Boise State opens fall camp this week. Here are five questions the Broncos must answer.

This time of year comes with familiar feelings for Boise State’s football coaches.

For many of them, Wednesday marks the beginning of their first fall training camp with the Broncos. For others, head coach Andy Avalos included, it’s a homecoming. But no matter how many years they’ve been on The Blue, they were all players at one time, and they remember the feeling in the pit of their stomachs as the season approached.

“The countdown is on,” said co-defensive coordinator and safeties coach Kane Ioane, a former player and coach at Montana, who joined the Broncos’ staff in January. “You always start to get those butterflies and you can start to smell fall right around the corner.”

Former Boise State safety Jeron Johnson is set to begin his first fall camp as a coach. He was hired in January to mentor the Broncos’ cornerbacks, and he’s trying to stay as even keeled as he was as a player.

“We’re going to compete, and it’s football, so we’re going to have fun,” Johnson said. “There’s a sense of urgency now, but it’s still practice. You have to know your assignments, and you can’t get too high and go out there and blow a gasket and forget everything you’re supposed to do.”

Boise State is still trying to master a new offense, and it heads into fall camp with heated position battles raging at quarterback and cornerback, new leadership all the way to the top of the athletic department and a wealth of experience on the field thanks to the extra year of eligibility the NCAA offered because of COVID-19.

They’re also preparing to head to Orlando, Florida, on Sept. 2 for the season opener against UCF, which may prove to be the Broncos’ most important game of the season.

Here’s a look at five questions Boise State has 29 fall practices to answer:

1. Who will start at QB?

The No. 1 question on the minds of fans is who will start at quarterback?

Junior Hank Bachmeier has an 11-2 record as the starter the past two seasons, but he missed time because of injuries his freshman year and after contracting COVID-19 last year.

Redshirt senior Jack Sears joined the team last year after transferring from USC. He was impressive in his debut as the starter — racking up 280 passing yards and four total touchdowns against Air Force — but he suffered an apparent head injury the following week during the Broncos’ first drive against BYU and missed the rest of the season.

Avalos said during Mountain West Media Days that neither quarterback has really separated himself yet, and the decision will be made based on how they perform on the field in the coming weeks. He did say, though, that the coaches should have a pretty good idea who the starter will be after the first 10 practices of fall camp.

“They’re going to continue to compete,” Avalos said. “They’ve done a great job over the summer, not only with continuing to learn and grow and get comfortable in the offense, but in their leadership and how they’re prepping themselves and building confidence in others around them.”

Bachmeier has proven he’s more than capable of leading the offense. The former four-star recruit has thrown for 3,029 yards and 15 touchdowns and completed 62% of his passes in 13 career starts.

Sears also had a four-star rating coming out of high school, and he was impressive in his only appearance in a game during his three years at USC. With the Trojans’ former starter, JT Daniels, and top backup Matt Fink injured in 2018, Sears stepped in against Arizona State and threw for 235 yards and two touchdowns.

Despite his small body of work, Pro Football Focus named Sears an honorable mention preseason all-conference pick, while Bachmeier didn’t make the team.

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2. How will the new offense look?

No matter who takes the snaps, they’ll be running a new scheme that offensive coordinator Tim Plough brought with him from UC Davis.

The Broncos didn’t show much of the playbook during the spring game in April, and Avalos was guarded at media days when asked how the new offense will differ from what the team has run in the past.

“In between snaps, the urgency and tempo will be different on both sides of the ball,” he said, adding the offense won’t be as personnel driven as in the past. “Every play won’t be based on specific personnel or for a specific guy. We’ve got concepts and whoever is in is going to run that concept really well.”

At UC Davis, most of those concepts revolved around throwing the ball. Under Plough’s direction in 2017, the Aggies led the Big Sky Conference with 484.7 yards of offense and 384.3 passing yards a game and set more than 20 program records. They led the conference with 322.8 passing yards a game in 2018, and ranked No. 3 in 2019 with 309.2.

Plough said it’s not all going to be about the passing game, though. He wants Boise State to get back to what historically made it such a tough team to play. That’s controlling the line of scrimmage with a physical running game.

“Let’s make sure we are a physical football team,” Plough said. “Let’s make sure we have that mentality to win late in games and late in the season. You have to be able to run the football to do that. It starts with building that mentality up front and building that mentality with the backs.”

3. Which transfers will make an early impact?

Improving the running game means dependable depth in the backfield. The Broncos learned that the hard way last fall after they lost starting running back George Holani to a knee injury in the second game of the season and ended the year ranked last in the Mountain West with 107.1 rushing yards a game.

Boise State was also without junior college transfer Taequan Tyler, who missed last season with an Achilles tendon injury he suffered in the preseason, and veteran running back Robert Mahone, who was suspended after an arrest for domestic battery and eventually left the team.

Tyler is expected to be full go in camp, and the Broncos hope to have addressed the lack of depth in the backfield with the addition of former Oregon running back Cyrus Habibi-Likio. He’s one of six transfers who joined the team this year and has a chance to see the field early.

Habibi-Likio left Oregon with 21 career rushing touchdowns. He was used primarily as a short-yardage back, but Boise State running backs coach Winston Venable isn’t putting any limits on what he can do for the Broncos.

“He has a bigger build, but he moves really well,” Venable said. “He’s not just a big, bruising running back. He’s very agile, and he’s a versatile player who can catch the ball out of the backfield.”

Boise State also added a trio of cornerbacks this offseason in Caleb Biggers — a veteran of 19 career starts at Bowling Green — Jalen Neal, who spent last season at San Bernardino Valley College in California, and Jared Reed, who spent the past two seasons at Utah State after transferring from Portland State.

The Broncos are looking for two new starters at cornerback after Avery Williams was picked by the Atlanta Falcons in the fifth round of this year’s NFL Draft and Jalen Walker decided not to join the eight super seniors that took the NCAA up on its offer of an extra year.

Markel Reed, a junior, spent the past two seasons as the top backup to Williams and Walker, and he’s expected to land one of those starting spots this year. The question is will one of the transfers claim the other one, or will it be one of the Broncos’ young cornerbacks, such as Kaonohi Kaniho or Isaiah Bradford?

“Our whole group is working hard and busting their butts out there,” Johnson said. “I’m excited to see them compete. It’s going to be a battle, and I’m excited to see it.”

The Broncos added two other transfers from Power Five programs this offseason: Linebacker Andrew Faoliu, who left Oregon with four career sacks and has two year of eligibility remaining, and tight end Kurt Rafdal — a 6-foot-7, 245-pound graduate student from Nebraska.

4. Are the Broncos ready for UCF?

The prize at the end of what is sure to be plenty of grueling practices is a nationally televised game at UCF. The coaches and players are all saying the right things about focusing on the here and now, but it’s hard to imagine they aren’t already thinking about the game that could determine the course of their entire season.

“It’s great having a big matchup like that is week one,” Boise State defensive back Kekaula Kaniho said at media days. “You have all of fall camp to prepare for them, so when we get there, we’ll roll the dice and see how it shakes out.”

The game in the Golden Knights’ stadium — which is known as the Bounce House — may be the most anticipated Group of Five game this season. It’s scheduled to be broadcast on ESPN and will kick off at 5 p.m. MT.

UCF and Boise State have both cemented their status as two of the top G5 programs in the country, and a win in the season opener could position either team for a berth in a New Year’s Six bowl game. The Golden Knights played in two in the past four years: the Peach Bowl in 2017 and Fiesta Bowl in 2018. The Broncos haven’t played in a NY6 game since they beat Arizona in the 2014 Fiesta Bowl.

It’s the first time the programs have met on the football field, and the game will feature two new head coaches. Avalos was hired at Boise State in January after he spent two years as the defensive coordinator at Oregon. Gus Malzahn took over at UCF this year after Auburn fired him last December.

It should be quite the test for the Broncos. UCF ranked No. 2 in the country with 568.1 yards of offense last season and No. 8 with 42.2 points a game.

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5. More COVID-19 protocols?

The main thing nobody wants is a repeat of last fall when COVID-19 almost led to the cancellation of the season and left just about every team in the country wondering if they were actually going to play from week to week. Boise State had two regular-season games canceled last fall because of the virus.

Vaccination rates around the Mountain West are promising, according to conference commissioner Craig Thompson, who said at media days that seven of the league’s 12 teams are close to 90% vaccinated. Boise State will not comment on its vaccination rate.

Thompson also issued a stern warning that players or coaches who aren’t vaccinated will have to undergo many of the same testing protocols as last season, and teams that have games canceled because of the virus will not get the chance to make them up and could be on the hook for its opponent’s financial losses.

As of now, no new protocols have been announced by the conference or the NCAA, and the Broncos are scheduled to play a full season. New cases of COVID-19 are on the rise in Idaho and around the country, though. Idaho added 2,259 new cases in the last week of July, and Boise is requiring residents to once again wear masks in government facilities.

Boise State is also strongly advising all members of its campus community — regardless of vaccination status — to wear masks when indoors on campus.

New Boise State Athletic Director Jeramiah Dickey has already unveiled plans to improve the experience during home football games at Albertsons Stadium with alcohol sales, new murals painted on entrances to the stadium and a deal with Verizon that is expected to improve cell service in the stadium. Boise State also announced the launch of its new app on Monday.

It’s all part of Dickey’s push to sell out all six of the Broncos’ scheduled home games. More announcements about their plans are expected in the coming weeks, but nobody in the athletic department can know for sure what impact COVID-19 is going to have on this season. All they can do is come up with contingency plans, offer information on the vaccine to players, coaches and staff members and hope for the best.