Season didn’t go as planned, Vandals take lumps in Petrino’s second season
Last season, the Idaho football team was chock-full of young and inexperienced players.
A freshman quarterback led the offense while being protected by an offensive line featuring two freshmen and one sophomore. The leading rusher was a junior college transfer playing his first season at the FBS level and the team’s top receiver was a former quarterback playing the position for the first time ever.
Out of the team’s 19 seniors, only nine had been with the program their entire collegiate career.
The group endured arguably the toughest four-year stretch in the history of the program. They played under three head coaches, spent time in two conferences with a year as an FBS Independent and spent their senior season playing with a bowl ban and reduced practice time due to the team’s Academic Progress Rate (APR) not meeting NCAA standards.
After the team finished the 2014 season with a 1-10 record, the four-year seniors left Idaho with just five wins to their name.
Despite the record, Idaho coach Paul Petrino found positives to build on after his second season as the Vandal head coach.
“I think we made big strides,” Petrino said after the 45-28 loss to Appalachian State in Idaho’s last game of the season. “Last year we kinda got killed by everybody and this year we got to the point where we competed with everybody. We were in every game in the second half and now next year we need to take that next step where we beat people.”
With an overall record of 13-17 and 8-11 in conference competition, the Vandals’ first season back in the Big Sky might not have gone exactly as planned.
“It wasn’t how we drew it up,” Verlin said. “We thought we could win a few more games.”
Idaho’s struggles came on the road as 13 of the team’s 17 losses came from away games. The Vandals only managed to win two games away from Moscow, one of which was in Pullman against Washington State.
Despite losing the final two games of the season, the Vandals’ 8-10 conference record allowed them to barely make the conference tournament as the No. 7 seed.
The low seed resulted in the matchup against EWU, a team Idaho failed to beat in each of the three meetings between the two. A combined six points decided the two regular season games.
Verlin said the Big Sky was a tougher conference than the WAC was last year and the team needs to make some adjustments to compete within the conference moving forward.
“I really like where our program is at,” Verlin said. “We got to add a couple things to it, we got to get some guys better and we got to get some guys stronger.”
Nick Blair, a 6-foot-5, 185-pound forward from Las Vegas’ Bishop Gorman High School, headlines an impressive recruiting class for Verlin.
The Blair signing came shortly after sophomore guard Sekou Wiggs opted to transfer to another school — which is still unknown.
Rounding out the recruiting class with Blair is point guard Myles Franklin (Hart High School, Newhall, California), combo guard Patrick Ingram (Trinity Valley Community College, Athens, Texas) and shooting guard Tyler Brimhall (Logan High School, Logan, Utah). The Vandals also recently added San Diego graduate transfer Chris Sarbaugh.
“When we get them all here in the summer, we’ll start kind of piecing all of their places together,” Verlin said of the recruits. “It was important we got good players and great kids, and we did that … All of them are good students, all of them are fine young men and really wanted to come to the University of Idaho, so we’re happy to get them.”
Korbin McDonald
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