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At almost the same moment on an August afternoon that West Virginia played its season opener against Penn State, beginning a journey that now finds it two wins from its first national championship, the teams best player was otherwise occupied winning an Olympic bronze medal a hemisphere away.As the Mountaineers concluded that first week with a game against Buffalo, Kadeisha Buchanan instead soaked in the Olympic closing ceremonies in Rio de Janeiro. She even met Usain Bolt.Which is to say that from the outset this season, Buchanan ran in different circles than your typical college senior.Different circles than even your typical All-American, for that matter.But it is what Buchanan has done since arriving back in Morgantown from Rio that makes the defender espnWs national player of the year. After a tie in their opening game without her, the Mountaineers have gone 21-1-1 with her in the lineup. They shut out the Big 12 for an entire conference season, allowing nary a goal in eight consecutive games. They earned the programs first No. 1 seed and survived both snow and foes to reach their first College Cup.Center backs rarely get to be stars. The position is responsible as much for defusing highlights before they occur as creating them in their own right. But already a World Cup and Olympic veteran for Canada at the age of 21, Buchanan cant help but be the center of attention for West Virginia. Her command of a craft stands out like, well, Bolt sprinting away from the pack in Rio. None of her peers do it as well as she does it.She is a soccer mind, West Virginia coach Nikki Izzo-Brown said. Shes commanding. She knows where everyone needs to be. Shes directing, shes orchestrating. Coaches will always tell you that they need great leadership to be successful, and thats exactly what we have in Keisha back there.It is difficult to quantify what makes a defender special, let alone the best player in the nation. Though they may score goals, as Buchanan has three times this season, and make themselves useful on set pieces, compiling statistics isnt a center backs primary work. Beyond the mere eye test, assessing Buchanan is a process of deduction. West Virginia has the second-stingiest defense in the nation. Buchanan is the teams best defender, backed up by an international pedigree that includes being named the best young player in the 2015 World Cup and a member of FIFAs all-star team for that tournament.Someone to whom all that applies, who North Carolina coach Anson Dorrance suggested might be the best center back in the nation -- a few weeks into her freshman season -- must be pretty good, right?Yet no matter how brilliant her soccer mind or impressive her athleticism, a defender will struggle to excel alone. Maybe more than any other position, a center back is dependent on the collective. And it is in that regard that Buchanan has grown from an amazing talent into a world-class player. Gone is the quiet reserve of a 17-year-old freshman who just wanted to play, not speak or lead.When shes telling someone to move, theyre moving, Izzo-Brown said of what she sees now. And people respond so well to her, and understand that she knows the game so well, that she is our fourth coach out there. ...Its like having a coach behind your team coaching.Even if leading from behind isnt exactly what Buchanan hoped for in Morgantown. It may be a myth that a frustrated striker inhabits the soul of every great defender, but Buchanan wont help dispel it. She had already debuted for the senior Canadian national team by the time she arrived at West Virginia, having previously earned a reputation as an up-and-coming defender on youth national teams. So she knew her role in college would likely follow that same route. But with a veteran back line already in place for the Mountaineers, the former striker for her club team hoped she might get some of the goals for herself.Those dreams died very quickly, Buchanan said. I knew coming into West Virginia that I was going to play center back. I kind of wanted to play forward, but Coach didnt let me. I got over it.Her tongue-in-cheek tone made it clear it wasnt an entirely serious lament. Not entirely.But twice this season the Mountaineers have needed Buchanan to revive her old skills.Down 2-0 at halftime against TCU in the Big 12 tournament final, matching the number of goals they conceded in the 12 games immediately preceding that contest, the Mountaineers pushed Buchanan into the attack in the second half. With a little more than a minute remaining in regulation, she scored the tying goal that brought on overtime and teammate Ashley Lawrences eventual winner.That was a game the Mountaineers very much wanted, the opportunity to sweep the conference tournament and regular-season titles. Then, when Buchanan stepped to a snowy spot as the fifth and final Mountaineer in a Sweet 16 penalty shootout against UCLA, a goal was a necessity.In a shootout for the first time since the 2014 tournament, when West Virginia lost to Georgetown, Buchanan lined up an attempt. Izzo-Brown said she asked Buchanan if she wanted to be on the list of takers. Buchanan didnt hesitate. She drilled the ball into the net, turned and leaped into the air as onrushing teammates swarmed her.West Virginia is most comfortable when its season is at her feet.Although she knew of the College Cup growing up -- plenty of Canadian national team players were veterans of NCAA championships in the United States -- it wasnt until a second-round loss against Virginia Tech her freshman year that she fully felt its importance. It is the biggest prize she can win in this uniform.Ive got to get one before I leave, Buchanan recalled thinking.She has since starred in a World Cup on home soil and won a bronze medal in the Olympics.And in her final college season, the best player in the nation has done all she can to give herself a chance at a different trophy. 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In his suite at Papa Johns Cardinal Stadium, University of Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich is talking about the schools commitment to its football team, which will rise as high as third in the country before losing to Houston in November. He keeps talking while Lamar Jackson, the sophomore quarterback who won this years Heisman Trophy, squirts through an opening and gallops over half the field before someone brings him down. Its nothing Jurich hasnt seen before.Louisvilles opponent is no patsy. The previous week, NC State had nearly upset Clemson. The week before, it beat Notre Dame. Still, the Wolfpack have as much chance of halting Bobby Petrinos offense as grounding the UPS planes that seem to leave nearby Louisville International every two minutes. At halftime, Louisville leads 44-0.When Jurich arrived at Louisville in 1997, football was an embarrassment. The Cardinals were in the midst of a 1-10 season. The last AD had imported Howard Schnellenberger to work the magic hed worked at Miami, but after more than 100 games and a losing record, Schnellenberger fled for Oklahoma. Thered been talk at one point of dropping football, says Billy Reed, the former Courier-Journal columnist and unofficial U of L historian.Instead, Jurich went all in. He scheduled games for Tuesdays and Wednesdays to get on television. He courted wealthy donors, with or without school ties. He hired Petrino, whod concocted a powerhouse offense at Auburn. And then, after Petrino left for a succession of jobs -- one of which ended with his being fired following an illicit relationship with an employee -- Jurich hired him again.Thats one way to succeed at college football, where field houses can feel like luxury hotels and the offensive coordinator often earns more than the governor. The other? Get real. Know who you are. Of the 128 universities in the NCAAs Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, perhaps a hundred have no shot at No. 1. Even in the Power 5 conferences, says Jim Livengood, the former AD at UNLV, Arizona and Washington State, there are teams that will eventually struggle to keep up.If those schools cant devote the necessary resources to FBS football, Livengood insists, they need to wean themselves from it before it bankrupts them. Football has brought dozens of FBS athletic departments to the precipice of fiscal mismanagement as they try to compete with the 16 percent of athletic departments that actually turn a profit, even as the cost of facilities, coaches and travel grows exponentially.Among the 128, one has waved the white flag. After being booted from the Sun Belt Conference, the University of Idaho announced this past spring that it was taking the unprecedented step of leaving the FBS. In 2018, it will rejoin the Big Sky, which plays in the Football Championship Subdivision, what used to be known as Division I-AA. Its coach? Bobby Petrinos brother.Idaho never fit in the Sun Belt. Trips to the Deep South for Troy and South Alabama bumped rivals Montana and Idaho State off the schedule. But if that was a hard road, staying solvent without bowl ties and TV revenue would be even harder. Idaho has gone 1-11 or 2-10 five times in the past decade. Its fan base is clustered five hours south in Boise. Its corporate donors are nearly nonexistent. Its athletic budget is $15 million, about one-sixth of Louisvilles $94 million. For head football coach Paul Petrino to have a chance of success, AD Rob Spear notes, the school needs to invest $5 million in his program.We cant pay that, he says. And maybe we shouldnt.LETS COUNT THE journalists in attendance for Paul Petrinos Tuesday afternoon news conference. Theres one. And another, the kid in front. Is that a third, in the fleece? Nah, shes the SID. Theyll ask Petrino questions in a 150-seat auditorium, but they could have done it in his pickup on the way to lunch.It isnt that college football is unpopular in Moscow, Idaho. Were passionate, city council member Gina Taruscio says. Some of us to a fault. There just arent many media outlets on the Palouse, as the fertile land that rolls south and east from Spokane is called. There arent many people either. Moscow and Pullman, Washington, separated by 8 miles of nothing and a state line, combine for a population of about 55,000, not including students. Pullman has Washington State, which plays in the Pac-12. And where does that leave Idaho? In a tough spot, Jurich says. Severely handcuffed because of geography.It makes you wonder what the Vandals were thinking when they decided to play Division I football. Boise State, says Mark Schlereth, the ESPN analyst who played football at Idaho in the 1980s. Plain and simple.A junior college until 1965, Boise had the good fortune to be located in the capital, where the people are -- as well as the Albertsons money, from the grocery chain that was founded there. It had a blue turf field and enough ambition for two universities. What it didnt have was a good football team. A dozen straight years, from 1982 to 1993, the Vandals beat the Broncos. I played in the Big Sky, says Jurich, who kicked at Northern Arizona. Idaho was the premier team. Boise State was an afterthought.If Boise State could hang with Americas best teams, the feeling was, surely Idaho could. So when the Broncos announced their intention to join the Big West in 1994, Idaho followed. I thought they were crazy, Schlereth says now. In Boise, you have the community, the infrastructure and the money to make this work. You can recruit a bunch of these kids who would have been Pac-10 players but couldnt get eligible at Cal, at Stanford, at USC. We dont have the facilities. We dont have the infrastructure. We dont have the money. Were doomed to fail. I get why they did it. I just never thought it was a great idea.Paul Petrino was already there in 1994, coaching receivers and running backs, when the announcement was made. Hed been hired on the recommendation of his brother, who worked at Idaho before heading up the ladder to Arizona State. Before that, Paul had followed Bobby, who is six years older, to Capital High in Helena, Montana, as an option quarterback. Then he spurned interest from Air Force and followed him to Carroll College, where their father, Bob Petrino, coached. As a coachs kid, you understand that your family is happy or sad a lot of times based on whether Dads team wins, he says. I knew that by playing for him, we were going to win. So my dad was going to be happy.Bob Sr. hadnt planned on a career at Carroll. He lobbied for the Montana and Montana State jobs, but his own ladder extended only so high. I dont think his ambition was any different than my brothers or mine, Paul says. It just turned out different. Bob planted a flag in Helena, a city about Moscows size. He won 15 conference championships, reached the NAIA semifinals three times with Paul at quarterback and set in motion a program that would win six national titles in a decade. The greatest statement I ever heard my dad make, says Bobby Petrino, was You make the big time wherever youre at.Think those words are echoing now? Paul followed his brother from job to job, Idaho to Louisville to the Atlanta Falcons to Arkansas, working as an assistant when Bobby was a coordinator, a coordinator when Bobby was head coach. They were a great team, the two of them. Hes an unbelievable coach, Bobby says. A great motivator. His style, his aggressiveness, the way he goes about his business on the practice field. I wish I was with him every day. But Paul and his wife, Maya, had a timetable. By the time the twins were ready for high school, hed have a team to run. We missed it by a year, Paul says.When Spear called in 2013, Paul remembered Idaho as the friendly place hed left two decades before. And sure, the students still hang out at the beer bars along Main Street and play Frisbee on the lawn that runs the length of campus. But college football had changed irrevocably, and it left Idaho behind. The Kibbie Domes 16,000 capacity is the FBSs second smallest, about one-seventh the size of Michigans Big House. Ticket sales when he arrived grossed less than $500,000, compared with top programs that were making more than $30 million. Morale was low; the teams GPA was lower. I didnt know it was going to be as hard as it was, Paul says. Its been as hard as anything you ever do in your life.At Louisville and Arkansas, the Petrinos set their sights on becoming No. 1. That isnt happening at Idaho. At best you go to a bowl, which the Vandals have done twice before this season, in 1998 and 2009. Each time, they traveled to Boise for the Humanitarian Bowl, where they dont exactly hand out leis. This year, after an 8-4 finish, the Vandals again headed to Boise, to the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl on Thursday. A real bowl experience, the kind you tell your grandkids about, was Pauls goal.So when university president Chuck Staben summoned him to break the news about the FCS, Paul took it hard. Hed come here to be a [FBS] coach, Maya says. Then he heard his fathers words. Pauls own son, one of those twins, is playing for him at Idaho. The other twin, his daughter, plays softball at Montana, which in the scheme of things isnt far.dddddddddddd And although Bobby would hire him back in a heartbeat -- Louisvilles current offensive coordinator makes nearly $200,000 more than Pauls $417,000 salary -- Paul looks in the mirror and sees a head coach.He leaned forward and told his president: Then I will win you a national championship in the FCS.MAKE THE BIG TIME where you are. Jurich understands. They thought hed lost his mind in 1997 when he left Colorado State, and a stable home in the Western Athletic Conference, for Louisville. The phone calls I got, he says, shaking his head. Tom, youre going to the graveyard.When Jurich arrived, the Cardinals played in something called Conference USA, which was a step up after two decades of no conference. In its last home game of 1997, Louisville had drawn 12,850, less than the crowd at the season-ending game at Idaho that year.Now it has a $94 million athletic budget. Earlier this year, it fit a record 55,642 fans into Papa Johns Cardinal Stadium for the Florida State game. Construction on a $55 million addition began as soon as the regular season ended. This past summer, Petrinos contract rolled into a seven-year extension that could pay him more than $30 million.Three years ago, Louisvilles baseball team reached the College World Series, womens basketball played in the NCAA final, the men won a national championship and the football team beat Florida in the Sugar Bowl. The ultimate validation of an FBS title wont happen this year after that unexpected loss at Houston. But this seasons heights -- a lofty ranking, a Heisman for Jackson -- only reaffirm that the Cardinals are on the precipice of college footballs upper echelon. Jurichs vision is confirmed, and the financial commitment will continue to strengthen. Were close, Petrino says. Were right there.At first glance, Idaho seems like the outlier. In reality, its Louisville that has capitalized on a singular situation, one that isnt likely to be replicated. Jurich, who might be the best athletic director in America, saw potential in a metro area of 1.2 million. The city had no big league franchise, which meant that the Cardinals could be the outlet for civic pride. If the NBAs Grizzlies had moved to Louisville instead of Memphis in 2001, notes Larry Benz, the chairman of the universitys board of trustees, there probably wouldnt have been enough oxygen left to start the fire.For years, Louisville had been a commuter school, so the wealthy businessmen and lawyers with U of L degrees had mostly grown up in town. They were locals who stayed local, creating a rich donor base. (One donor alone, John Schnatter of Papa Johns, has given more than $27 million to the school, apart from his pizza chains sponsorship contracts. And he isnt even an alum.)Still, little would have happened if the administration hadnt been set on building a winner, whatever the cost. The president gave me free rein, Jurich says, the flexibility that I needed.He hired John L. Smith, whod made his name at Idaho, beating Boise State all those years. Smith commandeered Petrino to run the offense. With Chris Redman throwing 45 passes a game, the Cardinals lit up Thursday nights. People in this town criticized us severely, Jurich says. What are you doing playing on a weeknight? Saturday afternoons at 4 is when we play. But if you want to build a program, you have to do it this way.Petrino stayed a year, then kept climbing. In 2003, after Smith bolted for Michigan State, Jurich offered to make Petrino a head coach. With Paul as his deputy, Bobby went 11-1 in 2004 and 12-1 in 2006. But soon he was gone again, despite a 10-year contract -- to the NFL and then Arkansas 11 months later.He stayed in Arkansas four years, making a bad team good. He might be there still if a motorcycle accident hadnt uncovered an affair with a young fundraiser in the football office. Arkansas fired him. In 2014, after his soft landing at Western Kentucky, Jurich came calling.To keep the engine of Louisville athletics humming, Jurich knew, he needed to win. Every school has to look at their mission statement, he says. What do they want to be? Where do they want to go? He gave Petrino a $3 million annual salary with a $450,000 payout for a national title. It was, everyone conceded, the going rate.ON A FRIDAY afternoon in Wenatchee, Washington, Scott Marboe throws a bag in the trunk and sets off toward Moscow. Its four hours of two-lane across the prairie, he says. But thats better than his friends journey from Boise: What they call the Goat Trail, along the Salmon River through the mountains and the snow.Marboes father played for Idaho. He did too. So did his son, though Louisville -- of all places -- recruited him. Marboe makes the trip for almost every home game. If hes going to travel that far, he wants to see top competition. When the decision was made to join the Big Sky, he felt angry. My friends feel the same, he says. Staben, Idahos president, heard it in the letters and emails he received from alumni: I will never go to another game.But Marboes are rare. Attendance at the Kibbie Dome remains disappointing; last season the Vandals ranked 123rd out of 127 in the FBS. As for road games, imagine the trip from Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport to San Marcos, Texas. Were going to Texas State in November, Staben says. I believe weve sold 28 of our allotted tickets. Even Marboe understands that the current situation is unsustainable. I dont want to see it, but I get it, he says. You cant win the arms race. Not at Idaho.The cost of doing business at college footballs highest level has led athletic departments deep into the red. They compensate by dipping into general funds, taking money meant for academic scholarships or concert halls, or with sponsorships and donations. Marboe and his buddies give and give, but in the end it makes little difference. We dont have a Papa Johns, Marboe says. We dont have a booster like Boone Pickens to come in and write a check, as Pickens did for his own alma mater, Oklahoma State. Wish we did, but we dont.Big Sky schools, Staben argues, dont need Boone Pickens. According to the NCAAs Report on Finances, the median cost of a student-athlete is $110,000 in the FBS but under $40,000 in the FCS. FCS teams sacrifice TV money and the chance for high-payout games at places like USC and LSU. But their competition doesnt pay $1.5 million to offensive coordinators.And with Montana and other regional rivals back on the schedule, the casual fan has incentive to make the journey. Honestly, I couldnt even tell you where Troy State is, says Schlereth, who supports the move back to the Big Sky. Montana, Montana State, Idaho State, those are big to me. Two years ago, the Vandals basketball team won a stirring double-overtime game against the Grizzlies. On the way out, Spear was accosted by a man in a Montana jacket. This is why you need to be in our league, he told Spear. You see how fun this was?Paul Petrino appreciates the emotion inherent in Big Sky showdowns. He just didnt sign up to coach them. Idaho couldnt have landed him, Spear understands, if it already had decided to drop down. Now who knows how long hell stay? Winning under these circumstances is likely to make Petrino a coveted property, especially after making Idaho bowl-eligible. Thats pretty amazing, Jurich says.But if Petrino has national aspirations, he wouldnt have stayed long in Moscow anyway. In that sense, Staben believes, hes doing Petrino a favor. In the Big Sky, he can amass a gaudy record. Hes not going to get the Louisville job by winning half his games at the University of Idaho, Staben says.One recent night, with winter in the air, Paul arrives at a barbecue joint off Main for his weekly radio show. Spear has shown up too, and a few boosters in Vandals sweatshirts, and drinkers at the bar who were there when everyone arrived and will remain when theyre gone.The UL Lafayette game is Saturday. Most of the listeners probably cant envision Lafayette, Louisiana, but Paul plays it up like Ohio State-Michigan. Soon Maya comes in with their 9-year-old, Ava, known for racing down from the stands to give her father a hug, win or lose. Thats part of the payoff, people like to believe, of coaching at a place like Idaho.Idaho was the first university to fully realize the cost of such intimacy. The difficulties of competing in the FBS make it probable that others will follow. Since the WACs Brigham Young in 1984, no school from outside a current Power 5 conference has won a national title. So if they have no chance of winning, why invest so much in the effort?Paul Petrino has no answers. Soon, though, hell need to decide how much those hugs are worth and whether his career path will follow his fathers or his brothers. He spots Maya and Ava and sends them a smile, then looks them toward an empty table. Throughout the course of your life, you end up in different places, not always by your choice, he says. Wherever it is, you make the best of it. If thats a half-full barbecue joint on a cold night in Idaho, well, its his big time for now. ' ' '