Statue Left: A Mizzou assistant's connection to history

When Bush Hamdan heard head coach Chris Petersen’s play call, his stomach sank. Hamdan, then a redshirt sophomore backup quarterback for Boise State, could only watch from the sidelines as the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, an instant classic in the most prestigious bowl game in program history, came down to a single play.

To that point, Boise State had more than held its own against perennial power Oklahoma. The Broncos jumped out to a three-score lead, only to have Oklahoma score 25 unanswered points in the second half. Boise State forced overtime on a miraculous hook-and-ladder play that went for a 50-yard touchdown on fourth and 18. Now, after another trick play scored a touchdown on fourth down to bring the Broncos within one point, Petersen called for his offense to go for two.

The call: Statue Left.

Hamdan’s nerves didn’t stem from a lack of faith in the play call. In fact, earlier in the game, he and fellow backup quarterback Taylor Tharp had contacted Petersen over the headsets each wore during games and suggested the play could work against Oklahoma’s fast, aggressive defense. But Hamdan hadn’t envisioned Petersen dusting off the gadget play in a moment of this magnitude. Had it failed, he would have felt partially responsible.

“I just remember myself and Taylor Tharp, the other quarterback, just being like, no, you can’t call that right now!” Hamdan, now the quarterbacks and wide receivers coach at Missouri, recalled. “Just because we were young and we felt we made this recommendation.”

By now, you know the result. Quarterback Jared Zabransky took a shotgun snap, pump-faked hard to the right side of the formation with his empty right hand while concealing the ball behind his back with his left. Tailback Ian Johnson took the handoff and scampered untouched into the end zone. Boise State won 43-42. Johnson proposed to his girlfriend, a Boise State cheerleader, on the turf amid the celebration. The Statue of Liberty play immediately became the stuff of legend: the signature moment from one of the most famous games in college football history.

“Sure enough, it worked,” Hamdan said with a chuckle, “and you know, when it works you’re like, ‘yeah, see, I told you.’”

Hamdan never started a game during his five seasons at Boise State. He attempted just 18 passes during his playing career. But he left a mark on his teammates and coaches, who said he played a role in the Broncos amassing a 55-9 record and becoming a nationally-recognized program during his career. Dan Hawkins, now the head coach at California-Davis, recruited Hamdan to Boise State and coached him for two seasons. He called Hamdan a “phenomenal” teammate.

“Just always had an effervescence about him, a joy for life, and really good teammate,” Hawkins said. “I mean, he loved football and understood football, studied it, worked really hard. It meant a lot to him.”

Hamdan’s time at Boise State also laid the groundwork for a career in coaching. As a backup quarterback, Hamdan helped out with game-planning between games, watching film with the other quarterbacks and conversing with the coaching staff about what might be successful against certain defensive looks. During games, he wore a headset, signaled in play calls to the offense and talked with the starting quarterback after each series.

Zabransky, who started at Boise State from 2004-2006, said he knew Hamdan had the makings of a future coach. Zabransky never enjoyed the game-planning side of practice like Hamdan; he just wanted to play. Plus, Hamdan had a knack for picking up on things during games that Zabranksy had missed.

“He could see stuff extremely well,” Zabransky said. “I’d come off the sideline and he’d be like, ‘Hey, did you see this? Did you see this safety kind of tipping this coverage?’”

It was a combination of film study and in-game observation that led Hamdan to recommend the Statue of Liberty play call. Oklahoma’s defense was faster than the Bronco offense and identified plays quickly, so Hamdan entered the game knowing Boise State would need to utilize misdirection — and specifically, the Statue of Liberty play. “Sometimes you go into games and you just kind of go, we’re going to get that call off,” he said. After the Sooners quickly sniffed out a few screen passes during the game, Hamdan knew the trick play would work.

“I think in the third quarter, (Tharp) and I were like, man, we should really come back with statue, because they were over-playing the screen pass, and we ended up telling Petersen that,” Hamdan said. “It’s normally pretty horrific in a game, you never want to press the button to tell a coach something, but we decided to tell him that.”

It should be noted that Hamdan wasn’t placing his faith in something the coaching staff had just drawn up during bowl practices. Boise State had been practicing a few trick plays throughout the season, the Statue of Liberty among them. They had also run the play earlier in the season, gaining a first down against Idaho. According to Zabransky, the play fooled the defense without fail.

“Our scout team ... were smart guys,” Zabransky said. “They would run to a spot or they would cover a receiver that was going to get the ball, or a pick or a rub, if we had some sort of a specialty play on, and they never got this play right, man. I’m telling you, like, not a single time. So when we’re able to have that much success with a play over and over and over again, you know you have something extremely special.”

Zabransky remembers that the coaching staff actually took Hamdan’s recommendation almost immediately, calling for the Statue of Liberty in the third or fourth quarter. In what ultimately wound up being a fortunate break for the Broncos, they got called for a pre-snap penalty and the call had to be changed. While Hamdan was nervous when Petersen circled back to the play call for the decisive two-point conversion, Zabransky and the rest of the offensive huddle — perhaps buoyed by the success of the two other trick plays — felt confident.

“We knew it was going to work,” Zabransky said. “After that, it was all about just making sure that the handoff was secured, you’re making sure that everybody’s lined up and you’re not false-starting, that sort of a thing.”

Boise State’s victory capped off the first undefeated season in program history and catapulted what had been a very good program under Hawkins and Dirk Koetter to a national power under Petersen, then a first-year head coach. Petersen guided the Broncos to a record of 86-12 and from the Western Athletic Conference to the Mountain West during his eight seasons in Boise.

The Broncos’ run also helped launch the careers of several prominent coaches. Even more so than his backup quarterback duties, Hamdan points to the coaching connections he made and examples he followed during his time at Boise as reasons he entered the profession. Bryan Harsin, who coached tight ends for Boise State from 2002-2005 and coached Hamdan and the quarterbacks from 2006-2010, is entering his seventh season as the Broncos’ head coach. Justin Wilcox, formerly the defensive coordinator at Boise State, now coaches California. Petersen went on from Boise State to Washington for six seasons before his surprise retirement in January.

Hamdan isn’t even the only member of his position group to go on to coaching success. Mike Sanford Jr., a senior quarterback during Hamdan’s redshirt freshman year at Boise, now serves as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach under P.J. Fleck at Minnesota. Kellen Moore, who beat out Hamdan, then a fifth-year senior, for the starting job prior to the 2008 season, is the offensive coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys and one of the hottest young assistants in the NFL coaching market.

Not only did Hamdan essentially receive a master’s class in coaching from his staff and peers at Boise State, the connections he forged have helped him on his coaching journey. Hawkins gave him his first coaching job as a graduate assistant at Colorado in 2009. Harsin hired him to coach quarterbacks and serve as co-offensive coordinator when he was the head coach of Arkansas State in 2013. There, he met his current boss, Missouri coach Eliah Drinkwitz. Hamdan spent four of the past five seasons coaching under Petersen at Washington, with a one-season break during which he coached quarterbacks for the Atlanta Falcons.

“At the time I was at Boise State, which was 2004-2008, there was like something in the water,” Hamdan said. “ ... I think there was just a little bit of weighing out the options of, okay, am I going to get into another field and it might take me three, four years to make the same contacts that I’m just leaving college with as a college football coach?”

Even from afar, Zabransky said he can still see some of the staples of Boise State’s culture in Hamdan. He described Hamdan as “detail-oriented,” “team-first” and a “grinder.” Hamdan said never winning the starting quarterback job as a player gave him a chip on his shoulder he has carried into his coaching career, motivating him to take on the challenges of coaching at nine different places in the past 12 years. The years he spent under Petersen at Washington — 2015-16 and 2018-19, mark the only times in his coaching career he worked in the same place two seasons in a row. He lost his job after Petersen stepped down and accepted a position at Missouri on Jan. 1.

“I think maybe because of that, it’s maybe fueled me in my coaching career, maybe put an even bigger chip on my shoulder to kind of prove myself,” Hamdan said. “I’m not sure I would have as big a chip had I had a better playing career, if that makes sense.”

Now, more than a decade removed from the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, Hamdan downplays his contribution to the Statue of Liberty call. Through the years, he says, the story has gotten “blown out of proportion a bit.” But it’s impossible to diminish the significance of that play and that game — to Hamdan, to Boise State and to college football as a whole. The Broncos’ upset of Oklahoma added more fuel to arguments that the BCS system be disbanded in favor of a college football playoff, which, of course, came to fruition in 2014. It helped launch Petersen to stardom and to create a nationwide appetite for coaches with Boise State ties, which gave Hamdan better contacts within the industry.

Hamdan noted that, even if Boise State had simply protected its 18-point lead and won the game by two scores, it likely wouldn’t have brought so much attention to the Boise program. As it is, no matter what Hamdan goes on to accomplish at Missouri or elsewhere in his coaching career, it will be difficult to top his connection to the Statue of Liberty as his claim to fame.

“It’s funny how everything works out,” Hamdan said. “Had we won that game by two or three touchdowns, or had we lost the game by two or three touchdowns, it certainly wouldn’t have given us the notoriety that we got with it being such a close game and having to pull those plays off.”