Boise State Gets Upset By Tiny Private School Located Inside A Shopping Center In College Hoops Season Opener

Monday marked the opening day of the 2025 college basketball season, and while thousands of games are yet to be played, we very well could have already witnessed the wildest upset of the year with Hawaii Pacific taking down Boise State.

If you were today-years-old when you learned that there was a college named Hawaii Pacific, trust me, you are not alone. 

The Sharks, a Division II program, made the long journey to Boise, Idaho to take on the Broncos in a game that was on absolutely nobody's radar, that is, until the final buzzer sounded. Hawaii Pacific carried a one-point lead into halftime, and instead of fading, managed to hang on and stun Boise State by a count of 79-78. Joshua West, a senior from Chicago, led the charge with 23 points for the Sharks.

While plenty of Division I programs have been upset by much smaller schools in lower divisions over the years, this one has a completely different feel to it for a few different reasons.

For starters, Boise State was expected to contend for a Mountain West title this season, having been picked third in the conference in the preseason poll.

That seems unlikely at this point, given that the Broncos just lost to a private school with roughly 5,000 students whose campus is located inside a shopping center. When we say inside a shopping center, we don't mean next to one or attached to one. Hawaii Pacific's is quite literally inside of one.

The university moved its main campus to Aloha Tower Marketplace after a revitalization project was completed in August 2015.

This is straight from the Aloha Tower Marketplace website:

"Hawaiʻi Pacific University (HPU), a private, nonprofit university on Oʻahu with an urban campus in downtown Honolulu, is the largest tenant of Aloha Tower Marketplace with residence halls on the second and third floors, a student and community dining center along the water's edge and multi-purpose classrooms interspersed amongst public retail, event spaces and restaurant outlets."

Attending college inside a shopping center along the water in Hawaii would be unbelievable. Losing a basketball game on your home floor to a college inside a shopping center, well, it may not get worse than that.

As you might imagine, Hawaii Pacific's basketball facility isn't exactly spectacular, either. You can see in the video below, the majority of high school gyms around the country are much larger than the home of the Sharks, which is aptly named The Shark Tank.

For those not counting at home, the stands in the video consist of just eight (!!!) rows, and not even all eight were pulled out of the wall for the specific game captured in the clip. Truly unbelievable stuff.

A Division II school inside a shopping center taking down a Boise State team that won 26 games a season ago, college basketball is great.