Spartans’ Brennan wins Lombardi coach of year national honor
San Jose State football coach Brent Brennan capped what was an almost perfect season when he was announced as winner of the 2020 Lombardi Foundation national Coach of the Year award on Wednesday.
Brennan, in his fourth year as the Spartans’ head coach, led SJSU to the Mountain West football championship. It was SJSU’s first football title of any kind since 1991. The Spartans were 7-0 during the regular season before losing to Ball State 34-13 in the Arizona Bowl.
Brennan was one of four finalists along with Indiana’s Tom Allen, Coastal Carolina’s Jamey Chadwell and Iowa State’s Matt Campbell.
“This is a really incredible day for me certainly, but also for our program,” Brennan said on a Zoom call. “I think these things happen only if you have incredible people with you
on the journey. You don’t get this kind of award, you don’t get this kind of recognition without the people you work with really lifting you up. I really believe that.”
The 7-1 season by San Jose State was the third-best in school history. The 1939 team went 13-0. It finished 11-1 a year later.
SJSU was limited to eight games in 2020 because of COVID-19, but it was a dominant team until the bowl game, with doubledigit margins in all seven wins. Against Ball State, the Spartans trailed 27-0 after the first quarter as they had trouble adjusting to playing without six players, including five starters, and both coordinators. The Bay Area News Group reported a week after the game that the football team had 13 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to data provided by Santa Clara County. The data did not include details about when or where the positive tests occurred.
Asked Wednesday if the Arizona Bowl defeat had left a bitter taste in his mouth, Brennan replied, “If someone said before the season you could win a Mountain West championship but would lose a bowl game, I would take it. I would take it every time. I would take it next year, too. It’s just so
hard to win a conference championship, and it had been so long since we won one.”
Brennan took over for Ron Caragher after the 2016 season and went 3-22 in his first 25 games.
“I expected us to win,” Brennan said. “I would really say, ‘What choice do you have? Golly gee, I expect us to suck again. I expect us to struggle again.’ No, when you’re in that situation, you really have only one choice, and that’s to believe that you can.”
Despite going 1-11 in 2018, Brennan saw significant improvement.
“So many of those games in the second year were real football games through three quarters,” he said. “In the fourth quarter the bottom fell out or we would give them away in a close one. We were able to get a little more over the hump in Year Three.”
The Spartans finished 5-7, and some of the losses were close.
“It takes a little time to learn how to win, how to finish,” Brennan said. “It
started to show up a little in ‘19 and obviously a lot this season.”
The success San Jose State had in 2020 is beginning to show up in recruiting as well. The Spartans only signed 13 players for their 2021 class, and it’s been months since coaches could conduct off campus visits. But Brennan said more and more recruits are starting to reach out, inquiring about playing at SJSU.
With the culture changing on the field, athletic director Marie Tuite was asked how the success can be sustained. SJSU has had pockets of success with coaches such as Darryl Rogers, Jack Elway, Claude Gilbert, Dick Tomey and Dave Baldwin. And Brennan has signed a contract extension after a brief flirtation with the University of Arizona.
“Anyone can say we want to be more competitive, or we want to win,” Tuite said. “You really have to have sort of a plan in place. It certainly starts with keeping your head coach. It’s an effort that takes a lot of folks to do the lifting.”
Brennan is the first football coach at San Jose State to receive national coach of the year honors. The last SJSU coach in any sport to earn such an award was golf coach Mark Gale in 1992, when the Spartans won the NCAA Division IV women’s golf title. He was named GolfWeek national Coach of the Year.