San Jose State’s bowl bid hopes dashed again
“Ron’s our coach and he’ll be our coach going forward.” — Athletic director Gene Bleymaier, on SJSU coach Ron Caragher’s future
SAN JOSE — San Jose State had a chance to become bowl eligible Friday. Instead, for the third straight season, the Spartans are couch-surfing qualifiers.
“We shot ourselves in the foot,” said defensive lineman Tony Popovich.
So that will make the couchsurfing even more painful, what with all those big bandages on big toes or whatever.
Popovich was not referring strictly to his team’s 40-23 loss to Boise State at Spartan Stadium. He was speaking of the season as a whole, in which SJSU finished 5-7 and lost three games by six points or less. In several other games, the Spartans were competitive deep into second half, such as Friday when they trailed by just 16-10 at the end of the third quarter.
But the bottom line was still five victories, seven defeats, no bowl game for the third straight season. And that must be considered disappointing, given that when Ron Caragher became SJSU’s coach before the 2013 season, he inherited a program that had just gone 11-2 with a Military Bowl victory.
After three years, Caragher owns a 14-22 record. His best
season was his first, when the Spartans went 6-6. Is his job in jeopardy? Gene Bleymaier, San Jose State’s athletic director, shot down the thought.
“There’s no question about his status,” Bleymaier said of Caragher after Friday’s loss. “Ron’s our coach and he’ll be our coach going forward.”
This was not a surprising statement. Bleymaier hired Caragher — both are UCLA alums — and in 2013 gave the coach a five-year contract that has two more seasons to run. That’s a fair time frame to judge a coach. But it is also fair to ask Caragher about his own level of disappointment to this point, and about his own accountability for the results. He was a bit defensive when the question was asked later Friday, although some emotion is always understandable in the wake of a rugged defeat.
“I want to go to a bowl game each and every year,” Caragher said. “But I think you have to take into account that we moved into the Mountain West Conference. We’re not playing in the WAC anymore. We’re in the Mountain West Conference. The people we play are different people. If you want to compare the opponents we played when we were in the WAC … those people are different.”
This is correct. The Mountain West is a tougher league than the WAC. But of course, Caragher knew that when he took the job.
“The bar has been raised,” Caragher acknowledged. “So we as recruiters have had to raise the bar to raise the talent level of our program. And I think we’ve done that the last two years. I think we’ve had two good classes that we’re building upon. I think we have some good young players.”
Good enough to challenge for a Mountain West title? That remains to be seen. But remember, to reach a bowl these days — there are 40 of them, five more than in 2013 — it only takes a .500 record. And this led to Caragher’s other Friday postgame talking point, that San Jose State needs to think about the four games on its schedule that are not Mountain West games.
“We have to address the nonconference schedule,” Caragher said. “That’s the hard part. We’ve gone 1-3 each year, three straight years. So when you go 4-4 in the conference and throw in the 1-3 … that’s tough. We’d like to get to where we can come out of that 2-2, at least. We all want to go to postseason play. But I think you have to be realistic.”
His unspoken message, of course, was that San Jose State might want to soften the nonconference schedule — with fewer major powerconference games on the road that pay major money to help balance the budget but are all but guaranteed losses. This season, the Spartans played New Hampshire (win), Oregon State (loss), Auburn (loss) and BYU (loss). Next season’s nonconference opponents are Iowa State and Tulsa on the road, with Utah and Portland State at Spartan Stadium.
On paper, at least, that 2016 nonconference schedule holds 2-2 promise. But there’s other stuff the Spartans must clean up before then, including a tendency to botch play execution at key moments.
It happened again Friday. A couple of missed tackles led to breakaway Boise State touchdowns in the fourth quarter. A very ill-timed interception thrown by quarterback Kenny Potter when the Spartans still trailed by only 23-10. The quarterback, a first-year starter as a junior transfer from Long Beach City College, took blame for the pick and admitted he has learned hard lessons this season.
“Just a couple or three plays can be the difference between a 5-7 record and 8-4,” Potter said.
Of course, when a team comes as close to winning as many games as San Jose State did this season — but fails to win them — there are always two distinct possibilities. One is, the coaching wasn’t good enough to get the team over the hump in the one or two plays that would have won those games. The other possibility would be that the team is getting excellent coaching just to be close enough to almost win those games.
With San Jose State, there are times when you honestly think that both theories could be true. Caragher will have at least one more season to solidify which one is the most true.
“I think when you go through these challenges, it doesn’t always show in the win-loss record,” Caragher said. “But I think we’re improved from a year ago.”
For now, that merely means an improved team sitting in front of the bowl game telecasts. It’s not unreasonable to expect that Caragher and San Jose State need to get off the sofa in 2016.