Tedford’s quick fix at Fresno impressive
Jeff Tedford didn’t think it would take three or four years to rebuild the Fresno State football program. But he probably wasn’t expecting a one-year turnaround of this magnitude, either.
In Tedford’s first year as coach of his alma mater, the Bulldogs won more games (10) than in their last three seasons combined, capping the year with a 33-27 win over Houston in the Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve. It was one of the most dramatic one-year flips in Football Bowl Subdivision history, and it’s why Tedford, 56, is among the five finalists for the American Football Coaches As- sociation’s 2017 National Coach of the Year award.
Tedford joins Iowa State’s Matt Campbell, Wisconsin’s Paul Chryst, Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Scott Frost, formerly of UCF, as regional winners. The national award will be unveiled at the American Football Coaches Awards presented by Amway on Jan. 9.
Fresno State’s hiring of Tedford, who previously spent more than a decade as the head coach at California, was not met with the same acclaim as some of 2016’s other coaching moves.
But it has paid immediate dividends for the Bulldogs, who became just the second team in FBS history to go from double-figure losses to double-figure wins in one year; Miami (Ohio) also achieved the feat in 2010.
“We all worked hard together,” Tedford said in his postgame news conference in Hawaii. “We didn’t come into this thing thinking this is going to take us three years. That’s not in the mindset. The mind-set is to work every day and see how it goes.”