Aztecs leave stellar 2015 season in the past
SDSU finished last year with 10 straight wins
Last Sept. 26, the San Diego State Aztecs were 1-3 on the young 2015 football season after a 37-21 loss at Penn State. Panic buttons were being pushed in and around America’s Finest City.
Rest assured, Aztecs coach Rocky Long wasn’t the one doing the pushing — or the panicking.
Twice during his 11-year stint as head coach at New Mexico (19982008), where he’d been a star quarterback, he rallied the Lobos from 1-3 starts to winning seasons.
At San Diego State in 2013, the Aztecs started not just 1-3 but 0-3 — and finished 8-5.
Never before, though, had Long experienced (and orchestrated) a turnaround like last season’s.
After that loss to Penn State, SDSU won 10 straight — beating Air Force for the Mountain West Conference title and crushing Cincinnati 42-7 in the Hawaii Bowl.
In the wake of the defeat at Penn State, one observer of the SDSU program wrote the following: “The ship isn’t sinking for San Diego State football. Yet. But it’s starting to take on water.”
Were similar sentiments expressed in Albuquerque after those 1-3 starts in 2001 and 2003? Well, uh, maybe. In any case, Long, a football coach for the past 37 years, knows he’s just three losses in four games away from more brickbats — regardless of what he and the Aztecs achieved last fall. There are no corners to be turned, he always said during his tenure at UNM — just the next game or the next season.
Still, the arrow on Montezuma Mesa is definitely pointing upward. Rather than criticism aimed at Long and his program, there’s at least some indignation that the Aztecs didn’t make the top 25 in The Associated Press preseason college poll. They came in, unofficially, 31st.
Last month, on the strength of that 10-game winning streak, San Diego State was a unanimous choice by the Mountain West Conference media to win the league’s West Division. That and 50 bucks, Long knows, will get you into the San Diego Zoo.
“We don’t talk about last year,” he told San Diego radio station 1090 AM in July. “... It was a good year and we did some things that hadn’t been done around here in a long time, but we have higher expectations for ourselves.”
Long believes Aztec football is on the brink of becoming a different animal: a Group of Five conference program with Power Five conference credentials. It’s not about turning a corner; it’s about continuing to march up the hill.
“We would like to be the best non-Power five school in the country,” he said. “... If you’re one of the top non-Power Five teams in the country, you can play with any of them.”
Nico Siragusa, the Aztecs’ allconference offensive guard, takes his cue from Long. Last year was great, but it’s over. And this year can be even better. “This team that we have now didn’t go 11-3,” Siragusa said on 1090 AM. “The team that we have now wants to win every game.”
Toward that goal, the personnel appears to be there. Siragusa will be blocking for Donnel Pumphrey, almost unanimously considered the best of many outstanding Mountain West running backs.
Returning all-conference linebacker Calvin Munson leads a defense that ranked seventh in the nation in scoring defense (16.4 points per game).