Petrino to Vandals: Embrace the opportunity

For the members of the Idaho Vandal football team (1-9), which as of Wednesday was a 57-point underdog in Saturday's game at No. 2 Florida State (10-0), Idaho football coach Paul Petrino has one message:

Embrace the challenge.

"I just think it's a great opportunity," said Petrino, the first-year Vandal coach. "A lot of guys can go their whole lifetime and never play a No. 1 or No. 2 team in the country. What we talked about (Sunday) night was, you get to go play against the best, everybody wants to judge themselves against the best ... In this game they're going to play against a bunch of guys that are going to play in the NFL. so, go challenge yourself. ... let's do everything we can to compete against the best, win battles one at a time."

Petrino recalled his first year as an assistant coach at Illinois, in 2010, when the Illini beat Baylor, which was quarterbacked at the time by sophomore Robert Griffin III, 38-14 in the Texas Bowl in Houston. Illinois quarterback Nathan Scheelhaase was a freshman that year.

"I still text Nathan Scheelhaase all the time -- 'no one can ever take away from you that you beat the superstar, the Heisman trophy winner the next year, in a bowl game,'" Petrino said.

Looking to the future: Idaho spent much of last week's bye week practicing players who are going to return next year. The Vandals also devoted much of the week to recruiting.

"We actually practiced Wednesday morning, then all the coaches got out on the road," Petrino said. "I stayed in the office and they all texted me back, 'check this guy out,' and I watched tape of all the guys they were out there looking at. We spent a lot of time early in the week organizing who we thought were the best, from top to bottom, and then they went out and found out everything about them, character-wise, grade-wise ... and came back and reorganized who we want, from top to bottom. It was a huge week on recruiting."

Notes: Idaho will receive $950,000 from Florida State for the game ... The Vandal roster lists four players from Florida -- senior running back James Baker and three Petrino recruits -- freshman defensive back Jordan Grabski, freshman running back Richard Montgomery and freshman wide receiver Jacob Sannon. "It'll be nice for us, because that's a state we'd like to get a couple guys from each year," Petrino said. "So that's definitely something that's a positive."