Cover Story: Utah State Takes Over Boise In Emphatic Beatdown

BOISE – It started innocently enough. Boise State head coach Leon Rice, disappointed with the showing for his team's surprising mid-week loss to Grand Canyon, wanted a better crowd on Saturday night. Shorthanded with much of its usual membership still on break until Jan. 12, Boise State's student section, The Corral, put out a call for students of all kinds – any and all students, to be specific – to fill in with free entry.

Four-plus hours to the south, an assortment of interested students decided to take them up on that offer. That the rules changed while many of those students were en route forced a slight migration into several upper deck sections but did little otherwise to deter representatives of the HURD. To the contrary, it almost certainly inspired more to make the trip, funded to the tune of more than $3,000 in a matter of hours by eager donors, be they fans, fellow students, former HURD members, active coaches or one particularly delighted athletic director. Every administrator loves when the student body takes an interest in school activities, after all.

They couldn't quite overwhelm the roughly 10,000 Boise State fans in attendance, at least not until a little later in the evening, but they were there with their banner, clarifications be damned. Their taller, more athletically inclined classmates down on the floor knew it, too.

"It was awesome," junior guard Mason Falslev said after the game. "I can't believe they'd drive four hours just to support us… That's the first time I've seen anything like that. Usually this place is packed, it's a really tough place to play and we have to create our own energy. From the get-go in warm-ups, they're chanting, 'Let's go Aggies.' It's crazy. Having them really helped us along. HURD, we love you, we appreciate you, keep showing up and we'll keep doing our part."

"I think it's tremendous," head coach Jerrod Calhoun added, pausing a few times during his post-game media obligations to take it all in as his group celebrated with their steadfast supporters, who had slowly relocated to the lower bowl. "When we found out that they couldn't get in with the student tickets, the staff put some money together, donors put some money together and helped fund it. They came out in droves. It was pretty incredible at the end of the game, all the chants."

And so, not wanting to let this spontaneous mobilization of the Spectrum go to waste, the Aggies went about their gruesome work with a smile and an air of invincibility, tearing to shreds a Boise State side hardly in any position to defend itself. The Broncos needed the win after dropping back-to-back games and falling into a 1-3 hole in the always competitive Mountain West race, felt they had prepared well enough to get it, and found within about two minutes that they had not.

On this night, it was difficult to imagine that any team in the league could have prepared well enough to touch Utah State, let alone compete with it. Star guard MJ Collins Jr. said two days before the game that the Aggies would need the intensity they had shown in their dismemberment of Colorado State on Dec. 20, and also all but said that he knew they'd have it. He was right.

"We need to come out with the same intensity we had against Colorado State," Collins said. "Of course it was at home and we had the home crowd to back us up. I'm not sure if we'll have any many fans (at Boise State), I don't know if they'll travel, but we just have to bring our own energy. It's a road game, it'll be tough, we might not get any calls but if the ball is going in the basket and we're getting stops, we don't really need any calls. Being locked in today and tomorrow in our scout and our prep and being able to pop on Saturday at 7 o'clock, that'll tell us everything we need to know. In the first four minutes, we should have a good feel for what kind of game it'll be from us and what kind of game it'll be from them.

"I texted the guys when they were playing San Diego State, and I'm like, 'Who do we hate more, San Diego State or Boise State?' They said San Diego State, but I know realistically, we hate everybody pretty much the same when it comes to Colorado State, San Diego State and Boise State. We're going to have that mindset to go kill. I believe, coming back on the road Saturday, everybody will be happy with the outcome."

Utah State struck first, second, third and fourth before Rice had seen enough to spend a timeout. The Aggies did it without pomp or circumstance, and as Colorado and Texas Tech dragged themselves to a conclusion on CBS Sports Network, they did it before most viewers at home could know what had happened. For them, the game simply began with Utah State spotted five points.

Within the first second of the now-televised broadcast, Collins received a pass from Drake Allen, who immediately fired his left hand, pointer extended, in the direction of the basket. Collins had come to the same conclusion, given his position at the top of the key opposed by a senior Boise State guard with his arms to his sides. That's not where they were supposed to be, so Collins took the ball, clutched it as he squared himself to the basket, and stuck it on the back iron. In the paint, the 6-10 Zach Keller dwarfed an unfortunately positioned Boise State guard, freshman Aginaldo Neto. A neutral observer or two may well have changed the channel then and there, convinced that this was not a fair fight, and in this case largely correct. Utah State was immediately and considerably better than Boise State.

It was better in strange, fascinating new ways, though. The Aggies carried themselves like a team assured of their quality and comfortable exacting it upon others. They scored four very different baskets amid the game-opening kill shot (Evan Miyakawa's apt term for a 10-0 run), starting with a Zach Keller wing pick-and-roll layup, a baseline inbound into an Adlan Elamin three, Collins' triple and a slick one-on-one drive and finish from Allen – four scorers, four methods of attack offensively. At the other end, Boise State tried and missed four shots, rebounded only one of them, and quickly became acquainted with Utah State's new defensive length as Elamin easily nabbed a Dylan Andrews cross-court pass. The Aggies were sending a message, loud and clear.

"To open up on a kill shot, 10-0 run, was pretty incredible," Calhoun said. "We really wanted to come out of the gates and establish ourselves and make sure that they play this game on our terms. We want to pressure the ball and hold them to one shot. We came into the game with a plan, we thought they were really vulnerable guarding off-ball screening actions with MJ and Mason continuing to make reads, Drake delivering the ball and EP delivering the ball. The unsung heroes of our team are our forwards. Those guys set great screens. We saw it last year with Aubin. I thought the game plan offensively was perfect.

"We do pre-game messages each game, whether it's a former Aggie player, a coach or a parent. Coach Sprinkle was the message today. I just texted him, he showed me a picture of his TV and watched it from start to finish. I thought he got our guys fired up with the message that he had going into this game."

Boise State eased into the game after Rice's timeout, aided by three new entries to the lineup, and kept the score fairly steady through the next six or so minutes. Both sides appeared content to exchange blows, and exchange they did. Neto and Allen swapped triples, the latter shooting a glare in Boise State's direction after being left wide open on the deep wing just in front of the Bronco bench. Utah State's veteran point guard had spent most of the day asleep or receiving treatment for an illness, but he refused to be denied his spot in the lineup and played like a man possessed. By the final buzzer, Allen would accumulate 14 points and eight assists with only one turnover.

Javan Buchanan got in on the three-point shooting contest to cap Boise State's ensuing possession and the Broncos briefly broke Utah State's serve as Allen suffered his lone miss on seven field goal tries, but the ball glanced off the iron right to Collins, who returned it for two points on an unguarded floater. Neto missed a three of his own, and Allen sliced into the lane once more to make it an 11-point Aggie lead, 17-6, for the under-16 break.

"Drake battled sickness," Calhoun said. "He was on an IV today. I didn't know if he would play, to be honest with you. He hadn't eaten in 24 hours. He was tremendous. This will be a great confidence booster for him. He had been struggling a little bit, but Drake is a warrior. Those guys really put their bodies on the line for the jersey and for the program, and I should have known he would play. He got an IV, slept most of the day, and I thought when he made that three, man, the look in his eye was unbelievable. I'm really proud of him."

Through the next TV timeout, the game adhered to that flow. Kolby King made it a 14-point Utah State edge from deep, matched almost instantly by Neto, and Spencer Ahrens answered a Garry Clark layup to keep the difference at 11 for that second break, 22-11. There were threads for the Aggies to pull, however, and it was about time to start pulling them. Collins baited Andrews into a foul hardly becoming of a senior guard with three years of experience at UCLA before transfering to Boise State and hit a pair of the three ensuing free throws.

The Mountain West's top scorer tried to push the edge to 16 from beyond the arc not long after, and though Boise State survived that try from Collins, RJ Keene was not so fortunate in outletting his rebound to a viable ball-handler. Against all odds, he overlooked the spidery leviathan lurking in the backcourt and could only watch, slack-jawed, as Elamin caught the ball in stride and powered through a two-handed slam that Andrews, the intended receiver, wisely wanted no part of. With 10:14 to play, the Aggie lead was 15, 26-11.

It would be another two minutes before Falslev – the devil Boise State knew, rather than the ones it had only recently met – first cracked the scoreboard with a right-handed runner looped easily over Andrew Meadow's arms and off the backboard for two.

Falslev carried the Aggies as far as he possibly could in this building late last February, registering a team-high 19 points with very little help in an eventual 82-65 loss. For more than half of this year's opening period, he had simply complemented the incursion, defending and rebounding and generally pestering the Broncos on the floor, peppering them with questions about their impressions of his new teammates. His first basket put the Aggies into the same 15-point lead they had claimed without his scoring, 30-15.

"That just shows the depth we have on our team," Falslev said. "It's pretty awesome that a lot of times I'm just the facilitator, trying to be a connector out there and show some good leadership.

"It's pretty easy when you basically just have to throw it to MJ anywhere and he just makes it. I love talking to the guys when he makes it right in their face. There were two or three times MJ made a three and I'm jogging down next to the guy like, 'Yeah, he's pretty crazy, isn't he?' And they're like, 'Dude…' It's pretty funny."

For more than four minutes, Utah State's offense was mostly stagnant. Elijah Perryman blazed down the court, fooled Neto with a half spin and bolted to the corner for a right-handed kiss off the glass, but that was the lone reprieve from the dry spell until an inbound dunk for Karson Templin out of the under-4 break. Boise State used this welcome lull to generate all of four points, slashing a 15-point lead down to 13 points before the Templin slam returned it to 15. The Broncos were without answers, without any sort of clear advantage to lean on, and without means to change it. A bewildered Rice opened his post-game press conference talking about how well Boise State had handled Utah State's matchup zone last season. These were not last year's Aggies, though.

"I just think we're a different team, it's a different year," Calhoun said. "Every time it'll be like that. Most of these kids aren't going to be in the rivalry. I hope in our program that it's a a little different, but there's so much change in college basketball. We're a totally different team. We're a much better defensive team. We can really guard the ball and do some things."

Having made no progress during Utah State's temporary slump, the Broncos had to face the final four minutes without any wind at their sails, and with the chasm in team depth between the two sides already beginning to show. They were, unsurprisingly, obliterated. Following Templin's dunk, Allen decided to have a little fun with Andrews as he crossed the half-court line, perhaps as retaliation for a suspiciously mobile Dominic Parolin screen, which was closer in reality to a forearm shiver. Allen shrugged off the contact and effectively pinned Andrews to the sideline just in front of Utah State's bench, forcing him first to pick up his dribble, then to fire a pass that could only have landed with Collins, who ripped down the floor and windmilled around the unwieldy Parolin for a layup.

Andrews tried and failed to jumpstart the Boise State attack with a three-pointer, Collins drilled a triple of his own at the other end while Templin gave Keene a taste of the moving screen medicine, and the chants from the HURD bounced around the arena. Utah State was up by 20, and everyone in the building had to hear as much. It would stay there for a little while and eventually move into a 46-23 margin at halftime on a long buzzer-beating three from Falslev, who knew it was good from the moment he shot it.

"At halftime, we only had two turnovers," Calhoun said. "That was our cleanest half of basketball. I thought we did a tremendous job there of valuing possessions, getting to the next advantage and getting the ball side to side. We were going to run a lot of step-ups to away screens and put Mason, MJ and Kolby in some situations where they could make reads on off-ball screens. I thought all the guys did a great job with that."

The game was over at that point, though only in retrospect. In the moment, it was still very much a live wire for the Aggies, who had seen Boise State erase significant deficits in the second half before and needed total focus to avoid a similar fate. Within the first three-plus minutes of the frame, they didn't seem to have it. Andrews opened the second half for Boise State with a three-pointer, and while Collins answered that shot, Utah State was without an immediate response to the next three, all two-pointers from Andrews, Peanut Carmichael and Parolin, which cut the deficit to 17. After two Elamin free throws and a Parolin three-point play, the lead was down to 16, 51-35 – still commanding for the Aggies, but teetering on the edge of competitive with 16:43 to play.

Falslev and Templin, both very well aware of the danger posed in the moment through their previous encounters with the Broncos, took the initiative to put down Boise State's emerging surge before it could really get going. Templin struck first, grabbing an offensive rebound under the basket and laying it in to stop the 9-2 BSU run. Second-chance points were an Aggie theme all night – Utah State scored 26 second-chance points on 12 offensive rebounds, the latter serving as a new season high for opponents against Boise State's usually stout defensive rebounding.

"It was just fight," Falslev said. "A lot of them were just pinging around down there, and at the end of the day you have to want them more than the other guys. A lot of them went their way, but I think a little bit more of them went our way."

Falslev added two points at the free-throw line out of the under-16 break, rebounding a Keene miss and going coast to coast before drawing an Andrews foul near the rim. After two more free throws, these from Collins, and a Carmichael triple to briefly stop the barrage, Templin all but put the comeback bid to bed with another second-chance bucket, this one through a Neto foul for a three-point play. It was a 60-38 Aggie lead six minutes into the frame, and though Boise State would draw within 19 points twice more, the closing stretch belonged almost entirely to Utah State.

"We went in at halftime and I think in the past three games Boise State has been in kind of the same situation, down, and they've almost come back in every game, especially (against) San Diego State," Falslev said. "We knew they wouldn't quit. I knew that, and I just told myself that no matter what, I'm not going to give up. I'm going to keep fighting and show them that we ain't going anywhere and you guys aren't coming back."

Slowly, steadily, Utah State pushed its advantage further. Falslev set it at 26 from the free-throw line with a hair over 10 minutes to play; Allen gave the Aggies their first 30-point cushion on a triple with 7:33 remaining; Falslev established a 32-point difference at the 4:46 mark; and the bench units for either side took it from there, easing into a 93-68 final score that still could have been considerably wider. It was Utah State's largest-ever victory at Boise State, Boise State's worst home loss since 1999, and the first non-overtime 90-point performance in Boise by a conference foe since Rice took over in 2010-11. Only one team, the 2010-11 Aggies (who went 30-4), managed a larger margin of victory (28 points) in a conference game against a Rice-led squad.

"I think both performances against Boise State and Colorado State were about as good as I've been a part of," Calhoun said. "I've been doing this for 14 years. You talk about coming in to Boise State, holding these guys in the 60s and scoring at a high clip, that's just great, efficient basketball.

"It'll be even harder (moving forward), but the sky is the limit for our group. We're going to enjoy it tonight and tomorrow. We have an off day tomorrow. We'll get back extremely late, get to church in the morning and regroup. This team has worked really, really hard at becoming a team. I'm really liking the direction of it."

For those keeping track at home, that marks at least three, and maybe four record-setting performances from the Aggies in five conference games. They opened MWC competition with their largest-ever victory over Colorado State, dropped an all-time best 99 points on Air Force, and likely set at least one obscure record in a 96-78 win over San Jose State.

Utah State has faced a fairly light load through this opening stretch, drawing matchups with the league's three worst teams in Air Force, Fresno State and San Jose State to go with the marquee bouts against Boise State and Colorado State. But these Aggies have done to that slate things never before seen in this program's illustrious history.

They've won five games by an average margin of 26.2 points and hit the 90-point mark four times, breaking a record set by the 1990-91 Aggies for scoring production to begin a conference season (that bunch did it three times in its first four games). They're up to seven 90-point outings overall, one short of last year's mark and on pace with the program-best 16 logged in 1969-70 by the last Utah State team to win multiple games in the NCAA tournament. On Monday morning, they cracked the AP top 25 (No. 23) for the third time in as many years, which is itself a program record.

Within the Mountain West, they're clear of the next-best team in the KenPom rankings (No. 51 New Mexico) by 31 spots. In the NET rankings, only No. 41 New Mexico is within 50 spots of the 13th-ranked Aggies. By almost all metrics seeking to identify league leaders, Collins and Falslev have been comfortably the two best players in the conference. They headline the KenPom POTY standings, the Barttorvik box plus/minus leaderboards (minimum: 60 percent of available minutes played) and the CBB Analytics wins above replacement player list. They're third and first, respectively, in EvanMiya's Bayesian Performance Rating, split only by Allen. Eight different Aggies rate within the top 50 of that same metric in the league, one of whom (Tucker Anderson) played only two minutes in this game.

Certainly statistically, and perhaps stylistically speaking, they're not your grandfather's Aggies, nor your father's, older brother's, or any other family member's for that matter. These are Calhoun's Aggies. They play with a calculated swagger, often cocky but rarely reckless; walk into and promptly take over fearsome road venues; force information directors into frantic searches through the record books; and pile on so swiftly as to suggest a degree of comfort in their actions that hardly matches their devastating effects – they make this all look easy, so to speak. In Collins' words, they "hate everybody pretty much the same" and "have that mindset to go kill."

Five games clear in the Mountain West, touting no blemishes and four blowout wins, that assessment looks to be spot-on – and with the 12-4 (4-1) Nevada Wolf Pack coming to town Wednesday night, the Aggies are already eyeing another victim as they carry on down the warpath. Look out.