Boise State’s Peterson Honored As Bobby Dodd Coach Of The Year

When Boise State football coach Chris Petersen researches legendary coaches like Bobby Dodd, he wonders what their secret was.

“They’re not secrets,” Petersen said. “They’re principles. (Dodd) was so into graduation. This was 50 years ago — and nobody talked about that. He was so far ahead of the curve in terms of doing stuff right.”

Petersen will receive the 2010 Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award on Saturday night during a banquet at the Boise Centre on The Grove, called “An Evening with Coach Pete.” Tickets are sold out, with a crowd of 800-plus expected.

The award is based partly on the Broncos’ success in 2010 but is considered more of a cumulative honor — and the criteria are Dodd’s principles of scholarship, leadership and integrity.

Petersen is 61-5 in five seasons as a head coach. He’s the first coach since World War II to win at least 90 percent of his games in his first five years and he has received a national coach of the year award in three of those seasons.

“He was just a natural (for the award),” said Bill Curry, the Georgia State coach who played for Dodd, won the award in 1989 at Alabama and now serves as the organization’s president. “… If you look at our track record and our winners — we haven’t been perfect, and there have been a couple of mistakes where maybe we didn’t do as much homework as we could have — but virtually everyone on there has stood for the right things his whole career.”

Dodd was the starting quarterback at Tennessee from 1928 to 1930 and a coach at Georgia Tech from 1931 to 1966, the last 22 as head coach. He was 165-64-8. He died in 1988.

Petersen remembers hearing about Dodd as a boy but did more research into his career after he was named the award winner Dec. 31.

“The more you learn about him the more humbled and proud you are to have your program’s name associated with it,” Petersen said. “His whole thing was scholarship, integrity and leadership. It’s so many of the same things that we talk about around here.”

Curry, who played at Georgia Tech in the early 1960s, says Dodd insisted on “a more noble purpose” to his football teams. He emphasized academics and personal growth and, at a time when other top programs recruited and discarded players in bunches, he promised his players they would stay if they were committed.

Curry liked the idea of playing for Dodd in part because he figured he might need some “extra academic attention.”

He got just that when he missed a class as a freshman.

“I found myself running up and down the stadium steps until I decided chemistry at 8 in the morning was a wonderful thing,” Curry said.

Petersen has been similarly dedicated to education. He established a policy through which players could be stripped of their complimentary game tickets for missing classes. Boise State football led the WAC in the most recent Academic Progress Rates and ranked in the top 20 percent nationally.

The Broncos’ annual goal — posted in the football facility — is to win the conference championship and a bowl game “with class, integrity and academic excellence.”

All of the Broncos’ achievements — and all of those responsible for them — will be honored at the banquet.

“The Bobby Dodd Foundation gets this, that it’s not about the head coach,” Petersen said. “The head coach gets to put his name on it. He’s the lucky guy who gets to collect the hardware. … This is not a banquet for me. This is a banquet for us, for Bronco Nation and for this university.”