Spring’s a Rosy Time of Year for Stolz and SDSU Football

Denny Stolz was apologetic. No, not for the 38-37 loss to Iowa in the Holiday Bowl. No apologies needed there.

“Things are kind of a mess around here,” he mused. “These don’t look like facilities commensurate with being Western Athletic Conference champions. BYU would look at this and laugh.”

An old-fashioned radiator was positioned in a corner in the San Diego State University football offices. It was as anachronistic as looking at the blackboard and seeing the single-wing formation.

“We’ll sit over here,” Stolz said, motioning to the corner. “This is what we have for heat.”

Indeed, SDSU’s football offices look as if they have been shaken and transported by some gigantic earthquake that left everything else in the vicinity unmoved. The buildings are about 50 feet to the southwest of their footings, and twisted sideways. Makeshift steps lead to the landing between offices.

Of course, all of this is part of progress.

Construction is under way on a football operations center, something SDSU has never had. It will include coaches’ offices, meeting rooms, film rooms, locker rooms and weight rooms. Such conveniences will be new for the Aztecs, though routine elsewhere.

However, getting even is also progress.

These are rather pleasant times for Stolz, the impish and elfish head coach who came to San Diego a year ago and theorized that the Aztecs were not getting their share of the athletic pie.

“I figured the pie should be cut into three pieces,” he said Friday. “I figured one-third for the Chargers, one-third for the Padres and one-third for us.”

SDSU had grown accustomed to getting only a taste of a sliver . . . or maybe a sliver of a taste. The San Diego athletic pie had seemingly passed it by.

Before the Aztecs’ first season under Stolz was completed, the pie had been recut. SDSU now has at least the third that Stolz considered to be its rightful share. What’s more, the Chargers’ third has been fruitless of late, and the Padres’ third is filled with crow.

Thus, Stolz could be excused for smugly sitting in an unheated conference room, his eyes twinkling as if life is full of second-and-inches situations. The football team had risen from the rubble of its recent past, and now even the facilities would be upgraded to championship caliber.

Spring is always the best time of year for football coaches, and this has been the best of years for San Diego State football . . . at least at the major college level. The recruiting is done, and spring practice is under way. The first game, Sept. 5 against UCLA in the Rose Bowl, seems a year or two away.

“This is the best time of year for a football coach,” Stolz said. “One of the nicest things about it is that we get to spend time with the kids. In this regard, so many of us are remiss in college sports. The nature of the job is that we’re gone so much, recruiting or whatever, that we don’t spend as much time as we should with the players we already have on campus.”

Coaches spend hours with their players in the fall, but it’s different. It’s talking to them (or maybe yelling at them) rather than talking with them.

San Diego State’s spring practice routine, which began March 10 and runs through April 11, calls for workouts on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, scrimmages on Saturdays and player-coach sessions Mondays and Fridays.

These are more casual times, though the players undoubtedly would argue that there is never anything casual about practices.

“You know,” Stolz said, “this is the first time we have had a chance to really analyze our game films and take a good look at what we did well and what we might have to change. There just isn’t time during the season.”

However, there are no “in-between times” for anticipation or expectations. For this reason, there is no “in-between time” for appraising talent . . . and trying to move upward from a season that found SDSU football at its peak.

Even in this best time of the year, a coach can never get too far from realistic appraisal. Darned if a writer won’t wander off the streets on a beautiful March morning and ask about the gaps that must be filled.

When Stolz and his colleagues review those 1986 films, they will be watching a lot of athletes who will not be around in 1987. If a film editor could delete the images of the missing players, quarterback Todd Santos would be the only man in the backfield and he would be throwing to . . . no one.

“Both running backs, both wide receivers and the tight end are all gone,” Stolz said. “You don’t just put people out there to replace them.”

With the linebackers also departing en masse, the defense also is left with a rather monstrous hole to plug.

Ah, the roses of spring come with thorns.

Stolz, though, is not one to dwell on such things. Time--as well as community college transfers and high school recruits--will take care of such inconveniences. He did not come to SDSU asking for a year of transition, and he is not now talking of a year to rebuild.

“I’m just not a five-year building program guy,” he said. “We’ll figure out who can help us this year . . . and we’ll play them. We have certain guys we know are up here at this level. We’ll see which of the other guys can make the plays.”

Those, of course, will be worries for another time. This is not a time for worries, and Denny Stolz did not seem to be a man for worries.

Very soon, the new football offices would be rising outside his window. It would be a fitting home for a championship team.

And it will have heat.