Luginbill Hopes These Aztecs Go Down in the Tradition Books

Al Luginbill is a professorial man with a sense of history, some of which he would like to see repeated and some of which he would like to see go away.

If you understand that the man is the head football coach at San Diego State University, then you also understand where he is coming from. We are not talking the kind of history that stirs academicians to doctoral treatises, but rather the history can either stir a community or put it to sleep.

Of late, SDSU football has been a cure for insomnia.

Luginbill knows it has not always been this way and does not have to stay the way it has been.

Luginbill is the man who steps into a position packed with a most unique type of pressure. It comes more from within the athletic department than from the community at-large, which does not seem to have the frenzied level of interest it takes to hang an unsuccessful coach in effigy. His task is to heighten that interest level and, thus, bail out an athletic department that must have an artistically and financially successful football program to survive at a major college level.

No easy chore, Al.

That’s where history comes into play. History is one word, but Luginbill prefers another. He prefers tradition.

You see, history is all-encompassing. History covers the good and the bad. Tradition is a fond memory of the good.

“We talk a lot about tradition,” he said.

Tradition, selective that it is, runs its course through the 1960s and 1970s at SDSU, those wonderful days when Don Coryell and Claude Gilbert, Coryell’s protege, captured the community’s heart and soul.

“Look at universities who’ve gone two decades with very, very little change, and you’ll see universities with very good programs,” Luginbill said. “San Diego State’s athletic administration and football program have undergone more changes in the last decade than in the previous two decades combined. Look at the programs that have been most successful here--women’s volleyball, tennis, men’s soccer and baseball, for example--and you’ll see programs with long-time coaches. We need a long-time football coach and athletic director to breed the consistency we need, and consistency breeds winning.”

Luginbill is right about turnover. Since Coryell and Gilbert coached from 1961 through 1980, SDSU has had three football coaches. Fred Miller took over in 1985 as the fifth athletic director since SDSU joined the Western Athletic Conference in 1978.

There is not room here to detail the bizarre succession of events that led to such a turnover in athletic directors, but the football coaches lost their jobs because of losing seasons. Coryell could never be fired for such a crime, because he never committed one. Gilbert had five consecutive winning seasons before two losing seasons out of three sent him packing.

Denny Stolz took the Aztecs to their best season of the 1980s when they won the WAC championship and went to the Holiday Bowl in 1986. This being a less-than-patient program, Stolz was out as football coach by the end of a second consecutive losing season in 1988.

It should be clear by now that a “long-time” football coach at SDSU will be a football coach who wins for a long time. The margin for error seems to be about the size of a trigger finger.

It would seem logical that Luginbill is aware of this pressure to win, especially since it seems to be historical in nature.

“I’ve been asked about pressure a lot over the last nine months,” he said, “but I guess I’ve been oblivious. We’ve just been working so doggone hard to make sure we dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I do believe the community is frustrated, but no one can convince me it’s apathetic. Just look at this building.”

Luginbill was sitting in his splendid office in the splendid Aztec Athletic Center, a facility built essentially for the football program by the San Diego Chapter of the Associated General Contractors and the San Diego Building and Trades Council. The only thing they forgot to do was make the entrance to the head coach’s office a revolving door.

“The time has come for us to prove to the community that we deserve to be supported,” he continued. “I put the onus on us. For whatever reasons, this program has been inconsistent. We’ve teased the community, and then we’ve fallen back. I don’t want to be a tease.”

Luginbill has a three-part formula for success that calls for a) playing with intensity on every down, b) leading the WAC in turnover margin and c) being the least-penalized team in the WAC. It may seem almost naively basic, but any team that accomplishes all three of those goals will win the WAC championship.

It all begins for this latest SDSU coaching era with the season and WAC opener at Air Force on Sept. 2.

“We’ve worked hard,” Luginbill said. “If anyone wants to judge us on Sept. 2, so be it. I asked Fred (Miller) if he could get that game back to San Diego on TV.”

And so Miller made arrangements for Al Luginbill’s coaching debut to be shown live on Channel 51.

Brave man, this Luginbill. He must think that Sept. 2 will have more to do with tradition than history.