Knowing is Half the Battle: A Brief History of SJSU Football

4 comments so far September 3, 2008 by Brandon Vogel

What do we know about Nebraska's next opponent, San Jose State? Three things:

1) Dick Tomey's their coach.
2) The Spartans will start a former VHT QB in Kyle Reed. The guy was swimming in stars coming out of high school and originally committed to Cal.
3) Nebraska better not (can't?) lose.

But there has to be more to the Spartans than that, doesn't there? Of course there is and it all begins in 1893...

Con...tin...uity

Sometime in 1893, they don't know the actual date, San Jose State started playing football with a 18-0 loss to the San Jose YMCA. Perhaps shamed by the fact that they had, you know, lost to the local YMCA the program would play only one game over the next four seasons and then take an even longer break from 1901-1920 due to a lack of interested participants. From 1943-1945, SJSU took their final break from playing football due to World War II, a war that the program would be directly involved in.

Stopping the run..errr...crawl.

In December of 1941, San Jose State traveled to Hawaii to play a couple exhibition games. The games never happened but Pearl Harbor did. Unable to get off the island of Honolulu, many Spartans were used as part of a defense plan against the theoretical amphibious assault from the Japanese. When that never came some players still chose to stick around joining the police or armed forces.

Coaches

While Dick Tomey may be the coach with the most wins to his name to take the helm at SJSU, he's hardly the most famous to ever grace the sidelines.

Between 1979 and 1983, while his son John was slinging footballs and baseballs all over Palo Alto, Jack Elway was guiding the Spartans to 35-20-1 record but that presumably would've been better if his lifelong in-home visit with John had been more successful. Dan Hawkins scoffs at this sort of lack of discipline/inability to close. Oddly, after John was done at Stanford Jack took the head coaching gig.

While not a head coach, Dennis Erickson was part of Elway's staff and Bill Walsh, who played two years at TE and DE for SJSU, was a grad assistant there in the 50's and, at least according to Wikipedia, wrote a master's thesis entitled "Defensing the Pro-Set Formation." My kinda guy, my kinda school.

Throw in Dick Vermeil, MA in 1959, and while San Jose State can't claim to do a lot of winning on campus they are one of only three schools that can claim to have two alums who have coached Super Bowl winning teams. The other two? Arkansas and, of course, Dayton.

QB U?

I wouldn't say that but Steve DeBerg and Jeff Garcia are both alums. Neither of them, however, had the hype of one Mike Perez. In their 1987 season preview Sports Illustrated quoted Bill Walsh as saying Perez was the "best QB on the West Coast since John Elway." (Notice all the connections there?) Four years later Rick Reilly was quoting Perez in a story about the World League of American Football for the same magazine. I must admit, however, that this TD pass is pretty impressive.

Upsets?

There aren't many. The biggest came in 1980 when the Spartans beat a Mike Singletary led (and top ten ranked!) Baylor squad as a 27.5 point underdog. As of this writing, Nebraska was favored by 26.5, so I guess a win for the Spartans on Saturday wouldn't technically be the most shocking thing ever.

Overall, SJSU is 1-9 against the Big 12 conference. Their lone win was in 1963 against Kansas State but the Spartans could've been favored there considering that then KSU head coach Doug Weaver never won more than three games--and thrice won zero--in his seven seasons at the helm.

Nebraska has played San Jose State once, winning 49-13 in the year 2000.

Did you enjoy this article?

Get Husker news by email
Follow us on Twitter

NextPrevious