Allen Finds 6-5 Season at Long Beach to Be Gut-Wrenching, but Rewarding

George Allen, who never met a motivational phrase he didn’t like, will take the bad with the good, especially since his Long Beach State 49ers posted their first winning record in four seasons.

After beating University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 29-20 on Nov. 17 to ensure the school’s first winning record in four seasons, the 49ers celebrated by dousing Allen.

“They dumped a bucket of Gatorade on me; only it wasn’t Gatorade, because we can’t afford Gatorade,” Allen said. “It was ice water.”

This is, after all, the school that almost dropped football in 1986. The program is still vastly under-funded, and the 49ers play their home games in one of the worst Division I-A stadiums in the country, the 12,000-seat, off-campus Veterans Memorial Stadium.

But Allen also had a serious message for his players.

“I told them they ought to put this season and game on their resume, and capitalize it and underline it, because it was such an achievement,” Allen said.

The 49ers went 6-5, winning all their home games and losing all their road games for their best finish since going 6-5 in 1986. They were fourth in the Big West Conference at 4-3, their first upper-division finish since ’86.

“There’s only one other Division I-A team that started out 0-3 and ended up with a winning record--Alabama,” Allen said. “Of course, Alabama has a little more tradition and more going for it than Long Beach State, I would say.”

The 72-year-old Allen, who hadn’t coached at the college level since leaving Whittier College after the 1956 season, was hired last December to turn around a team that had been a combined 11-24 the previous three seasons.

The 49ers opened with a 59-0 loss at Clemson, the worst beating in school history. After losing at Utah State and San Diego State, the 49ers went 6-2 the rest of the way.

“I think it was the most rewarding experience of my entire coaching career,” said Allen, who had five winning seasons with the Rams and seven with the Washington Redskins, including an appearance in the 1973 Super Bowl.

But Allen, who has a three-year contract, said, “I don’t care to go through another season like that again. It was too gut-wrenching.

“We were working seven days a week, and every day there was some unexpected experience that came up. It was real easy for the team and coaches to give up. That 59-0 loss at Clemson was the worst defeat in school history. We had lost two of our good players in that game, but we just stuck together and kept fighting. We worked hard and had long practices.

“We don’t have lights at our practice field, and when the time changed to standard time, we had to bring a truck out on the field and turn on the lights so we could see. That’s why I say it was just tremendous.

“(The players) learned some lessons that they wouldn’t learn in classroom.”

Long Beach had an average home attendance of 4,697, almost double the 1989 total.

The 49ers’ tentative 1991 schedule shows eight road games, including at Miami and Arizona, and there’s a lot of recruiting to do.

But, Allen says, “I think that we’re now dealing more from strength rather than just trying to stay alive and save the program like last year.”