As his flight to San Diego got delayed and eventually canceled Wednesday night in Dallas, Boise State assistant football coach Spencer Danielson came up with a crazy idea.

Danielson and five other Boise State players — David Moa, Khalil Shakir, Demitri Washington, Quinn Skillin and Garrett Curran — were trying to get home to near San Diego but were stranded at the airport thanks to severe storms that forced the cancellation of their game against Boston College in the First Responder Bowl earlier in the day.

With the airline telling them it wouldn’t be until at least Friday when they could get a flight to San Diego, Danielson thought of another way to get everybody home — a rental car.

“A lot of these guys really wanted to get home and not sit around until Friday or Saturday or who knows when, and I knew for a fact I could get these guys home and do it safely if we load them up in a car,” Danielson told the Idaho Press Friday afternoon. “I said I don’t know how long it will take and it won’t be comfortable, but these guys didn’t have their parents here and they were by themselves, and I said, ‘I’m going to get a car, and whoever is down, let’s get home.'”

Normally a Boise State coach wouldn’t even be allowed to drive a player up the street to get dinner in Boise due to NCAA rules violations concerning extra benefits, Danielson said. But rules allow for the schools to pay for players to go home for the holidays (their flights home were purchased by the school), so that made it OK in this situation.

Danielson called coach Bryan Harsin with his idea and to make sure there were no issues, and Harsin gave the OK. But when he started searching for a van or three-row SUV to rent, he couldn’t find anything nearby.

“All the cars had been picked up and all they had left was a Silverado pickup and I said how many does it seat and they said ‘well you can squeeze six’ and I said alright, here we go boys,” Danielson said. “And that’s six normal-sized people, not six big guys. They looked at the truck when I pulled up and I opened the door and I said ‘you guys ready to roll’ and they said let’s do this, so we just scrunched 2,000-plus pounds of man into this six-seat Silverado and went for it.

“I had Quinn as my navigator and I said put in San Diego in Google Maps and it said 19 hours and we said, ‘let’s do it.’”

The group left Dallas around 10 p.m. in the middle of a thunderstorm. They drove straight through the night, watching the sunrise somewhere in New Mexico, and made several stops for food, gas and to stretch their legs.

“The guys were freaking awesome,” Danielson said. “We talked the entire time and never once did any of them complain. They just wanted to go home and it was a piece of mind where no matter what, we’re getting home. Nobody is telling us our flight is canceled again.

“We would stop to get food, walk around, get a Monster Energy Drink, take a quick power nap and then get back on the road.”

The group rolled into San Diego around 5 p.m. Thursday, roughly 19 hours after they left a stormy Dallas. They dropped Curren off at his house and then met the other players’ families at the rental car lot near the San Diego airport.

While some players and their families were still stuck in Dallas trying to find a flight home, Danielson and the five players were back with their families with a story to tell.

“I’ll never forget it,” Danielson said. “As much as it was brutal being in the car for 19 hours crammed with these big dudes, we played games and got to know each other and just had a lot of fun. I didn’t really know Khalil that much but me and him talked about life for two hours about my career, coaching, how I met my wife, his life. We got to know each other on a deeper level and getting that time with them was just great.

“It was really cool. I was excited to get them home and get home myself so we could spend more time at home than we would have had we stayed in Dallas. I just hated seeing the guys scrambling and upset that they couldn’t get home, so I was happy I was able to help.”

OTHERS HAVE CRAZY TRIPS HOME TOO

Danielson and the five players that drove to San Diego weren’t the only ones with stories to tell from their trip home following the canceled bowl game Wednesday.

Garrett Collingham and his family were scheduled to fly directly to Mexico Thursday for a vacation, but their flight was canceled and they elected to drive nine hours to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to try and catch another flight back to Boise instead. They didn’t have cell service all day because of an outage with Verizon and went to four hotels before finally finding one with a room. They got to the airport Friday morning for a 5:50 a.m. flight but that was delayed multiple hours as well due to a record snow storm that hit Albuquerque. They eventually made it to Denver and ran to catch a connecting flight in Boise which got them back to Boise late Friday afternoon.

“I can laugh now but we really wanted to cry,” Theresa Collingham said. “By this morning when the flight got delayed again I was beyond laughing. It was pretty frustrating. … We were lucky to have the money to rent a car or buy a new ticket, but if we didn’t have the money we would have been sitting at the airport for two days, so all I could think about was the players still there and the families that used all the money they had to get there and they were sleeping on the floor of the airport. It was a bad deal.”

Matt Locher and his parents had their flight to John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, delayed and then canceled Wednesday night, so they hung out at the airport and played dominoes with Matt Pistone, Eric Quevedo and Sam Whitney. Those three players stayed at the airport all night and caught flights home the next day. Donna, Mark and Matt Locher went to a hotel around 1 a.m. (they offered the other players to come but they declined) and eventually were able to catch a flight to Palm Springs on Thursday afternoon. The airport was completely out of rental cars in Palm Springs, so they were forced to pay $225 for a 2-hour Uber ride to the airport in Santa Ana to get their car.

“The driver was super awesome,” Donna Locher said. “He had just started for the day and was looking for a long ride. We stopped for food and he was awesome, but it was a really tiny car and my son barely fit. It was hysterical.... It was a lot of money and a lot of time, but we made the best of it. I had the best time when we hung out at the airport with those boys. It was a great time.”

Sonatane Lui and his parents and sister elected to rent a car and drive nearly 20 hours to their home near Salt Lake City after their flights were canceled. They left Thursday morning around 11 and arrived home around 7 a.m. Friday morning after driving through rain, snow and ice. His father Olisi Lui drove the entire way, while his mother Laura Lui and sister Salina Lui rode along. Thursday was also Sonatane's Lui birthday.

"It was great," Olisi Lui said. "We got to talk about a lot of things. You'd be surprised the things you discuss when you are in the car that long. We had fun playing music and ate some good BBQ on the way. I just pounded down a couple Red Bulls to make sure I was wide awake and as soon as I hit the house I took a nap.

"There were a couple areas in the snow storm in New Mexico and Utah where had I known I would have gotten something with four-wheel drive. The vehicle we had was rear-wheel drive which is the worst possible thing you could get in the snow and we had to go like 30 miles-per-hour to be safe. But it was fun.It was one of those experiences you will never forget."

Ezra Cleveland and his dad spent the night at the airport in Dallas after their flight was canceled. They finally got on a flight the next afternoon after having spent 24 hours inside the airport.

“We didn’t get much sleep, but it was a once in a lifetime experience — hopefully,” Jim Cleveland joked. “You can’t be mad about it. We’ll gladly through stuff like that to see him play and that’s the bottom line. We want to support him and do whatever it takes and that’s what parents do. They will do anything to be there. The game being canceled was disappointing because we knew for two weeks the weather was bad and you’d think they could have a backup plan, but it is what it is. It was pretty crazy, but we all made it back.”