Greatest season we never saw coming
Amid county coronavirus controversy, SJSU leaves for Arizona Bowl game
SAN JOSE >> The San Jose State Spartans football team left town Sunday to write the final chapter of the greatest season in school history.
While it’s true that the 1939 team went 13- 0, those Spartans didn’t have to play amid a global pandemic that forced them to move six hours away just to have training camp. Or play their games in an empty stadium. Or play a home game in Hawaii and two more in Las Vegas. Or be the subject of controversy instead of celebration.
“The hits just kept coming,” one of the team’s star players, defensive tackle Cade Hall, said Saturday.
Hall was talking about the season, but he just as easily could have been talking about the past week.
The Spartans survived all the hits this season, putting together a 7- 0 record, winning the Mountain West championship game against conference kingpin Boise State and rising to No. 19 in the latest Associated Press poll. Only once in history has SJSU been ranked higher; the 1939 Spartans were 18th.
And yet, when the Spartans left Sunday, bound for Tucson for one last game, the Arizona Bowl on New Year’s eve against Ball State, they left amid criticism.
Under current Covid protocol, any person traveling in or out of Santa Clara County is required to quarantine for 10 days. The Spartans, a hundred or more in their travel party, returned home last Sunday from two
weeks in Las Vegas and now, six days later, have left again.
Bad News Bears, meet the Scofflaw Spartans.
“It stings a little bit,” Nick Starkel, the SJSU quarterback, said of some of things he and his teammates have heard the past week.
“Not the best-case scenario,” said Hall. “We’d love for the community to be involved and for there to be no issue.”
And then there’s SJSU coach Brent Brennan, a relentlessly upbeat man who seems to be too good to be true. Asked about the past week, which included a strong rebuke from a county health official and a threat to not let the team board its flight to Arizona, Brennan nodded calmly.
“I believe everyone is doing the best they can — on all sides,” he said. “This is such a unique time and unique situation. Everybody is doing the best they can.”
San Jose State has fared better than many major college sports schools in handling the novel coronavirus. It had two football games canceled this season because of virus issues involving opponents Fresno State and Boise State.
A recent New York
Times’ survey of Football Bowl Subdivision schools showed San Jose State had the second-fewest number of cases out of the seven Mountain West Conference schools that fully completed the form.
At the time of the survey, SJSU reported eight cases of those who play or work in the athletic department. Since then the school has had a total of 11 cases, a school spokesman recently told the Bay Area News Group.
Brennan, 47, could have spared himself and everyone else — on all sides — the stress of this past week. He could have kept his team in Las Vegas, where it had been headquartered since Dec. 6 as a result of the county’s ban on contact sports.
But Brennan chose to bring the team home last Sunday, after its championship game victory. Instead of a parade, the Spartans came home to questions about what they were doing here.
Asked Saturday about the wisdom of that decision, and whether events of the past week had caused him to second-guess it, Brennan said: “I have not.”
Follow up: Why the heck not?
“Every decision we make starts with the well-being of our kids,” Brennan said. “So many people are worrying about Covid, and rightfully so. But the mentalhealth component, I don’t know that people have really understood the impact the pandemic has had on that.
“Mental health, that’s different for everyone as you go through these last six months. These young men’s worlds have been turned upside down. There’s no class. No parties. You can’t go out on a date. You can’t go the movies.
You can’t go get a burger.”
You can’t go home for the holidays to see the family you haven’t seen in months and months.
It’s like that for all of us, and Brennan recognizes that. Still, he made the call. He went for it on fourth down. May it turn out as well as everything else Brennan has done this season.
For years, pro football teams would hold preseason training camp far from home to provide focus and build strong bonds. San Jose State did it because there was no choice. With the county shut down, the Spartans set up training camp at Humboldt State University, 320 miles away, and that is where the seeds for this historic season were sown.
“You’re hanging with each other, even if you don’t want to be,” said offensive lineman Jack Snyder, who like Hall is an allconference performer on the field and in the classroom. “One night, we were gathered on the field and I looked around and thought, ‘This feels different.’”
When it comes to San Jose State football, different is good. For most of the last three decades, the Spartans have been bad, very bad. This is only their fifth winning season since 1992.
Brennan knows the history. He grew up in the Bay Area. His Dad was an assistant coach at SJSU. Brennan himself was an SJSU assistant from 2005-11. He was hired as head coach in 2017 and lived the darkness of Spartans football for two years, losing 22 of his first 25 games.
It broke him one night after a five-overtime loss to Hawaii.
“I was alone in the coaches’ locker room, and I just started bawling, crying my face off,” he said.
There have been more tears lately, a lot of them, good ones. Brennan reaches up to a bulletin board, pulls down something he wrote a year ago. It reads: “We will be practicing in Spartan Stadium with Christmas music playing in 2020.”
The implication was that the Spartans would be playing in a bowl game in 2020. Like everything else this year, when nothing is perfect and most is much worse, that practice didn’t happen.
But the plane took off Sunday, bound for Tucson and the final chapter of the greatest football season we never saw coming.