The Big Boom : CSUN Football Recruiters Say They’re Having a Blast This Year

When a football team bumbles and stumbles its way to a dismal 6-15 record over two seasons, it becomes fair game for humor. So when Cal State Northridge announced recently that it was increasing its number of football scholarships for next season from nine to nearly 19, open season was declared.

Would CSUN use the 10 extra scholarships to sign five slow wide receivers and five sore-armed quarterbacks? Maybe six lame kickers and four clumsy running backs? Or perhaps the administration would award the additional scholarships to 10 skinny linemen whose weight-lifting sessions consist of doing arm curls with dry car-wash sponges, guys who couldn’t bench press a slice of airline meat loaf.

But Bob Burt, who replaced the fired Tom Keele as the head football coach last month, says the jokes about the CSUN football team are about to become as scarce as the California condor. CSUN has already signed 19 junior college players, including some heavily recruited standouts such as tight ends Brian Bowers (6-3, 225, from San Jose City College) and Tony Palamara (6-3, 230, from Saddleback College).

Defensive coordinator Mark Banker, who teamed with offensive coordinator Rich Lopez in recruiting the JC players during the one-month period between the departure of Keele and the arrival of Burt, said the coaching staff is ready to burst with excitement.

“We think we’ve had the best recruiting year here in five years,” he said. “Among the JCs we brought in are two of the best defensive linemen we’ve ever had here. Along with Bowers and Palamara and a bunch of other kids, we are really thrilled to have gotten.”

The linemen Banker referred to are Dester Stowers, a 250-pound tackle from Pasadena City College, and Mike Najera, a 230-pound tackle from Southwestern in San Diego.

For a team that gave up an average of 31 points per game last season, Stowers and Najera might turn out as important as helmets.

And Burt promises more next Wednesday when the high-school recruits sign letters of intent.

“We recruited some real top-notch players,” he said. “We may sign none of them, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I think there will be some interesting surprises on the list of kids we sign.”

The recruiting boom at CSUN is the result of two recent occurrences. The first is the NCAA’s passing of amendments to its constitution that will make academically borderline high-school students ineligible for Division I competition. That action forces some Division I-caliber football players to turn to Division II schools.

The second is the decision by the CSUN student body to increase its funding of the athletic scholarship program by $4 per student, per semester, which raises the fund from about $80,000 last year to more than $220,000 for the spring and fall semesters of this year. In return, 40% of the seating capacity at school sports events will be free--on a first-come, first-served basis--for students, who traditionally have ranked the thrill of attending a CSUN football game somewhere between being electrocuted and slamming your hand in a car door.

“We decided we wanted to make our degrees more valuable in the job market,” said Jeff Weiner, president of the Associated Students at CSUN. “To do that we had to build up the image of the school, and one of the ways to accomplish that is through athletics. Our hope is to eventually have a major stadium on campus and move our football program into Division I.”

Athletic Director Bob Heigert, who has spent years battling for a larger scholarship budget, is overjoyed about the new cash flow.

“There’s no question it will make a significant difference,” he said. “We needed this additional money to be competitive. The underlying theme here is that the students have decided to support the athletic programs much more enthusiastically than they ever had.”

Banker, Lopez and Burt, who left his job as an assistant at Cal State Fullerton to take the CSUN job, said they are taking full advantage of the NCAA academic-rule changes and the additional 10 scholarships made possible by the student funding.

“With all of the people we recruited we stressed academics, not only that this is a good school but that we will do everything for a young man to make him successful, including study halls, tutoring and grade checks, all the things that will help them personally. And then we stressed the opportunity to grow within a program that is on its way up.”

After seasons with 2-8 and 4-7 records, there seems to be nowhere else to go for the Northridge football program. And Burt said the dreary performance of the past two seasons was not an obstacle to recruiting.

“When they asked me about last season, I told them simply, ‘I was not here last season.’ That’s all I can tell them. Our coaching staff, with just a few exceptions, was not here last season.

“Believing in yourself, that’s what’s important. Often, the better athletes get beat. Maybe that was the case here last season. But I don’t want to deal with last season. That’s history. My feeling is we’re going to win, and that’s what I’ve told all of the recruits, that, ‘We are going to win, and we are going to win with you or without you.’ Winners find a way to win. Losers find a way to lose.”

When Keele left, he took with him a seemingly strange rule about recruiting that forbidded any recruit from staying overnight on the campus. Banker, who said the other coaches never quite understood Keele’s reasoning for that rule, claims many of the recruits decided to sign up at CSUN only after spending a night or two at the school during semester break and getting to know the team’s veterans.

“This is a commuter campus to begin with, and when the recruits from past years would come here during vacation time it was like a ghost town,” Banker said. “The kids never got a feel for the place. But this year we allowed them to spend more time here, to get to know the campus and the other players, and we think it made a big difference.

“We didn’t hide anything from them. We showed them the game films from last season. They saw what we were. But we told them what this team can be, and many of them believed in us. We took that 4-7 record and told them that they were going to be the difference. We told them we won’t be 4-7 again and that we needed them to make sure we wouldn’t be 4-7 again.”

Burt, who jumped into the recruiting battle within a day of his appointment as head coach, said he expects to sign 11 high-school players by Wednesday, bringing the total of high school and JC recruits to 30. The 19 full scholarships available to him will be broken up and dispersed among the 30.

“We will not offer any full scholarships,” he said. “If we did, we could only offer, say, three players financial aid instead of six. I just wouldn’t do it. There is nobody that important, nobody we can’t do without. There are just too many good players out there.

“I’m not about to buy a kid to come and play here. I’ve seen that happen at other schools. One kid gets a $4,000 scholarship and another gets a $1,000 scholarship and the $1,000 kid turns out to be an all-conference player while the $4,000 kid turns out not even to be a player. We’re just not able to take that chance,” Burt added.

“And I just don’t believe one guy is that much more important to a team than any other guy. If the kid doesn’t want to accept the limited scholarship that we offer, then we tell him to go somewhere else. We don’t need them that badly.”

Burt said his recruiting is conducted in three phases.

“On film we assess a kid’s athletic ability and growth potential. But the third phase is not done in the film room. It comes when you talk to the kid in person and find out what kind of kid he is, what kind of heart and what kind of character he has, what kind of citizen he is.

“If we find a kid with great ability and great growth potential, but he is a low-character type, we don’t want him around. We interview a kid here at Northridge, at his home and at his school, and we find out a lot about him.”

With the coaches bubbling about a bumper crop of recruits, and with that bleak 6-15 two-season record trailing them around like a lost dog, it would seem that the pressure on Burt to produce a winning team in 1986 would be no greater than, say, the pressure on a diamond cutter not to sneeze.

Not so, says Burt.

“I feel no great pressure to win next season other than the pressure I put on myself,” he said. “Nobody in the administration expects miracles. We can be 0-11 if we want to, but the kids are the ones who want to win. They want to win bad. And they will have the most to say about whether we win or lose.

“But I honestly feel we have the chance to be competitive in the Western Football Conference right away. Maybe we won’t win the conference championship right away and maybe we won’t win nine of 11 games. But when we line up to play, people will have to reckon with us. I see the returning kids and the JC kids and some of the high-school recruits and I see that already the attitude is right.”

Burt has heard the stories about some players laughing on the bus after some of the losses last season. He thinks that is about as funny as a faulty parachute.

“Maybe there was a bad attitude on the team last year, but it won’t happen this year,” he said. “They will feel a loss if it happens to them this year because of the work they will put in to become winners. It won’t be ridiculous Marine Corps commando killer-training, just good, sound, hard football practice. Good players look forward to that.”