Filed under: Boise State, Michigan, Navy, San Diego State, TCU
SAN DIEGO -- Like music mogul Jay Z and building tycoon Donald Trump, San Diego State's football coach is in an empire state of mind. Only without the artistic riffs or weird hair.
San Diego State, Rocky Long tells me, can become football's next TCU or Boise State. Which is to say, San Diego State can rise into mid-major prominence and crash a BCS bowl.
"That's realistic within a five- or six-year period," Long was telling West Coast Bias on letter-of-intent day.
Hearing this, my mind raced back to a different time yet on the same sunny campus here 11 miles east of the Pacific Ocean.
Twenty years ago, another Aztecs head coach painted SDSU as a latent "Miami of the West," and he meant Florida's mighty Miami, not Ben Roethlisberger's Miami of Ohio.
Making his dreamy talk seem less dreamy, Al Luginbill recruited several future NFL players to his SDSU offenses and defenses. But his Aztecs more resembled the misbehaving Hurricanes than the triumphant Canes. Luginbill was pink-slipped in 1993 after five interesting, if maddening, seasons that yielded no conference titles or bowl victories.
"We should've been better," one of those Aztecs, Robert Griffith, an electrical engineering grad and former Pro Bowl safety for the Minnesota Vikings, told me in November.
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