Leon Rice knew about the blue turf, the Bowl Championship Series appearances, the well-stuffed football trophy case and all the rest when he took the men’s basketball coaching job at Boise State.

But it took a quick look around the home court his first game as the Broncos’ head coach to drive home the sobering reality of running a basketball program at a football school.

"I came out for the first exhibition game and you could have fired a cannon in there and not hurt anyone," Rice recalled. "I mean, you could have heard the crickets in the upper balcony. There was just no one there. We knew we had a challenge ahead of us."

Though the basketball arena sits not much more than a first down from Bronco Stadium, it might as well have been miles away in the sporting public’s mind.

Three seasons later the crickets are no longer audible at Taco Bell Arena and firing anything more than 3-point shots is ill-advised in a facility where 8,234 turned out for the Broncos’ last home game.

Boise State is still a football school, but as the Broncos come to the Hawaiian Airlines Diamond Head Classic for their opener Sunday against Hawaii, the shadow is no longer as deep or as daunting.

While the 8-4 football team, which will appear in next Tuesday’s Sheraton Hawaii Bowl against Oregon State, failed to secure at least a share of its conference championship for just the third time in 12 seasons, the 8-2 hoopsters are projected to contend for the Mountain West Conference title this season. The two losses have been to No. 11 Kentucky and Diamond Head-bound St. Mary’s.

BASKETBALL IS well on track for its third season of 20-plus victories in the past four years and last year registered the fifth best rise in average attendance, from 4,367 to 6,394, among 350 NCAA Division I programs.

Those are no small accomplishments at a school where basketball was something people marginally paid attention to and even then only as a filler between the end of the bowl season and the start of spring football. Especially since it involved a jump to the MWC from the WAC one season after Rice’s arrival from Gonzaga, where he had been an assistant coach.

But last year a young Broncos team made its breakthrough, going 21-11 and earning an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. This year Boise State returns all five starters.

"We just did it kind of brick by brick and just kept building on the little successes that we had," Rice said. "And, people watched us and liked our style of play, liked the ways our guys scrapped, hustled and fought. And it has just grown and grown and grown."

But can Boise State be a basketball school, too? "There is no question it could be both," Rice maintains. "We can have a great football program and a great basketball program and I think our administration understands that. We’re going to make an investment in both of them. This is a city that needs both of them to be good. That’s why I’m here and that’s why Coach (Bryan) Harsin came back, too. We know that we both have something special."

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.