Coaching Question to be Answered at SDSU

When San Diego State’s football team begins its first pre-season workout Monday, it will not only usher in the new era with head coach Brady Hoke, but it will answer a question asked by local fans for years: can the Aztecs program find success if it ever gets a good coaching staff?

The group under Hoke certainly qualifies. Al Borges (offense) and Rocky Long (defense) are among the game’s best coordinators over the past couple decades and Brian Sipe, brought in to tutor the quarterbacks, is merely a former NFL Player of the Year. There’s something to say for the other guys on the staff, too.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say this is the best group of football coaches assembled on the Mesa since the beginning of the Ted Tollner-era in the mid-1990s. Those guys, remember, led the Aztecs to two 8-win seasons. The current staff might not rival the NFL coaching factory under Don Coryell and Claude Gilbert but that’s only because they’re just now getting their first season underway.

There’s plenty of reason for the diminished number of Aztec faithful to be desperate for a quality staff:

After the news of the past couple of weeks, I don’t think I need to pile on the legacy of Chuck Long, who now goes down as one of the worst coaching hires in the history of American sports.

As great an offensive mind as he has, Tom Craft needed an offensive coordinator to help with in-game adjustments, but the athletic department wouldn’t spend enough money. The lack of financial support resulted in a low-quality staff that recruited poorly and left their successors in a lurch.

Tollner had the great staff initially but those early successes were stymied by the development of the BCS, which redirected players and assistants to the Pac-10 and other major conferences. They ran out of steam by the new millennium.

(By way of full disclosure, from my dealings with both men, I really like and respect both Craft and Tollner personally. Both had nothing but love for SDSU. Tollner was beat down by the changed landscape of college football and Craft’s resurrection program simply didn’t work.)

Longtime fans are certainly aware that Al Luginbill, Denny Stolz and Doug Scovil all had their issues, too.

Now a good staff is on hand, guys with solid track records. One gets the impression of a sea change at San Diego State because of these coaches. We’ll finally find out what SDSU football can do with another great coaching staff -- especially interesting because the sport’s landscape has swayed back into State’s favor with the ascent – finally – of the Mountain West Conference.

How long it will take to get the answer is obviously unclear. It took Tollner and Luginbill two seasons each to find success. Stolz did it his first year, before he discovered he liked golf even more than Steve Spurrier. I bet we’ll have our answer, good or bad, sometime in November 2010. However, anyone who prays for something – and Aztecs fans have prayed for salvation for years now – knows the answer sometimes is “no.”