BOISE, Idaho — THIS DAY IN SPORTS…September 29, 2018 five years ago today:
On the same day, Boise State and Oklahoma become the first college football teams to reach 200 wins in the 21st century. The Broncos got there with a 34-14 win at Wyoming, avenging a painful loss in Laramie two years earlier. Brett Rypien, whose fumble turned into the safety that provided Josh Allen and the Cowboys with their winning points in 2016, threw for 342 yards and two touchdowns. The Sooners picked up their 200th victory of the century with a 66-33 rout of Baylor in Stillwater as Kyler Murray threw for 432 yards and six TDs. It was an ironic twist for the two teams that battled in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl.
For Rypien, patience and persistence paid dividends at Wyoming. He was 11-of-16 for just 58 yards in the first quarter, admitting after the game that he was a little off. But in the second quarter he was 8-of-9 for 159 yards. By the time it was over, Rypien had his fifth straight 300-yard game dating back to the 2017 Las Vegas Bowl. And what better place to do it than his 2016 House of Horrors? The start to Rypien’s senior year was the polar opposite of his junior season. Through the first four games he played in 2017, Rypien had thrown for one touchdown and three interceptions. At that point in 2018, it was 12 TDs and zero picks.
Rypien couldn’t have done it that evening without playmakers, and they were everywhere you looked in the second quarter for Boise State. The first eye-opener came from A.J. Richardson, who made a leaping 21-yard touchdown catch at the goal line as he was being sandwiched by two Cowboys defenders. Then came a 92-yard drive that included a 46-yard catch down the sideline by Sean Modster and a highlight reel all-timer by John Hightower, a 31-yard one-armed grab at the one-yard line as his shoe flew off. The drive ended with true freshman Khalil Shakir’s first career touchdown, a wildcat play that saw him hit the corner and go airborne, curling the ball around the pylon for the score.
The Broncos’ 2018 season would have to be considered a mixed bag, though. They had lost at Oklahoma State the previous week and had fallen out of the rankings, and they fell the following week to San Diego State on the blue turf. Then Boise State rattled off seven straight wins to get back into the Top 25. The Broncos were No. 19 in the AP Poll when they faced Fresno State in the Mountain West championship game at Albertsons Stadium. A missed extra point toward the end was devastating to the Broncos, and the Bulldogs won 19-16 in overtime. And to add insult to injury, the First Responder Bowl in Dallas was cancelled five minutes into the game due to lightning from an extensive thunderstorm.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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