Tollner Takes On His Future

Five days on the job and already Ted Tollner, new head football coach at San Diego State, is 0-1.

The first loss came Tuesday and it was a doozy. Marshall Faulk, The Man Who Would Be Heisman If Not For Quarterbacks From Florida and Cornerbacks From San Diego, announced he would be skipping his senior season and jumping to the NFL ASAP. Faulk was pleading hardship, and who could possibly deny him?

You did see how San Diego State played defense this season, didn’t you?

Tollner had no chance in this one. This one was as big a mismatch as the Rams and the Cardinals. Faulk’s mind was set a good while ago, roughly about the time he led the Aztecs to 41, 44, 37 and 38 points in their last four games--and went 0-4.

Nothing personal, Ted, Marshall said, but the time has come to look out for No. 1.

“I think it was over before I got there,” Tollner said Tuesday at Rams Park, where he is serving out the last days of his sentence as tutor to Jim Everett and T.J. Rubley.

“I met with him (Monday) and told him how much he’d mean to us and how it would be good for him to go through a transition year with a new coaching staff. It would prepare him for what to expect in the pros, and it would enable him to add to his overall accomplishments.

“But I didn’t try to sell him beyond that . . . What am I going to tell him--’No, you’re not ready?’ I’m not going to try and con anybody. That would be belittling to him, and to me.”

No, that wouldn’t be Tollner.

This is Tollner: By the end of his please-stay pitch to Faulk, Tollner couldn’t help but lay out the naked truth, and nothing but. “I told him, ‘The NFL is the greatest challenge there is in your profession. You’re playing with the best in the world and everything is done in first-class fashion.”

Sounds wonderful.

So why is Tollner giving it up?

Three reasons: Past, Present and Future.

Tollner’s past is USC, where he spent four embattled seasons as John Robinson’s successor, succeeding at little more than surviving the bile-spewing, torch-and-pitchfork alumni mob, also known as “Friends of the Trojans.” Who can blame him for leaping at the chance to rewrite his resume?

Tollner’s present is the Rams. Enough said.

Tollner’s future is San Diego State, which is poised to become The Miami of the West, just like everyone has been saying for the last 10 years. It has the climate, the booster power, the stadium, the schedule, the non-private school entrance requirements. Bound to happen any day now.

“When I was an assistant coach at San Diego State in the ‘70s,” Tollner says, “we played Florida State, must have been ’76 or ‘77, Bobby Bowden’s first year there. And we beat them pretty good (41-16). Since then, that program’s gone . . . “

Tollner makes a whooshing noise as his right hand imitates a rocket.

“We also played Miami during those years (’78 and ‘79) and we split with them. Won one, lost one. If you go back far enough, you’ll see that we were on the same level with them.

“Miami has since gone on to another level and San Diego has not. Is San Diego capable of making that move? I don’t know, but that’s part of the excitement that made me take the job in the first place.

“Let’s find out.”

Tollner comes to San Diego in immeasurably better condition than when he replaced John Robinson at USC in 1983. That is to say he’s tanned, rested, not on probation and not on the guillotine scaffold, staring down at rabid cardinal faces screaming, “Give us the Rose Bowl or give him death!”

When Tollner was fired at the end of the 1987 season, he was commonly viewed as the worst thing to happen to USC football since George Tirebiter, the Trojans’ car-chasing dog mascot, got squashed by one of its prey in 1950.

This was before Larry Smith and Fresno State 24, USC 7.

Let the record show that Tollner never lost a Freedom Bowl, won more games than he lost (26-20-1), won a Rose Bowl (20-17 over an Ohio State team that included Keith Byars and Mike Tomczak), beat UCLA (17-13 in 1985) and came closer to beating Notre Dame than any USC coach has in a decade (he lost the 1986 game, 38-37, on a John Carney field goal with no time on the clock).

In the last half-dozen years, Tollner senses people have noticed.

“Over time, I think maybe the perception has changed,” Tollner said. “We beat Ohio State in the Rose Bowl and went 7-4 my last year with a very good young team that went to the Rose Bowl the next year. We lost to Notre Dame in a great game, Rodney Peete versus Steve Beuerlein, after Tim Brown makes a great catch at the end of the game. . . .

“We went to the Citrus Bowl and the Aloha Bowl--played a great Alabama team that had Broderick Thomas and Cornelius Bennett, Bobby Humphrey at running back--but the people at USC don’t want that. What they want is to be in the Rose Bowl, and they don’t want to hear excuses. And that’s fine. I understand that.

“But John Robinson went 7-5 this year. He did a great job and there’s a new excitement there, but if you look at the numbers by themselves, it’s still a 7-5 season. I went 7-4 in 1987 and got fired, but there’s an upbeat feeling at USC now.”

So much of it is expectation. Tollner was replacing a myth. Robinson is replacing a swing-and-a-miss. San Diego State, Tollner believes, is offering an even break.

“At USC, they expect the national championship,” Tollner says. “At San Diego, they hope we can find a way to win the WAC championship.”

Tollner inherits an experienced quarterback who doesn’t wilt in the pocket, Tim Gutierrez, and possibly an All-American wide receiver, if junior Darnay Scott decides not to follow Faulk’s footsteps. It’s a running start, anyway, certainly an improvement over this dead end in Anaheim, and isn’t the idea supposed to be career enhancement?

Yet Tollner frowns at the jumping-a-sinking-ship jokes he has been hearing since Friday.

“That bothers me some,” he says, “because that’s not me. . . . It weighed on me before I made my decision. I came here to do a job and leaving before it is finished is not something I believe in.

“Chuck (Knox) helped me a lot. He told me to look at it for what is was, a great opportunity, and do what was best for me.”

And if Tollner needs a defensive coordinator down there, well, he has Knox’s number.