Bronco Nation's offseason hibernation in full swing

Nap time!

With the 2008 Boise State football season coming to a close, many Bronco fans are turning off their TV sets, disconnecting their dial-up Internet, and packing it in until football resumes in earnest next fall. The "Whose House?" guy is going back to his day job as a barker. The Blue Turf Towel guy is boning up on copyright law. And David Augusto is talking himself into the Idaho Steelheads.

It is the offseason, and it is time to take a break.

At least, that seems to be the prevailing wisdom from everyone we know who owns a car flag. The local media seems to be taking five, too. We have gone a full week without an update to Chadd Cripe's Bronco Beat blog. The Idaho Press-Tribune's Boise State page is starting to look an awful lot like its barren Idaho Angler page. And don't even get us started on Dustin Lapray. We have nothing to say to him.

Where is the passion of two weeks ago? Where is the conversation, the debate, and the news? Oh, wait. We found it. It's sleeping in the corner.

To a certain extent, we understand where everyone is coming from. We just experienced one of the most intense, exciting Bronco seasons in history, and it all came to a crashing halt with a close loss. Had the Broncos won, we could have continued talking about undefeated seasons, BCS injustices, and the impending wallop that Alabama will put on Utah. But instead, no one has anything else to say except, "Wait until next year."

And that seems to be all anyone has said. Savvy Bronco fans know that this season of excellence was in no way intended to be so excellent. The real Bronco machine will hit the field next year and the year after that and the year after that. It is beyond exciting to picture what next season will be like, but next season just happens to be over 200 days away. Is it too soon to start that countdown calendar?

We hate to imagine the morass of months without football that await once bowl season ends. Coach Pete hasn't spoken to us in days, Kellen Moore is slowly starting to fade from our Google News updates, and we don't know what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to take naps!

So we'll keep doing the same thing we've done for the past year: blog it out. Just because nothing new is happening with Boise State football doesn't mean that nothing new will happen at OBNUG. We have the first annual NUGie awards to hand out in early January. There is Letter of Intent Day in February (surprise! the entire recruiting class is in our sidebar) and spring practice in the spring. Graham Watson will be keeping us entertained all summer either by picking Nevada as her preseason WAC favorite or by getting fired thanks to a smear campaign by an anonymous website. There's a public enemy to determine, a Hall of Fame to fill, and hundreds more memories to make. Like the kid from the Disneyland commercial, we're too excited to sleep!

We might not bring the big guns with seven or eight posts per day, but who was really reading all that stuff anyway? We mean, besides our parents. OBNUG will keep the blue and orange flag flying until it leads to burnout followed by therapy followed by relapse blogging followed by institutionalization followed by J Bates taking over the blog. It will at least be more entertaining than twiddling our thumbs until fall camp.

If you are one of the many Bronco fans who take a break this time of year before gearing up for the next season in the summer, may your vacation be one of rest and renewal. And feel free to drop in on us throughout your sabbatical or catch up with us again once the season starts (provided the aforementioned burnout cycle has not happened).

For the rest of you Bronco fans who need Boise State news and opinion as if it were bottled water, we're here for you. And unless someone spikes our Bubble Up with Dramamine, we'll be awake all offseason long.