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Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009

College football commentary: Fresno State

The next month will be a Pat Hill debate in this town. There's no way around that.

He is a debatable man and college football is a debatable game.

Hill is probably the most well-known person in the entire San Joaquin Valley. At least the most talked about.

It's a fascinating debate, actually. Would 9-4 and a bowl win get him a contract extension, despite not having an outright WAC title in 13 seasons? Would 6-7 get him fired, despite

98 wins and 10 bowl games in the same period? Whether you see Hill as a roadblock or a redeemer, there is something else to remember. It won't be any easier for the next coach.

Let's be blunt: Fresno State is not an ideal football coaching situation and it isn't a program on the rise.

What the school needs a lot more than a new football coach is, of course, a move to a new conference. The Western Athletic Conference is trying, with its "Play Up" slogan and its gritty commissioner Karl Benson pleading with the New Mexico States and Utah States and Idahos to improve.

And in ways, they have improved. Utah State has new facilities.

Idaho is bowl-eligible for the first time in a decade.

But the WAC just has too far to go and is still too crippled by the Mountain West Conference schools departing 10 seasons ago. The Boise State president is jarringly open about a desire to move to the Mountain West. Usually you wait until after the breakup to talk about your new love interest, right? With Boise State presumably on the way out, that would leave a conference with little national appeal and few connections. Its schools are separated by thousands of miles and that's just the beginning of the distance problems.

The eight theoretical remaining WAC teams would all have main rivals outside their own conference. You could make the argument that Fresno State and Hawaii are each other's No. 1 rival, but even that's a stretch since it's not exactly an easy road trip and the coals of the rivalry are sure to cool with coach June Jones gone.

Financially, Fresno State football just can't compete at the level it's trying to play. Beyond Bulldog Stadium and Save Mart Center -- and the liabilities of Save Mart Center are another discussion for another day -- the athletic facilities are sub-par.

Hill isn't recruiting to 7-acre weight rooms or 89-combination uniforms or spas with flat-screens -- he's promoting big-time nonconference games and a history of sending players to the NFL.

USA Today just published the salaries of all Division I football coaches and their assistants and the numbers say a lot. Boise State's Chris Peterson is making $1.12 million. Hill is making $963,000. Both before bonuses.

Hill's assistants make a combined $889,620. Peterson's make $1,577,153. Fresno State's highest-paid football assistant makes just $6,000 more than Boise State's lowest-paid assistant.

The Bulldogs are flying on Fridays for Saturday morning games.

They're busing to Reno. They're getting farther from big-time college athletics, not closer.

Whether the Mountain West will be interested in Fresno State when and if it does expand remains to be seen. Losing to Nevada the way the Bulldogs did couldn't have helped.

The main goal of a Mountain West expansion would be to become one of the top six football conferences, an automatic BCS qualifier.

The best guess is that the Mountain West will go to a 12-team conference, adding three teams, some combination of Boise State, Fresno State, Houston and Nevada. The Bulldogs' finally being accepted, the way they should have been a decade ago if not for bad hires, would be a lottery win. It would fix most every financial problem the athletic department has, especially if it moved the MWC into the BCS.

Being the odd-team out of a MWC expansion would absolutely cripple it.