Bordow: Spartan attitude keeps Tomey winner

Dick Tomey should have hung up the phone and had a good laugh at San Jose State’s expense.

It was the fall of 2004, and the Spartans were calling to see if Tomey, the former Arizona Wildcats coach, was interested in becoming their head coach.

Are you kidding?

Tomey was 66 years old. He had a great gig as the Texas Longhorns’ assistant head coach. He and his wife, Nanci, liked living in Austin, Texas.

Why in the world would he want to take over a program that had one winning season since 1992, hadn’t played in a bowl game since 1990 and was so down and out that just two years earlier it was in danger of losing its Division IA status because it failed to meet NCAA criteria, including averaging 15,000 fans per home game?

Here’s why: Where others see thorns, Tomey smells roses.

“I’m not sure there’s more exciting work than building a program that’s fallen on hard times,” Tomey said. ... “I don’t believe any job is a graveyard. To think they can’t have winning football here is crazy.”

No, what Tomey has done the past two seasons at San Jose State is crazy.

After an inauspicious 3-8 start in 2005, the Spartans finished 9-4 last season and beat the University of New Mexico in the inaugural New Mexico Bowl.

The nine wins were one more than the Spartans had the three previous seasons — combined. It was San Jose State’s first winning season in six years, and home attendance at Spartan Stadium was up 300 percent.

Tomey didn’t win any end-of-the-year coaching awards, but he may have done the best job of any coach in college football.

“There were a lot of people who said, ‘You can’t win there,’ ” said Texas assistant coach Larry Mac Duff, who was an assistant under Tomey for 14 years at Hawaii and Arizona. “He just went in and changed the whole culture.”

Tomey did so by selling sunshine.

He gave more than 100 speeches in and around campus his first year on the job. He sold the community on his vision and the Spartans’ players on the future. That enthusiasm — along with tangible improvements such as additional scholarship money and a salary hike for assistant coaches — gave birth to belief.

“Like Colin Powell says, ‘Optimism is a force multiplier,’ ” Tomey said. “I believe in that so much. ... Players need to feel good about where they are and they need to feel they can achieve and grow.”

Tomey didn’t just water the plants, though. The football program had been down for so long it was bereft of discipline and accountability. Tomey scared his players straight.

“We had to change the work ethic in the program,” Tomey said. “You need to set high standards in terms of what you expect in personal behavior and attention to detail. At the same time you need to hug your guys and get to know them and treasure them as people.”

Arizona State coach Dennis Erickson had no doubt Tomey would resurrect San Jose State. In fact, he told Spartans athletic director Tom Bowen that Tomey, who was on Erickson’s San Francisco 49ers staff, would be the ideal candidate because he already had transformed downtrodden football programs at Hawaii and Arizona.

The Wildcats had one bowl victory in 85 seasons prior to Tomey’s arrival. In his 14 years there, they went to seven bowl games and beat, among others, No. 10 Miami in the 1994 Fiesta Bowl and No. 14 Nebraska in the 1998 Holiday Bowl.

Tomey brought that blueprint with him to San Jose.

“He’s just done a great job,” Erickson said. “To win nine games (last season) and go to a bowl game is really phenomenal, but I’ve always thought he’s one of the great coaches in the country.”

Tomey is not quite ready to take a bow — “I think the jury is probably still out on exactly what we’ve done because we’ve done it one year and you need to do it repeatedly for a program to be really turned around” — but he will admit to feeling good about the program’s direction. He should. San Jose State was on the endangered species list five years ago. Saturday, it will pose a real threat to Arizona State.