What's next for Petrino, Idaho football

It was 22 degrees and late in the afternoon when Idaho and Colorado State kicked off in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl on Dec. 22 at Albertsons Stadium in Boise.

Nearly four hours later, it was a few degrees colder than that when Vandal players drenched their coach, Paul Petrino, in the waning moments of Idaho’s 61-50 victory over the Rams.

With the trophy presentation on the field after the game, followed by his media obligations, Petrino said it wasn’t until about an hour after the game when he could change out of his cold, soggy, frozen clothes.

“It was cold,” Petrino recalled recently, while in Coeur d’Alene as part of a booster function at The Coeur d’Alene Resort to showcase Idaho’s most recent recruiting class. “The pants froze completely, and the sweatshirt that was underneath my coat, the water got down on the hood, and that was frozen.

“But it was worth it; it was a good freeze,” he added.

IT WAS Idaho’s third bowl victory in as many tries, but first since the 2009 season, and also the Vandals’ first winning season since then.

After winning one game at Idaho in each of his first two seasons, Petrino guided the Vandals to a 4-8 record in 2015, setting the stage for this year’s 9-4 record.

So success came slowly, but it came.

“I always knew that what we were doing was the right thing,” Petrino said. “It just helped prove it to other people. It helped prove to fans and players and to everyone else. It was a great lesson for our kids, for our families, for my kids, individually, just because you do everything right and you work as hard as you can, that doesn’t always mean you’re going to have the right outcome. The real true test of your character, and test of who you are, is that you continue to do it right, you continue to work hard, until you do get the right outcome. It isn’t always going to happen right away, but you’ve got to keep grinding and keep working hard until that right outcome comes. And that’s what we did.”

SO WHAT’s next for the Vandals?

“I think the next step is that we continue to improve,” he said. “They know how to work; now they know how to win. You’re never going to stay the same, you’re either going to get better, or you’re going to get worse. We’ve just got to keep getting better. Our guys know how to work; we’ve just got to make sure we pay attention to all the little details and continue to get better.”

There are other benefits to a winning season.

“I think it really helps in recruiting,” Petrino said. “It helps just how our guys walk around and feel about themselves. They knew they knew how to work, but for them to see the final outcome of how doing all the right things and working hard is paying off, it gets them to re-teach the younger kids that, and them to believe that even that much more.”

Last fall, when backup quarterback Jake Luton transferred to a junior college in California, Idaho was left without an experienced backup to third-year starter Matt Linenan.

The other QBs were Gunnar Amos, a redshirt freshman from Coeur d’Alene High, and Mason Petrino, a true freshman and the coach’s son.

Both ended up playing briefly, especially early in the season, sometimes one of them at receiver when the other took snaps.

Petrino said there were times when he thought of not playing his son this season.

But, “I just thought if Matt got hurt, they needed each other to be successful, so we were going to have to do that eventually, so I figured I might as well do it right from the get-go,” Petrino said. “Mason still has his redshirt down the road if he needed it.”

IDAHO HAS one more season at the FBS level, and its 85 full scholarships, and the FCS level and its 63 full rides.

Without giving away trade secrets, Petrino said he has “a plan” how to make it work.

At the FBS level, schools have 85 players on full scholarship, and the rest are walk-ons. At the FCS level, the 63 full rides can be spread among 85 players. So some can get full rides, some three-quarter rides, some half scholarships, some a quarter of a scholarship — and the better students can get some academic money to make up some of the difference from a partial to a full scholarship.

Petrino, who spent most of his college coaching career in the midwest and south, said he’ll still recruit all over the country, taking advantage of the contacts he has developed all over the country over the years.

But he said recruiting is a little different at the FCS level, with perhaps a lesser budget than at an FBS school.

“Sometimes, especially in state, you might take two kids that are 6-4, 235, that maybe have a chance to end up being really good players, so you take a chance on both of them, so you give them both half-scholarships, where in the past, you might not have recruited either one of them,” Petrino said. “Some of those guys are the ones who end up great football players in I-AA — ‘how did everybody miss on him?’ So maybe you would have taken a chance on one of them, but you surely wouldn’t take a chance on them both.

He recalled when he was an assistant at Idaho in the early 1990s, and the Vandals were recruiting a couple of running backs. One of them was Joel Thomas, who turned out to be one of the Vandals’ all-time greats.

But at that time, he didn’t appear to be a sure thing.

“We gave the other running back a lot more money than Joel his freshman year,” Petrino said. “Well, then Joel ended up being the better player, so as the years went on, Joel ended up getting more of the money and that kid ended up getting less of the money. It gives you a chance to take chances on a few more guys at times. You’ve just got to work harder.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.