Realities of Spartan Existence

The billboards at each end of Spartan Stadium read:

San Jose State Football

A Tradition Since 1893

So when Coach Fitz Hill stared at the scoreboard during a game on his home field last month and it blinked back at him, Rice 34, SJSU 7, he made a snap assessment of how he really felt.

“It was the lowest point of my career,” said Hill, 40, in his fourth season as the Spartans’ coach.

“I was thinking I was standing in front of the Red Sea, no way across, then it parted and I got to the other side. But even when we went ahead and won, 70-63, I still felt like someone was chasing me.”

It’s a familiar feeling at San Jose State, the school where John Ralston and Jack Elway coached, where Jeff Garcia and Steve DeBerg threw touchdown passes, where Dick Vermeil lettered for two years in the 1950s at quarterback and where Bill Walsh did the same at receiver and defensive end.

But there are decidedly different vibes and a conflicting message these days at Spartan Stadium. The tradition-rich Spartans are getting chased down from behind and it’s starting to look as though it’s third-and-long, no matter how hard Hill tries to get the ball moving in the right direction again.

“It looks like we’re going backward, but really, that’s not the case,” he said.

Hill is right. It does look that way:

* The Spartans, who allow an average of 39.3 points a game, are 2-5 and face the possibility of their 12th losing season in the last 13 years. Winless in four road games, they will be in Reno on Saturday night for a game against Nevada.

* Despite playing in the third-largest city in California and having an alumni base of around 150,000 in the Bay Area, they rank last in attendance among 117 Division I-A football teams, averaging 6,949 a game.

* Last spring, an academic senate resolution proposed that funding to the athletic program be cut and that the Spartans should drop out of Division I-A and the Western Athletic Conference.

* There is an interim university president whose predecessor was planning to launch a task force to look into the athletic program and its funding.

* This week, the man who hired Hill, Athletic Director Chuck Bell, said he was going to retire.

Even so, when Bell made the announcement Tuesday, he said football had a future at San Jose State.

“The only two entities that have been against it have been some in the media and the faculty senate,” he said. “The acting president told me that neither of those two entities will decide the history and future of the sport, so I think it’s a non-issue.”

Nevertheless, some could add it all up and believe this is the beginning of the end of San Jose State football. But, like Bell, Hill is not among them. He says the skeptics are wrong.

Don Kassing, who has a two-year contract as university president, reaffirmed the school’s commitment to Division I-A football. Hill was relieved.

“When I recruit someone, the competition says, ‘Why San Jose State? They might drop football,’ and ‘The administration doesn’t like football,’ ” said Hill, who was the assistant head coach and recruiting coordinator at Arkansas. “The first 15 minutes with the recruit, I have to defend myself.

“Anyway, we have a great opportunity here to do something many people think can’t get done.”

It’s going to have to be quite a performance. The football landscape in California is littered with programs that failed, flopped and disappeared -- Cal State Northridge, Cal State Fullerton, Long Beach State and University of Pacific to name a few.

Here in the heart of the Silicon Valley, San Jose State’s fate rests with Hill, who had no head coaching experience before he arrived but has clearly grown up on the job with an acute ability to channel the positive, deflect the negative and have faith.

Indeed, Hill even named one of his daughters Faith. He has another daughter named Destiny and a son named Justice. One of only five African American head coaches in Division I-A football, Hill earned his doctorate at Arkansas with the thesis “Examining the Barriers Restricting Employment Opportunities Relative to the Perceptions of African American Football Coaches at NCAA Division I-A Colleges and Universities.”

There were no Xs and O’s in there, nor were there any for Hill to find when he joined the ROTC at Ouachita Baptist to pick up a little extra money, then was made a second lieutenant and served in Operation Desert Shield.

Hill earned a Bronze Star and U.S. Army Commendation medals in his nine-month stay.

“When I start feeling sorry for myself, I wonder what it’s like to be a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s a very easy decision.”

Hill insists he is succeeding in laying the right foundation for Spartan football to make it. Next year, for the first time in his tenure at San Jose State, he expects to have a full complement of 85 players on scholarship. Hill had 58 on scholarship when he came in 2001 and 70 this year.

His first recruiting class will be seniors next year and they will number 32, 17 recruited from high school. This season, there are only 11 seniors -- and five of those began their careers as walk-ons.

There are additional areas of modest growth, including the grade-point average for his players, which has risen from 1.95 to 2.3. Also, the athletic program comes up with $1.2 million annually for the school through the Spartan Foundation, with football being the major contributor.

Hill says it’s all part of a long, slow process.

“I wish we could have put this program in a microwave and done it quicker, but this program needed a crock pot,” he said. “We all want soup and soup in a crock pot tastes better.”

How that soup translates into victories will probably determine whether the Spartans are going to be successful in the long term. The NCAA altered its rule requiring Division I-A schools to average at least 15,000 in home attendance, saying that two seasons of noncompliance in a 10-year period would bring on sanctions, but those requirements will be reviewed in the next year.

The 70-63 victory over Rice, in which the teams combined to set an NCAA record for points in a regulation game, drew a crowd of 4,467 at Spartan Stadium. Last Saturday, only 5,968 showed up for homecoming, a 38-20 loss to Texas El Paso.

Hill said the fans will come when the team wins. He knows the clock is ticking, but he is optimistic.

“There’s more things than wins and losses in the grand scale of things, but wins and losses are the only things that keep you employed,” he said. “Still, they’re not going to put my winning percentage on my tombstone.”

The Spartans are one big victory away from a defining moment that will change everything, according to Hill, who said that chance slipped through their fingers in the last game in 2002. Needing a victory over Fresno State at Spartan Stadium to earn a spot in the Silicon Valley Classic, which would have been their first bowl appearance in 12 years, the Spartans lost, 19-16, when a sure touchdown pass was dropped.

“That game would have changed the whole perception,” said Hill, whose record at San Jose State is 14-29. “We’d be in the postseason, the alumni would be proud, people would spend money and buy sweaters. We need one of those moments.

“Each year it doesn’t happen, people lose their sense of hope. It’s a process to get it back. This program is at a critical juncture.”