THE EX FILES

As yet another new coach gives it a go at USC, Ted Tollner sits at San Diego State with something a Trojan football coach can only imagine.

A 10-year contract.

“I guess it is unusual,” said Tollner, 12 years removed from the short, almost forgotten tenure at USC that ended when he was fired after going 7-4 in 1986--becoming the first of three consecutive coaches to be fired.

Saturday night, Tollner brings his Aztecs to the Coliseum, a field he visited often as an NFL assistant after his final days at USC, but where he will coach against the Trojans for the first time.

“Obviously, you’d like to win, but mine is not an ‘in your ear’ kind of thing,” said Tollner, whose team is 0-1 after a season-opening loss to Wisconsin and 25-22 as he begins his fifth season at the school. “I’d like to win because it would be great for our program. It would be nice for me personally, but that’s really not the primary thing.

“No one likes to be fired, but I don’t have a bitterness. . . . I don’t like what happened, but it happened. I’m not bent on revenge.”

Tollner, 58, has other challenges now. Things like trying to explain to recruits what he doesn’t know himself, such as San Diego State’s future after announcing it will secede from the Western Athletic Conference to form a new conference. Things like selling the climate and Qualcomm Stadium while schools like USC sell the chance to play in the Rose Bowl.

“It’s a different standard,” Tollner said. “There, I was fired after a 7-4 year. That’s the way it is. They’re different schools with different expectations.”

Ah, those expectations.

When Tollner was dismissed at USC in 1986 by former Athletic Director Mike McGee and former President James H. Zumberge after four seasons, he was only the third coach to be fired since USC took up football in 1888.

It was the beginning of a trend.

Tollner was the first to go, followed by Larry Smith, and then a Trojan icon in John Robinson.

Now it is Paul Hackett’s turn to try to restore the old glory, and a funny thing has happened in the intervening years.

Tollner’s tenure--an era once referred to as “four years of unending humiliation” in a letter to The Times--doesn’t look so awful in retrospect. Or certainly no longer so unusual.

He inherited a team under NCAA sanctions left over from Robinson’s first tenure and went 4-6-1. That was followed by a 9-3 season and a Rose Bowl victory over Ohio State. USC went 6-6 the next season, including an Aloha Bowl loss to Alabama and was 7-4 when he was fired in 1986, although he stayed on through a Citrus Bowl loss to Auburn and finished 7-5.

Also worth noting is what happened to Larry Smith’s first three teams after Tollner was fired.

Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl.

“I’m not going to take any credit for what Larry Smith did,” Tollner said. “We recruited them, but they coached them. It’s unfair to say the results would have been the same. We don’t know that.”

On the other hand, Tollner was 1-7 against UCLA and Notre Dame.

Perhaps more important is that back then, USC was only five years removed from its last national championship in 1978 when Tollner took over in 1983.

What Tollner did wasn’t good enough then. Would it be any closer now?

“I do think they have become a touch more reasonable in what they expect. They still have high goals and rightfully so,” Tollner said.

“They want national championships. Sometimes I think they’re a touch unreasonable. You want to be in the hunt for the Pac-10 championship, certainly. That I don’t think is unreasonable. To say you expect to contend for the national championship year in and year out, that’s unreasonable. Occasionally certainly, but not every year.

“But to assume they’ll be in the hunt for the national championship and have nine, 10, 11 wins every year, they seem to understand that’s a lot tougher today than it used to be.

“I don’t know if they’ve lowered their standards. That’s not something I can talk about. I’ve lost touch with the power structure there. My gut feeling is yes.”

The picture is a little different at San Diego State--long regarded as a program of slumbering potential. In 1977, San Diego State played a Florida State team in its second season under Bobby Bowden and the Aztecs won, 41-16. The Seminoles have become a national power since. San Diego State hasn’t.

“Here, I think the goal is to win the conference championship. We haven’t accomplished that,” Tollner said. “We’ve been in the hunt, but we lost to Colorado State when we needed to beat them. We’re not a school that’s really looking at the national championship.

“I still think there’s more to be achieved than we’ve achieved.”

Evidence of one of the issues can be found in the Aztec media guide, where Tollner’s postseason coaching experience is stretched to include bowl games as an assistant at USC and the Pro Bowl as well as college all-star games.

That’s because San Diego State has yet to play in a bowl game under Tollner--despite eight-win seasons in 1995 and 1996.

“We still fight that,” Tollner said. “The Pac-10 has the Rose Bowl. Our kids can be first-round picks in the NFL draft, we have statistics to show that.

“But I think bowl games are really important. Other schools can say, ‘Where is a WAC team going if they win eight games? You think if we win eight games we’re not going to a bowl game? If we win seven, we’re going. If we win six, we might be going.’

“That’s what they tell them.”

Because of that 10-year contract, though, he can give them a pretty good idea who might be coach.

Athletic Director Rick Bay was worried Tollner might return to the NFL or moving to another school after the back-to-back eight-win seasons.

“The more I worked with him, the more I realized if I lost him, I’d simply be out on the street looking for someone like him,” said Bay, formerly the athletic director at Oregon, Ohio State and Minnesota as well as a baseball executive.

What evolved before last season was a contract that is guaranteed during the first five years--but more important, includes buyouts both ways, meaning Tollner, or the team that hired him, would have to pay off San Diego State if he were to leave.

“I love the challenge here. I love living here,” Tollner said.

So instead of going back to the NFL, where coaches don’t have to worry much about players’ academics or NCAA or legal troubles, Tollner stayed put.

At San Diego State, players have gotten in plenty of scrapes over the years, but Tollner and Bay say the problems have been reduced.

The idea is to come out somewhere between an 11-0 team with serious behavioral problems and as Bay puts it, having “all choirboys on the dean’s list and being 3-8. That’s not acceptable either.”

Tollner’s contract gives him security, even if the guaranteed salary in the $250,000-$300,000 range is less than half what, say, Hackett makes in a year.

But being on the same page with the people you work for is worth something.

“I know what the expectations are at ‘SC,” Bay said. “What Ted went through at ‘SC is kind of what Earle Bruce went through at Ohio State when I was there. Earle was never worse than 9-3, and the first time he lost four games, he was fired. That’s when I left. People lose sight.”

Tollner said that given “the hand we were dealt” at USC with the probation, he believes the Trojans made progress in his four years.

USC didn’t win enough games, it’s true.

“I could live with it. I try not to rationalize. I’m pretty critical of myself,” he said.

“When we left, things were better.”