Aztecs’ Fountain of Youth Overflows

San Diego State’s football team is young.

How young?

“Very, very, very, very young,” said Al Luginbill, head coach and baby sitter.

How very, very, very, very young?

The Aztecs should have a nursery rather than a locker room, a diaper service rather than towel room and training wheels on their exercise bikes. They should have strained food at their training table.

Brigham Young has these guys who come back from missions old enough to go on pension rather than scholarship and San Diego State has players excitedly awaiting the arrival of their first whisker.

SDSU has all of 14 seniors on the roster, most of whom probably answer to names like Gramps, Pop, Old-timer or Geezer. They must feel a little bit like George Burns would feel at a rock concert.

The two-deep roster lists 10 seniors and eight juniors. That leaves 26 innocents--freshmen and sophomores--among the 44 players who will see most of the playing time. That’s an awful lot of peach fuzz.

And that can be scary.

The Aztecs’ schedule is not one to help make growing pains more comfortable. It starts out with a couple of hors d’oeuvres, Cal State Long Beach and Pacific, but picks up with heavyweights such as UCLA, Brigham Young and Miami. These kids will have to grow up very quickly.

Indeed, it would be tempting to call this one of those transitional building years, but Luginbill is not the sort to hide behind cliches.

“I don’t think it would be fair to give the impression that we’re going to be a Juggernaut going into the season,” he said, “but I think we have a chance to be a very good football team.”

But what about all these kids?

“As I’ve said all along, that’s the unknown,” he said once again. “Some of the younger players will be asked to make major impacts at an age that maybe it should happen a year later. These are the cards we’ve been dealt, and we’re going to play them.”

Actually, Luginbill has not been dealt this hand. This is almost entirely his team. These are kids he selected and recruited and signed. This is only his third year as head coach, but only 16 players remain from Denny Stolz’s last year as coach in 1988.

If these kids do well, there is reason to suggest that this program is now firmly in place and well-grounded for the future. If they don’t, it hardly means the opposite, simply because kids will be kids and they need time to develop.

“What we don’t know is how youth will react to adversity, which we’re going to have,” Luginbill said. “They may be mature beyond their ages and react positively and we’ll be fine. They could go into the tank and become divided and then we’ll be in trouble.”

A key to the performance of the Baby Brigade may well lie in the ranks of the upperclassmen. They can set the tone for how the youngsters develop.

“We’re very fortunate,” Luginbill said, “because we have strong leadership in the senior group. The junior class is smaller, but we have some solid leaders in that group too. Plus, they are excellent football players and excellent people and they understand the program and what’s expected. They are our nucleus and we will fill in around them.”

Luginbill does not run a program that will ever be mistaken for a country club recreational program. He is a demanding taskmaster whose style weeds out the faint of heart. This is one reason for the relatively small sizes of the senior and junior classes. Many others have bailed out for more comfortable environs.

What is left is the best, brightest . . . and toughest. Hence, there is quality rather than quantity in the senior and junior classes. The survivors from the lower classes will be the same.

Because of defections, this football team does not have the top-to-bottom balance of normal five-year programs.

“Including this year,” Luginbill said, “we’re three years away from that. It just takes time.”

In the meantime, this will not be a bad football team. It might even be a very good football team, conceding that so much reliance on youth comes with built-in uncertainty.

The Aztecs, 3-8 in 1988, improved to 6-5-1 in 1989 and 6-5 in 1990, moving up to third in the Western Athletic Conference last year. They are headed in the right direction.

“I thought we improved in terms of competitiveness from the first year to the second year,” Luginbill said. “It showed up in the conference standings more than anywhere else. I feel comfortable that we will improve again this year.”

If these kids come through, it will be easy to reward them, assuming the NCAA would not frown on the distribution of lollipops.