Idaho Vandals Football Program Covers Collection

Contents: About the Collection | About Idaho Football | Sources | Tech

About the Collection

This collection contains over 50 years of game-day program covers, spanning 1908-1967. The programs include games outside of Idaho as well as home games in Moscow.

Programs include games against:

About Idaho Football

The University of Idaho football team began in 1893 and adopted the mascot “Vandals” in 1917. The team currently competes in the Big Sky Conference in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA).¹

Since 1893, the team has only missed five seasons:²

• 1896: no team
• 1898: no games were played
• 1918: season cancelled due to World War I
• 1943: season cancelled due to World War II
• 1944: season cancelled due to World War II

NCAA Membership

The team played in the NCAA Division I-AA (now FCS) between 1978-1995. During that time, the team attended the playoffs 11 times and appeared in the national semifinals twice (1988, 1993).¹

The team played in the NCAA Division I-A (now FBS) between 1996-2017.³ During this time, the team appeared in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl (formerly the Humanitarian Bowl) three times and won every time (1998, 2009, 2016).

In 2016, university President Chuck Staben “announced the football program would return to the Big Sky and FCS in 2018. This followed the Sun Belt Conference’s announcement on March 1 that the associate membership of Idaho and New Mexico State for football would end after the 2017 season. Idaho is the first FBS program to voluntarily drop to FCS.”¹

Conference Membership

The team has a complex history of conference membership:¹

Rivalries

The football team has 4 rivalries¹

• Boise State University
  • This rivalry began in 1971 and continued through 2010. Idaho won 12 straight years between 1982-1993, then Boise won 12 straight years between 1999-2010.
• Idaho State University
  • The rivalry between these two schools was known as the Battle of the Domes and was most competitive in the 1970s-1980s. The two teams didn’t meet between 2008-2018, but “the series was revived in 2018 when Idaho dropped back to FCS and rejoined the Big Sky Conference in football (its other sports rejoined in 2014).”
• University of Montana
  • This rivalry, known as the Little Brown Stein game, began in 1938 during their 25th match.
• Washington State University
  • This rivalry, known as the Battle of the Palouse, began in 1894. Since both schools are “in close proximity, from 1938 to 1968 there was a tradition called “The Loser’s Walk,” where during the week following the game students of the losing school would walk from their own campus to the winners’ campus, then receive rides back home from the winning side….In 1954, the walk made national news when about 2,000 students from Washington State College made the trek east from Pullman to Moscow after the Cougars lost to Idaho for the first time in 29 years.”

Notable Players

As of 2020, 16 players have advanced to the NFL and 6 have advanced to the CFL in the program’s history.¹ 11 players went on to be college or professional football coaches.¹

Stadium

Between 1937-1968, Idaho football games were held at the wooden Neale Stadium. It was demolished and replaced with the concrete William H. Kibbie-ASUI Activity Center (commonly known as the Kibbie Dome) in 1971. The Kibbie Dome has “just 16,000 permanent seats,” making it “the second smallest home stadium for college football in Division I FBS (formerly Division I-A).”⁴ It is likely that prior to Neale Stadium, football games were played on MacLean Field.⁵

Sources