BOISE, Idaho — Tuesday, August 4, 2020.
First things first before the NCAA Board of Governors meets today to decide some logistics on the college football season: Boise State fall camp is scheduled to start this Friday. Brad Larrondo, the Broncos’ football “Chief of Staff,” said yesterday on Idaho SportsTalk that fall camp is still on. “We’re going to be doing football—and something—on Friday,” said Larrondo. “If things change in two hours, or two days, we’ll adapt.” Larrondo said Boise State is utilizing two and sometimes three fields to get pre-camp walk-throughs done, allowing no more than 50 players, coaches and staff at each one per Ada County’s Stage 3 regulations. That includes the famous running of the decks in Albertsons Stadium.
This was an interesting tweet yesterday from Boise State senior cornerback Jalen Walker: “If camp goes on I need a Guaranteed Season!” There are no guarantees, of course, but the Sun Belt appeared to have helped the Broncos’ cause Monday. Multiple sources say that the Sun Belt plans on playing as full a schedule as possible, including eight conference games and up to four nonconference matchups (as many as teams can salvage). That means right at this moment, Georgia Southern’s trip to the blue turf to open the season September 5 is intact.
COUGARS IN CHAOS?
New Washington State coach Nick Rolovich has a locker room problem. WSU wide receiver Kassidy Woods called Rolovich to say he was opting out of the 2020 season due to a sickle cell trait he has in the midst of COVID-19. Rolovich was fine with that. Woods taped the conversation. But when the coach asked Woods if he was joining the #WeAreUnited movement with hundreds of other Pac-12 players—and the answer was “Yes sir”—Rolovich was not okay.
“It’s going to be different,” Rolovich told Woods. “This group is going to change how things go in the future for everybody, at least at our school.” Rolovich sounded like he was threatening the status of Woods’ scholarship over his joining the group. Rolovich released a statement Monday night trying to clarify what he said he meant, but there has been damage done.
PLEDGING ALLEGIANT
I wrote this down during Mountain West Media Days in Las Vegas back in 2018. Officials said at that time that the Raiders’ new Allegiant Stadium was due to be completed in two years—on July 31, 2020. Well, on Friday, July 31, 2020, officials declared “substantial completion” of the $2 billion, 65,000-seat facility after 1,000 days of construction. With the 2020 season shuffled, the first UNLV game scheduled for Allegiant is October 10 against Wyoming. However, it appears that the Rebels and TCU are arranging a matchup for Week 0 on August 29. There’s been no announcement yet. They may as well wait until the end of the week to see what all ends up happening. The first Raiders event is a scheduled Monday Night Football game versus the New Orleans Saints on September 21.
FAMOUS IDAHO POTATO BOWL WATCH
You can bet the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl is watching all this week’s goings-on with great interest. With Pac-12 and SEC championship games being moved to December 18-19, can the bowl season start at bthe same time? Nick Carparelli, the executive director of the Football Bowl Association, told ESPN on Monday he thinks it still can, as teams involved in title games typically don’t play in the early bowls.
No date has been set yet for Boise’s bowl game. One postseason game has already been scrapped, as the RedBox Bowl at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara won’t be played this year. No reason was given, but the Pac-12 is one of the participants, and the late championship game probably complicated things.
RICO GARCIA: LATE-BLOOMER
Our Unsung Former Boise Hawk of the Day: righthander Rico Garcia of the San Francisco Giants. Garcia is a former starter for the Colorado Rockies who appeared in only two games for them last season and gave up seven runs in six innings. The Rockies gave up on him, and now for the Giants he’s made six appearances and has not allowed a run (he tossed a scoreless third of an inning Monday night in a 7-6 loss to his old Colorado teammates).
Garcia’s fastball topped out at 98 miles per hour during a one-inning stint in a 7-3 win over the Texas Rangers Saturday. You never know who’s going to make it when they come through Boise. In two different seasons with the Hawks in 2016-17, Garcia went a combined 0-8.
THIS DAY IN SPORTS…August 4, 2012:
American swimmer Michael Phelps competes in what we thought would be his final race and temporarily retires as the biggest Olympic medal-winner of all-time. The 27-year-old Phelps swam the butterfly leg of the men’s 4X100 medley relay at the Summer Games in London, winning the 18th gold medal of his career and 22nd medal overall. Phelps’ hardware haul began in Athens in 2004 and continued in Beijing in 2008, when he broke Mark Spitz’s record of seven golds in a single Olympics (he won eight). But he’d be back in 2016 in Rio, where he captured five more gold medals and another silver.
Watch more Boise State Football:
See all of our Boise State football coverage in our YouTube playlist:
