Survivor of Titan Football Gets Second Chance at Purdue

A decade removed from his last head coaching job, Jim Colletto kicks back in his new office at Purdue University, reveling in the difference between then and now.

“Right now,” Colletto says, speaking by phone, “I’m looking out the window of my beautiful office at a stadium that seats 70,000. I can see an indoor practice facility that’s as good as any in the country. I’m coaching at a school that plays in a great football conference.”

Colletto laughs.

“My office in Fullerton, I had to put the plywood on the wall myself. My office also shared a wall with the girls’ gymnasium and the hot steam from the showers made the plywood buckle.”

The wall makes an apt metaphor for Colletto’s five-year tenure at Cal State Fullerton (1975-79). It, too, buckled--bowing under the strain of having pushed the Division I issue before Fullerton was even close to ready.

In 1975, Colletto was the youngest Division I head coach in the country and Fullerton was the youngest Division I football team in the country. Colletto was 30 at the time, a winner during his playing days at UCLA, where he captained the 1966 Rose Bowl champions. Fullerton football was six, having completed a successful run at the Division II level under Dick Coury and Pete Yoder.

It was going to be a case of youth serving youth. The idea was for Colletto and the Titans to grow together, to learn together, to struggle and develop and mature together.

Nice idea.

Five years later, Colletto was the oldest 35-year-old football coach alive, beaten down by a 17-38-1 record, exhausted from running the same obstacle course Gene Murphy runs today. After a 3-8 season in 1979, Colletto resigned, unsure if his head coaching career hadn’t lost its grip on the very first rung.

“Neale Stoner (then Fullerton athletic director) told me my best chance to get back was to go somewhere and be a coordinator,” Colletto said. “Neale said, ‘That’ll give you the opportunity to outlive this problem.’

“It worked.”

Colletto returned to UCLA, where his old teammate, Terry Donahue, was head coach. “Terry was kind enough to hire me as an assistant and let me regroup for a couple years,” Colletto said. From there, it was on to stints as offensive coordinator at Purdue, Arizona State and Ohio State before, 11 days ago, Purdue named Colletto as its new head coach.

Yes, good things can happen to old Titans who wait.

Colletto lost many things at Fullerton--games, naivete, hair, a smoothly functioning digestive tract--but a sense of humor wasn’t among them. Ask him about those bygone years and Colletto will crack, “I’ve tried to forget them all.”

He hasn’t, though. For a long time those years seemed to be the albatross around the neck of his resume, but time--along with a lucrative five-year contract at Purdue--has shed a kinder light on the dark ages of Jim Colletto.

“That whole situation, as difficult as it was, was a very valuable experience,” Colletto said. “It was like a laboratory experiment, and I don’t mean that facetiously. You’re thrown into an environment where you’re going to make mistakes. You learn pretty fast that there’s a lot more to it than Xs and O’s and that you’re not going to be the next Knute Rockne.

“But every problem I experienced there has been magnified at every school I’ve been at since. It’s given me a little better perspective.”

A checklist of those problems, circa 1979, sounds painfully familiar. Has Colletto been sitting in on any of Murphy’s media luncheons lately?

“We played all over the place. We played every stadium dedication and homecoming across the country. . . .

“I had great support from the athletic administration--Neale Stoner, (president) Donald Shields--but we didn’t have many resources. There was no on-campus housing. There were very few funds for recruiting and there was zilch for game films. I had to use my own camera, my own Super-8 and my own film. I raked the practice field to have it soft enough for practice.

“There was a whole litany of things. It was all the result of trying to move up to Division I when the school wasn’t ready.”

Is it yet? Fullerton has just now broken ground on the on-campus football stadium that, Colletto says, “was first proposed when I was there.” And this season, the Titans broke new ground of a different sort--finishing 1-11, the worst single-season record in the school’s history.

“I keep up with what’s going on there,” Colletto said. “I think Gene Murphy has done a great job. He had a rough year this year. but I don’t know how they can expect to have winning records there, year-in and year-out.

“The money problems are inherent. They’ll always be there. And from a fairness standpoint, they’re physically incapable of playing those big schools, where you get the big scores. Gene’s done about as good a job as you can do there.”

Today, different problems confront Colletto. He has inherited from Fred Akers a Purdue program that was crippled by one quarterback transfer--Jeff George, to Illinois--and now has to ward off a second, now that run-and-shoot incumbent Eric Hunter no longer has Akers’ run-and-shoot to run.

“I had a meeting with Eric,” Colletto said, “and told him that in nine years as an offensive coordinator, I worked with Scott Campbell, who’s now quarterbacking the Atlanta Falcons; Jim Everett, who you know about; Jeff Van Raaphorst, who was a Rose Bowl MVP, and Greg Frey, who set records at Ohio State.

“I said, ‘Eric, if you want to play somewhere else, fine,’ but I think he’s going to stay.”

Colletto has a reputation for fine craftsmanship when it comes to grooming young quarterbacks. That’s an improvement. At Fullerton, Colletto had a reputation for fine craftsmanship when it came to putting up office walls.