Fresno State Athletics
Fresno State Storms Onto Scene
9/5/2001 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 5, 2001
FRESNO, Calif. - Pat Hill, like a lot of football coaches, celebrates fast and then quickly gets back into a grumpy mood.
It is Monday morning, just 12 hours after his Fresno State Bulldogs earned their biggest victory in his four-plus seasons, a merciless 44-24 shellacking of supposed powerhouse Oregon State, Sports Illustrated's preseason No. 1 pick.
Hill is back at his office desk and not feeling terribly triumphant. "I can't believe this," Hill says, rubbing his bleary eyes. "Ridiculous."
The game films from this week's opponent, Wisconsin, have been delayed.
"This is bull," he says.
Hill's 2-0 team has upset Colorado and Oregon State, but the game Saturday at Wisconsin, he says, is the matchup he feared most going into the season.
Plus he is worried about the short week, going from a Sunday night game to traveling so far and kicking off Saturday at 9:10 a.m. PT.
"That means a pregame meal at 4 a.m. our time," he says. "We'll be dragging."
And if it's all too much for the Bulldogs to handle?
"I don't even think about losing, but we all know we can't afford to stumble," he says. "One loss and we're right back off the radar screen."
Maybe, but right now Fresno State blips are filling up college football's radar screen. The Bulldogs have bludgeoned the Big 12 and manhandled the Pac-10. For the first time since 1993, they head into Big Ten country with a national ranking - No. 19 in the AP poll released Monday. (This week's USA TODAY/ESPN Coaches' Poll was completed for its normal Sunday morning release.)
Thank goodness, some people in Fresno know how to celebrate. A record crowd of 42,410 showed up Sunday night to see the highest-ranked team ever to play in Fresno State's raucous pit of a field. The Beavers, 11-1 last year and whose previous game was a 41-9 Fiesta Bowl pounding of Notre Dame, came in ranked 10th by AP, 12th by USA TODAY/ESPN.
Marching down Bulldog Lane
Just 5 minutes into the game, with the Bulldogs leading 7-0, the crowd was already taunting the Beavers with chants of "Overrated ... overrated."
When it was over and Fresno State had won its 16th consecutive home game, the third-longest streak in the country, the red wave of Bulldogs fans tore down the south goal post. They marched out of the stadium with it and headed down Bulldog Lane to who knows where.
And the two folks from the Orange Bowl committee headed back to Florida.
"I don't think they were here to look at us," Fresno State assistant athletic director Steve Weakland says. "But hopefully they'll take something back from us."
Probably the Orange Bowl wanted a closer look at Ken Simonton, the Beavers' Heisman Trophy hopeful tailback. It was hard to see him, though. He was generally surrounded by a sea of red-clad defenders. He gained 42 yards in 15 carries.
But as one Heisman race sputtered, perhaps another one was born. Fresno State's 458-yard offensive explosion against what last year was the Pac-10's best defense was sparked by senior quarterback David Carr, a strapping 6-3, 225-pounder with a light, accurate touch on the long ball who threw for 340 yards and four touchdowns. His teammates are a little disappointed he didn't get more. "We were trying to get him 400," says wide receiver Bernard Berrian. "We want to get him in the Heisman race."
Carr reacts to that as if Berrian had said they wanted to teach him Greek or how to play the oboe.
"The Heisman?" Carr says. "I don't know anything about the Heisman."
But NFL scouts know Carr. Hill, an NFL assistant for 5 years before coming to Fresno, says Carr could become a first-round draft pick.
One reason Carr has played so well is that he is throwing to a remarkably talented crew of receivers who took turns torching Oregon State's secondary.
The most electric one is 5-9, 175-pound senior Rodney Wright, who caught seven passes from Carr for 182 yards and two TDs and was named Western Athletic Conference offensive player of the week.
Who knows how many passes he's caught in his life from Carr? They're both from Bakersfield, Calif., about 100 miles to the south. And, though they went to different high schools, they started playing catch as soon as they both committed to Fresno State.
"Rodney's my boy," Carr says. "Sometimes I have too much confidence in him. I just know that, at any moment, he can make a play."
Another receiver making plays for Carr is sophomore Jeremy Johnson, a 6-4, 205-pounder who is a little skinny for a tight end but caught seven passes for 73 yards. Yet another, Marque Davis, caught eight passes in the win against Colorado. And still another, Charles Smith (94 receptions the past 2 years), has yet to make his season debut because of a knee injury.
But this is not a team built solely on the skill and finesse of a passing game.
Playing physical
The Bulldogs, like they did to Colorado the week before, physically whipped the Beavers. They punished Simonton, who is bidding to become the first Pac-10 runner to rush for 1,000 yards in four seasons. And they sacked senior quarterback Jonathan Smith six times. Three of those were by Alan Harper, a 6-2, 285-pound senior defensive tackle who, if he played at Nebraska or Florida State, would be clearing a shelf for all the postseason awards to come.
Does the relative obscurity of Fresno frustrate him?
"David and I have talked about that," Harper says. "We kind of wonder what it would be like if we were at a big university. But I like it like this. If we get some attention here, we know we really earned it."
After 2 weeks of the 2001 season, they've earned a lot of it. They are ready for their close-up.
Hill, 49, has been planning for a breakthrough like this since he arrived in 1997 and began trying to schedule the toughest opponents he could get.
Playing in the WAC, a non-BCS league, Fresno State's only route to a BCS bowl and a shot at the national title is to finish in the top six in the end-of-season BCS poll. And the only way to do that, Hill figures, is to schedule the best teams and beat them.
"That's the only way," he says. "Bobby Bowden did it back in the 1970s. That's why I love that guy. Who would have thought it could happen at Florida State? He just hit the road every week and eventually started beating people. Why can't we do that, too?"
The hard part, he says, is getting people to agree to play. The teams from the major conferences have nothing to gain, everything to lose in scheduling Fresno State. To secure the Colorado game, Fresno State agreed to buy 11,000 tickets.
"We bought the game," Hill says. "Some teams travel just for the payday. But we're willing to pay for a game. We just want to play."
Hill says he offered to travel to Southern California "just for bus fare and a hotel" but the Trojans declined.
"They don't want to play us," he says. "Then they recruit against us and say, 'You don't want to go there. That's not a big-time program.' Well, if you're so big time, let's get it on out on the field and find out who's better. We'll see who has a program. It bothers me a lot, because I think everybody should have a chance at the national championship."
Like in basketball?
"Exactly," he says. "Take Gonzaga and what they have done in the NCAA tournament. That's a great story. Why can't it happen in football?"
