2013 Mountain West football season previews for every team

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

For Boise State, the 2012 season was about taking a breath. After setting off on an absurd path of destruction for four years (50-3 from 2008-11), the Broncos lost nearly every starter last fall, replaced yet another offensive coordinator, and basically had to re-learn how to win football games with a new cast of characters.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

My first 2013 preview was for a team making its FBS debut: Georgia State. In it, I said the following:

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Don’t pretend like you know what’s going to happen next. You don’t. Neither do I.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

This is probably what you envision when you make a coaching change. You want to improve your own program, obviously, but the odds are decent that you might not hold any open hostility to the guys you’re firing, and you probably hold some hope of them succeeding elsewhere. In a perfect world, everybody ends up better off when you fire somebody.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Three years ago, San Jose State was basically on par with Idaho and New Mexico State. The Spartans had no budget and little hope, having ranked 104th, 92nd, and 116th in the F/+ rankings from 2007-09 and fallen to 2-10 in Dick Tomey’s final season in charge. In fact, three years ago, SJSU was probably in worse shape than Idaho, which was coming off of a 7-6 season and a dramatic bowl win.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Over the last 10 years that Nevada’s football team has been coached by someone other than Chris Ault, the Wolf Pack are 49-65, with three winning seasons (1993, 1996, 1998) and four years with eight or more losses (1975, 1999, 2000, 2001). Ault had one of the strangest, most unique tenures in college football’s history, building a winner from nothing, retiring, getting inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, returning, inventing the Pistol formation, winning another 70 games, and retiring again. A Nevada grad and former Wolf Pack quarterback, he spent three different tenures as the program’s head coach (1976-92, 1994-95, and 2004-12), served as the school’s athletic director for 19 years (1986-2004). It is a cliché, but he is Nevada football.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

It’s right there in Air Force’s game notes (example here -- PDF): Air Force is a hard job.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

I felt bad. Aesthetically, Hawaii’s hire of Norm Chow seemed just about perfect. One of college football’s most celebrated assistants heading home to take the reins of a program that was neither far removed from success nor built sturdily for future success. It made perfect sense through that prism. But this celebrated offensive assistant hadn’t been in charge of a celebrated offense for a while.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Consistency isn’t always a good thing. Over the course of four seasons with Wyoming, head coach Dave Christensen has taken a team that ranked 110th in the F/+ rankings when he inherited it and has produced squads that ranked 101st, 108th, 104th, and 100th, respectively. Because of some strange variance in close wins (a ton one year, very few the next), the Cowboys’ win total has changed drastically in his time in Laramie; it has either gone up or down by at least three games in every season. But relatively speaking, the quality has not changed at all. With each progressive year, the offense gets a little better and the defense gets a little worse, but it has been a nearly zero-sum relationship overall.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Mike Sanford was UNLV’s head coach from 2005-09. After three consecutive two-win seasons to start his tenure, Sanford engineered back-to-back five-win seasons, complete with clear statistical improvement (the Rebels averaged an F/+ ranking of 103.0 through his first three seasons but ranked 84th and 89th in 2008-09), but was fired anyway. UNLV replaced him with Bobby Hauck, and the process began all over again. In three seasons, Hauck has gone 2-11, 2-10, and 2-11.