The football team was an independent for the 2013 season due to a major wave of departures from the Western Athletic Conference that left just two football-playing schools.

[4] Yellow gold and black were the colors used by most of the varsity teams from 1978 to 1996, initiated by first-year head football coach Jerry Davitch's new uniforms for 1978.

The Vandal football team was an independent for the 2013 season, and rejoined the Sun Belt Conference as an affiliate member in 2014, after a decade-long departure.

The Sun Belt Conference announced on March 1, 2016, that the affiliation agreement with Idaho and New Mexico State would not be extended past the 2017 season.

[13] Idaho State dropped its program six years earlier in 1974,[14] when the Big Sky stopped sponsorship of baseball and four other sports.

[20][21] (The Inland Northwest was a hotbed of the sport as Idaho, Washington State, and Gonzaga had top programs and won national titles.

[32][33] After over a decade as a varsity sport, women's swimming was cut after the 1985 season,[36][37][38] then returned 19 years later in the fall of 2004 under head coach Tom Jager.

From 2001 to 2020, massive black curtains encircled the basketball seating configuration and the arena was called the "Cowan Spectrum", with a capacity of 7,000.

(photo)[45] An outdoor stadium for four years, it was fully enclosed in 1975 and its playing surface sits at an elevation of 2,610 feet (795 m) above sea level.

West of the Kibbie Dome is the 400 m (437 yd) outdoor track and field stadium,[50] opened in early 1972 and named for newly crowned Olympic champion decathlete Dan O'Brien in September 1996.

MacLean Field, the campus' original athletics area, was on the grounds south of the Memorial Gym, with the spectators on the eastern embankment.

Football was played here from 1914 until Neale Stadium opened in 1937; the baseball team called MacLean home for another three decades, until the construction of the College of Education building displaced the infield after the 1966 season.

[59] Wicks (1902–68), a UI graduate, was a Vandal baseball player in the early 1920s, a head coach in two sports in the 1940s, and later an associate dean of students.

[62] The university opened the new Idaho Central Credit Union Arena in September 2021,[63] with the first event taking place in late October.

In 1917, Harry Lloyd "Jazz" McCarty – a writer for the student newspaper, The Argonaut – tagged the team with a new nickname in a pregame write-up: "The opening game with Whitman will mark a new epoch in Idaho basketball history, for the present gang of 'Vandals' have the best material that has ever carried the 'I' into action."

By 1921, McCarty and Edward Maslin Hulme, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, succeeded in their push to have Vandals officially adopted as the nickname for Idaho teams.

[66] The current mascot is Joe Vandal; in response to Title IX concerns in the late 1970s, a new abstract logo was introduced and featured both genders.

[67] Since returning to Division I-A status for football in 1996, Idaho has rekindled its rivalry with Washington State, eight miles (13 km) to the west in Pullman.

The annual game, usually played at Martin Stadium in Pullman, was renewed in 1998 after just two meetings in two decades, and is referred to as the "Battle of the Palouse."

The last game played on the Idaho side of the border in this series was in 1966, a mudbath won by WSU late in the fourth quarter.

Idaho had a major in-state rivalry with Boise State since 1971; BSU joined the Big Sky in 1970 but the football teams did not meet that season.

Boise State left the WAC after the 2010 season to join the Mountain West Conference, leaving no future for the football in-state rivalry.

For most of its history, Idaho had an intense interstate rivalry with the University of Montana in Missoula, approximately 200 miles (320 km) east.

Since the departure of Idaho, Boise State, and Nevada from the Big Sky to Division I-A in the 1990s, the Montana Grizzlies have been the dominant I-AA/FCS football program in the West, though pushed strongly in the last part of the 2010s by Eastern Washington.