Long Time Coming

There is a buzz emanating from Old Town that has nothing to do with limes and Mexican beer.

After years of procedure penalties and path interference, San Diego State appears to be making another run at big-time college football.

Season ticket sales are up 10% with projected revenue of $3 million for fiscal 2006-07 as the school anticipates a crowd of 40,000 for its home opener Thursday against Texas El Paso.

“It’s time to win,” first-year Coach Chuck Long proclaimed during a recent interview in his office.

Fans, apparently, can’t wait to catch the wave of a program that:

* Hasn’t won a postseason game since 1969, when San Diego State defeated Boston University in the Rose Bowl, which played host to the defunct Pasadena Bowl.

* Holds the distinction of being the only Mountain West Conference team without a winning season or a bowl appearance since the league was formed in 1999.

* Has not been ranked in the polls since Sept. 26, 1992 -- when the Aztecs were No. 21 in the Associated Press poll before a loss to UCLA.

* Recruited Marshall Faulk from New Orleans and broke him in as a defensive back.

* Failed to attract home-grown prospects Marcus Allen, Junior Seau, Ricky Williams, Rashaan Salaam, Reggie Bush and Alex Smith -- Seau and Smith being the only two in that group not to have won a Heisman Trophy.

* Has processed scores of players to the National Football League while posting 18 non-winning seasons since 1977.

* Allowed rising-star Oregon assistant Jeff Tedford to slip away to California four years ago and then hired a junior college coach.

Every coach since the glory days of Don Coryell and Claude Gilbert saw San Diego State as a mother lode -- only to end up with fool’s gold.

The stale-bread status of San Diego State football remains one of college football’s more enduring conundrums given its evident attributes of weather, a hilltop campus, top-notch facilities and available players.

Now, a group of investors from the Midwest -- mostly transplanted Iowans, led by Long -- is bringing a salt-of-the-earth ethic to the salt air.

“It’s always been a mystery to me,” Long said of the paradox that is San Diego State football.

A longtime assistant under Bob Stoops at Oklahoma, Long decided San Diego was the place to make his breakout debut.

The same way he prepared to become an All-American quarterback at Iowa, a Rose Bowl star, a runner-up to Bo Jackson for the 1985 Heisman Trophy and an eight-year NFL veteran, Long has prepared for this job.

Is he ready?

He thought he was the minute he wrapped up his pro career and returned to Iowa to become a young-fry assistant under Hayden Fry, his old coach.

Fry, though, sat Long down and told him he needed 10 years of seasoning before even considering a head-coaching position.

“I thought he was crazy,” Long, now 43, recalled. “I’d been in the NFL. I can be a head coach right now. How hard is this? He said you need to learn what an assistant coach goes through for 10 years, so when you become a head coach, you’ll appreciate what they do.”

Long heeded the advice and spent 12 years as a sponge.

At Iowa, he soaked up nuances from assistant Bill Snyder, who would later lead Kansas State to the biggest turnaround in college football history.

Long tutored under Stoops, another Iowa graduate, on the cusp of an Oklahoma revival that culminated with a national title in 2000.

You pick up things along the way.

“The blueprint is a little bit of everywhere I’ve been,” Long said.

Long on Fry: “He always made you feel good as a player. He made it fun. Even after a loss, his whole deal was, don’t let your players leave the locker room without saying something positive.”

Long on Snyder: “Perfectionist. Never went into a game unprepared under him. Not one time.”

Long on Stoops: “Confidence. An air of confidence he brought every day.”

Long has designs for a Kansas State-type revival and went right to the source in hiring two key components, offensive coordinator Del Miller and defensive coordinator Bob Elliott. Both were free agents after Snyder retired at Kansas State last year, and both have roots that extend to Iowa.

Jeff Schemmel, hired as San Diego State athletics director in 2005, is a Kansas State graduate who was on the search committee that hired Snyder.

Schemmel is convinced Long is Snyder with a cheerier personality. Snyder, of course, turned a football wasteland into a top-10 program.

“Anybody that tells me we can’t get it done here, let me take you to Manhattan, Kansas, and show you what we had,” Schemmel said. “We lost 28 games in a row there. No one’s ever going to convince me we can’t win, and win big here.”

Schemmel said he knew within 15 minutes Snyder was the right man for Kansas State and it didn’t take him much longer with Long.

“Chuck hasn’t played a game yet, but I have the same feeling,” he said.

Long hasn’t spent much time worrying about why San Diego State has failed, although junior quarterback Kevin O’Connell has an interesting theory.

“As much as a gold mine people look at San Diego State as, it sometimes can be a little bit of a distraction,” O’Connell said. “You have all those distractions two to five minutes away. Keeping guys here for the summer is easy in a sense, but keeping them focused on the journey and the path we want to be on is a different story.”

It’s sometimes hard to remember that Coryell and Gilbert coached here and were 165-45-4 from 1961 to 1980. The football team is 133-153-5 in the 25 years since.

Some of it has been bad coaching, some of it bad luck. Tedford had all but agreed to take over the program in 2002 before Cal swooped in at the eleventh hour, as Tedford once put it, “out of the blue.”

After they lost out on Tedford, the school turned to Tom Craft, a junior college coach in San Diego who was going to infuse the program with local, two-year talent.

Craft was fired after a four-year, 19-29 run.

Dismissing the idea that you have to throw the ball to keep West Coast fans entertained, Long is prepared to run the ball more, at least this year.

“You can be all this finesse and throw it 50, 60 times a game,” he said. “We may get to that point, it just depends on our personnel. But after a while if you’re not winning with that they’re not going to show anyway. That’s just my opinion.”

And defense?

Now there’s a concept.

At his first team meeting, Long passed around the national championship ring he won at Oklahoma.

Receiver Chaz Schilens won’t forget: “He said, ‘That’s what a championship feels like, that’s what a ring looks like, that’s our goal.’ ”

Credibility is important to modern-day players.

Long has it, and, frankly, Craft didn’t.

“Not knocking on Craft,” nose tackle Jonathan Bailes said. “Craft did what he did, but you’re talking about somebody with JC experience coming into Division I and you’re talking about Long. He’s brought an aura and is lifting the program, that cloud that’s been over us. ... He didn’t just talk it, he lived it.”

That’s not to say all the program knotholes have been covered.

There is no guarantee Long will be a success -- only an early-indication hope.

The team could also end up homeless should the NFL’s Chargers leave San Diego. If that happens, Qualcomm Stadium, where the Aztecs play their home games, could be razed and turned over to developers.

Beginning Jan. 1, the Chargers are free to negotiate with areas outside the city.

Schemmel says he thinks the Chargers will ultimately end up with a new stadium in town and the Aztecs will continue to piggyback on that partnership.

In a worst-case scenario, the Aztecs would have to build an on-campus stadium.

“Obviously, we don’t want that scenario to happen,” Schemmel said. “But I think we need to be ready for that scenario and we will be.”

Another downer would be San Diego State opening the season 0-3 and some fan raising an “Up Chuck” banner.

After the UTEP opener, San Diego State plays at Wisconsin before a return home to face Utah -- a tough way to start a renaissance.

It may be a new dawn here, but there’s still a full day ahead.

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(Begin Text of InfoBox)

The Faulk line

San Diego State was 19-15-2 in Marshall Faulk’s three seasons (1991-1993). Since he left for the NFL after his junior year, the Aztecs’ record is 62-77, with only three winning seasons:

*--* Year Conf. Coach Record 1994 WAC Ted Tollner 4-7 1995 WAC Ted Tollner 8-4 1996 WAC Ted Tollner 8-3 1997 WAC Ted Tollner 5-7 1998 WAC Ted Tollner 7-5 1999 Mtn. West Ted Tollner 5-6 2000 Mtn. West Ted Tollner 3-8 2001 Mtn. West Ted Tollner 3-8 2002 Mtn. West Tom Craft 4-9 2003 Mtn. West Tom Craft 6-6 2004 Mtn. West Tom Craft 4-7 2005 Mtn. West Tom Craft 5-7

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