San Diego State Fires Craft After Four Years

San Diego State Coach Tom Craft was fired Monday after failing to post a winning record in four seasons.

Craft, who played quarterback for the Aztecs in the mid-1970s and was their offensive coordinator a decade ago, was 19-29. His best finish was 6-6 in 2003. The Aztecs were 5-7 this season.

Craft had one season left on his contract. He’s expected to be reassigned within the athletic department at his base pay of $148,000. He had been making $400,000 a year in total compensation.

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Texas Coach Mack Brown has been calling USC the No. 1 team all season, and it wasn’t just talk. Brown voted the Trojans first in the final USA Today coaches’ poll -- and so did his brother.

The ballots were made public Monday, a first for the coaches’ poll, which is used by the bowl championship series in its standings formula.

Brown had his Texas team No. 2. The Trojans and Longhorns will play for the national title in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 4.

Alabama Birmingham Coach Watson Brown also had the Trojans first and his younger brother’s team second. USC Coach Pete Carroll is not on the 62-member voting panel.

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Texas quarterback Vince Young started his own Heisman Trophy campaign, saying that voters should look at his leadership and that he sat on the bench in the second half of several Longhorn blowouts this season.

“I think my chances are real high if they watch the game, how I’m a leader for my teammates,” Young said. “I hope they will see that the numbers that I put up were basically in the first half. In the second half I’m basically on the bench.

“If I played a full game I would have some more stats. Coach Brown, he don’t like to blow out people, so he pulled basically all our starters.”

Young passed for 2,769 yards and 26 touchdowns and ran for a team-high 850 yards and nine scores this season in an offense that scored 50 or more points seven times. Young leads the nation with a pass efficiency rating of 168.6.

USC tailback Reggie Bush is considered the front-runner for the Heisman. “If they’re just looking for the big, big highlights, then you got Bush winning,” Young said. “He is a great athlete, though.”

If he doesn’t win the award Saturday in New York, Young said it would motivate him even more to have a big game at the Rose Bowl, “to go out there and show the world they made a wrong decision. You’ve got to do that.”

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Forty-one percent of this year’s bowl-bound teams fall below the NCAA’s new academic benchmark, and almost half of them lacked a 50% graduation rate, according to an annual survey.

The 56 Division I-A teams headed to bowl games have a lingering problem of too many student-athletes failing to complete their studies, said Richard Lapchick, the University of Central Florida professor who wrote the report.

This is the first year Lapchick has used the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate, known as APR, to measure the bowl-bound schools’ academic progress. In past years, the study has relied solely on graduation rates.

A cutoff score of 925 means an estimated 50% of those student-athletes are on track to graduate. According to Lapchick’s report, only 33 of the 56 bowl-bound teams -- 59% -- got above the 925 cutoff. The Pacific 10 Conference’s five schools chosen for bowl games -- USC, UCLA, Oregon, California and Arizona State, scored less than 925.

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Virginia defensive coordinator Al Golden will become the new Temple coach, a school official told the Associated Press. ... Louisville defensive end Elvis Dumervil won the Bronko Nagurski Trophy as the best defensive player in college football.