The last time Boise State walked into Autzen Stadium, Oregon needed almost every one of the 60 minutes available to finally put the Broncos away.
That 37-34 game in September 2024 has obvious value when looking ahead to Saturday because many of the coaches remain the same and several Boise State players who were on that field are still around. It can also become misleading pretty quickly if we start treating this as a continuation of that game.
This is a different Boise State team.
The easiest difference to identify is Ashton Jeanty, but I think stopping there misses quite a bit. Boise State went 9-5 without him last season, won another Mountain West championship and enters its first season in the rebuilt Pac-12 with enough returning experience that this should not be viewed as some complete rebuild. At the same time, the advanced numbers from 2025 show a team that was much closer to the middle of the FBS than the 2024 College Football Playoff version, and the places where Boise has experience are very different from the places where it is replacing people.
That is where I want to start the first edition of The Scouting Room.
This will be different from a normal game preview. The idea is to look at the opponent before getting too far into what Oregon should or should not do about it. Personnel, production, scheme, efficiency and the numbers underneath the conventional statistics can usually tell us quite a bit about the team Oregon is about to play.
Since this is the season opener, there is one important limitation. There is no meaningful 2026 performance sample yet. SP+, FPI and FEI can give us predictive baselines, and returning-production data can tell us how much of last year is still on the roster, but EPA, success rate and most of the other performance metrics below are describing the 2025 Broncos. Starting next week, we will begin having current-season information to add to that picture.
