Since arriving at Boise State in 2021, Jeramiah Dickey has overseen 52 individual and team conference championships, a return to the College Football Playoff, the highest single-semester cumulative GPA in school history at 3.5, fourteen consecutive football sellouts, and more than $220 million in fundraising. The Bronco Athletic Association has grown to over 10,500 members. The Lyle Smith Society, which launched with a goal of reaching 100 members, now sits above 300.

On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, Boise State’s Director of Athletics joined host Tommy Ahlquist and co-host Travis Hawkes of Capital Eleven for a wide-ranging conversation about how that happened, what’s genuinely broken in college athletics right now, and why he believes Boise State has only scratched the surface of what it can become.

The What’s Next Mindset

Dickey’s operating philosophy has become well enough known around Boise that Ahlquist admitted to borrowing it for his own business. “What’s Next” isn’t a slogan. It’s a discipline, and by Dickey’s own account it borders on a compulsion.

The North End Zone project, a facility that will open this football season and that Hawkes predicts will genuinely surprise fans when they see it, was conceived and pushed through years ago. Dickey has barely looked at it. He mentioned that he doesn’t visit the construction site often enough that his team gives him a hard time about it.

“Part of it is the competitiveness of I can’t let myself get to the place of complacency,” he said. “I don’t like looking at the successes. I’m more concerned about my failures and then what’s next.”

Hawkes traced his own first impression of Dickey to the introductory press conference, where the new athletic director said that whatever Boise State didn’t have, they would go out and get. That framing, Hawkes noted, was a genuine departure from how the program had historically talked about its constraints, and it has defined everything since.

Why College Athletics Feels Broken

The most candid section of the conversation came when Hawkes, a Boise State alum and donor, admitted that his optimism about Boise State remains high while his optimism about college athletics as an industry does not.

Dickey didn’t soften the assessment. Between NIL, revenue sharing, conference realignment, and a steady stream of litigation, the current model is not financially sustainable and everyone in the industry knows it. The NCAA has lost much of its regulatory authority. Individual conferences, presidents, and athletic directors are each pursuing their own institutional interests, which makes collective solutions extraordinarily difficult.

What frustrates him most is the widening structural gap between the power conferences and everyone else, and the deliberate distancing that comes with it. He pointed to something as small as a fantasy football product launching for power conference teams only, excluding the Group of Six entirely, as a signal of where the industry is heading.

“Everything that has happened in my career has led to this moment of them trying to distance themselves from who we are,” he said. “We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can accomplish if there were rules and guardrails that would allow us to compete at the highest levels.”

His view on solutions is pragmatic rather than optimistic. Federal legislation, imperfect as any bill is likely to be, may be the only mechanism that can apply across the whole industry. The SCORE Act clearing committee, he noted, was itself a meaningful step given how many previous attempts never got that far. Student athlete representation will also need to be part of whatever structure eventually emerges.

He has also been publicly vocal about all of this in a way that most athletic directors have not, which he admits is uncomfortable and sometimes lonely. But over the past year or so, more ADs and head coaches have started saying publicly what was previously only said behind closed doors. That shift, in his view, is the beginning of something.

The Front Porch of Idaho

One of the more consequential things Dickey has changed since arriving is Boise State Athletics’ relationship with the state.

When he took the job, he discovered that athletic directors hadn’t historically engaged much with the State Board of Education beyond coaching contracts and policy matters, and hadn’t been going to the Capitol to tell the program’s story at all. The state, in other words, simply didn’t have the information.

“It’s hard for me to blame the state when the state had no idea,” he said.

The correction has involved economic impact studies, sustained relationship-building with legislators and the State Board, and a consistent message: Boise State Athletics represents a roughly $350 million economic impact and functions as the front porch of Idaho, the thing the state is nationally and internationally known for alongside potatoes and the blue turf.

Dickey was careful to note that he genuinely wants success for Idaho and Idaho State as well, and that the political rivalry between the state’s institutions has never made sense to him. But Boise State operates at the FBS level, competes nationally, and carries a brand that took decades to build and could not be replicated somewhere else.

“If we lose this brand here, we lose everything,” he said. “The brand is the hardest thing to build.”

Turning Facilities Into Year-Round Revenue

The business innovation that may end up defining Dickey’s tenure has less to do with football than with square footage.

When he arrived, ExtraMile Arena and the Stueckle Sky Center were controlled outside the athletic department and largely underutilized. Dickey made the case for bringing them under one umbrella, and used that consolidation to launch a sports and entertainment operation that has fundamentally changed the department’s revenue picture.

The department is now projecting over 5,000 events this year across public and private bookings. That includes athletic competition, but also concerts, monster truck events, Banana Ball, weddings, funerals, birthday parties, and conferences. Post Malone’s show at Albertsons Stadium was, by Dickey’s account, the largest concert in Idaho history.

The strategic point is that every dollar generated this way is a dollar he doesn’t have to ask a donor for. “It isn’t always about the handouts,” he said. “I’m looking for investment, because there’s value in what we do.” Facilities that were once cost centers are now producing revenue that can flow back into the student athlete experience, revenue sharing, and fan experience investments.

A New President and Locked Arms

The conversation was recorded shortly after Boise State announced Dr. David Hahn as its incoming president, arriving from the University of Arizona where he served as dean of engineering.

Dickey’s enthusiasm was specific and grounded. Hahn’s career has taken him through LSU, Florida, and Arizona, all institutions where athletics operates at significant scale. He answers calls and texts. He understands fundraising. And he’s arriving without the blinders that come from having been inside the institution for years.

“I’m very clear, it’s not me, it’s us,” Dickey said. “We have to be so aligned and together, epic is possible.”

Faith, Family, and the Myth of Balance

Asked how he sustains the pace, Dickey rejected the framing of work-life balance entirely.

“There is no work-life balance. It’s life and what you prioritize,” he said. For him that order is God, family, then the job, and holding it means making genuinely hard choices. He doesn’t have hobbies. His kids’ baseball games are his hobby. He brings them to the office and on trips so they see him as more than a title, and so the student athletes see him as a husband and father rather than just an administrator.

Ahlquist, who has made a similar argument on the podcast before, framed it as letting yourself off the hook on balance and holding yourself accountable on priorities instead. In seasons of intense work, time will never divide evenly. What matters is whether the priorities are straight when you look in the mirror.

Boise State opens the season at Oregon before returning home to face Memphis in the first game at the new North End Zone facility, in a season that also marks 20 years since the Fiesta Bowl, the unveiling of the Kellen Moore statue, and the program’s first year in the Pac-12.

The expectations, as Dickey stated plainly, are championships and a return to the College Football Playoff. He acknowledged that the resource gap is real, borrowing an analogy about showing up to a gunfight with a spoon. Then he added the part that explains the whole conversation: “We will do damage with that spoon.”