Aztecs Hope to Clean Up This Season

This is a nice time of year at San Diego State University. The campus is quiet. Parking is plentiful. No one seems to be in a hurry, but then no one seems to have anywhere to go.

However, in one corner of campus, the morning cool was giving way very swiftly to perspiration, grass stains and the sound of bodies colliding.

On this day, the 1992 Aztec football team was in full armor for the first time.

“Boy,” said an awed onlooker, “they sure look bigger today than they did yesterday.”

And never has this university’s football team bitten off a bigger schedule than the one it confronts in 1992. At the same time, never has this team gone into a season with more ambitious dreams.

Forget those glorious years under Don Coryell, if you will. Going unbeaten against a schedule opening against the likes of Mexico Polytechnic, Weber State and Cal Poly SLO just isn’t the same as opening against USC, Brigham Young and UCLA.

Al Luginbill, the professorial head coach, was running his “class” through its lessons. He wasn’t smiling, but that was to be expected. You want a stand-up comic, maybe you should have gone to Notre Dame.

Besides, something was eating at Luginbill.

Lack of hustle? Lack of concentration? Lack of aggressiveness?

The players gathered in front of him in the aftermath of two sweaty hours of drills and you could almost smell the grass burning under his feet.

“The first day you’re out here in pads,” he snarled, “and the locker room looks like a hell hole. You’re not disciplined enough to pick up a three-foot area in front of your locker? If you’re not tough enough to pick up in front of your locker, how are you going to be tough enough to beat USC?”

Imagine the freshman, away from home for the first time in their lives, and the first thing their head football coach tells them after their first full-scale practice is the same thing their mothers have been telling them since they were in diapers.

“If you want to make anything of your life,” Mom screamed, “clean your room!!!”

You wonder how both Tom Landry and John Madden were such successful coaches if neatness counted.

Coaches have long been masters at gerrymandering logic. It is part of what they learned from their coaches. It gets passed from generation to generation as surely as cliches and motivational press clippings.

However, when it came to making his point, Luginbill had not exactly kicked this one wide to the left of the goal posts. He was right down the middle.

This was his way of saying his players will pay attention to detail and will be disciplined. I’m not sure what neatness has to do with toughness, but I’ll give that one to him. When I was haranguing my offspring to clean their rooms, they always thought I was being the tough one.

After running his players through a blistering series of calisthenics to purge the messiness from their systems, he came to the sidelines.

“This is a tremendous group of kids,” he began, “but they need to be reminded of things once in a while. They’ll take care of what happened this morning among themselves. It won’t happen again.”

It was nothing horrendous, to be sure, Luginbill’s kids had not torn up a night club or gotten into a food fight in the cafeteria or roughed up a security guard. They were a little lax with their laundry, was all.

In Luginbill’s mind, however, a “little lax” here leads to a “little lax” there. He doesn’t want such attitudes to come into play during games, during practice, in the classroom . . . or in the locker room.

“I feel very good about this group of guys,” Luginbill was saying. “I like this team. I like its personality and its talent and its maturity.”

Personality?

“This team is very serious and very intense about doing things right,” he said. “They have feeling for each other and I believe they are committed to winning. They know that ballgames are going to come down to making fewer mistakes than the opposition. That’s our goal. We don’t have to worry about who we’re playing if we take care of San Diego State University.”

Given equal talent, and it’s not really a given that SDSU’s talent is even with the likes of USC, the outcome of a game will, in fact, swing on the balance of mistakes. The Aztecs have developed this annoying, not to mention frustrating, habit of coming up just short in their biggest of games.

This being a season that opens with a succession of just such games, Al Luginbill can be excused for addressing his athletes on such an innocuous detail as cleanliness in the locker room.

Lombardi would undoubtedly cringe at the simplicity of the notion, but perhaps cleaning up in the locker room can translate into cleaning up on the field.

Neat idea, huh?