on its final drive — and the Broncos set up the game-tying field goal with a 55-yard kickoff return on the only deep kickoff by the Pack all night.
"That missed extra point is going to haunt us for a while," said Ault, who is in his 23rd year. "… We played as bad on defense and special teams as one of my teams ever has."
The game was packed with offensive thrills and defensive spills. The Broncos built a 28-21 halftime lead as the teams combined for nearly 600 yards of offense (BSU 313, Nevada 271).
The Pack pulled even at 28-28 in the third quarter and 34-34 and 41-41 in the fourth. A Johnson fumble allowed the Pack to take a 44-41 lead — their first — with 3:40 to go, but the Broncos answered with Rashaun Scott's kickoff return and Brotzman's 27-yard field goal on the last play of regulation.
"It was so back and forth at times," Tharp said.
And throughout overtime.
The teams needed just five plays to score four touchdowns in the first two overtimes, all 25-yard plays. Tharp tossed two touchdown passes and Nevada had two touchdown runs.
Nevada was forced to settle for a field goal in the third overtime, but so was Boise State. Brotzman delivered another game-tying kick — this time from 29 yards — to set up the fourth-overtime dramatics.
"We've never faced this sort of adversity when we're really against the wall," Johnson said. "They finally took the lead on us and we had no clue how our guys were going to react, and we definitely reacted this year with every type of attitude and enthusiasm that we were supposed to.
"Last year's team did it. We just answered the question, ‘Can this year's team do it, too?' "
