Columnist Dean Juipe: San Jose State on 13-week death march

Dean Juipe

Friday, Aug. 30, 2002 | 10 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

It's a mercenary's life, to be sure, one that will leave bodies strewn in the wake.

It'll be torturous and it'll be unrelenting. It's 13 weeks and 13 consecutive football games, at least four of which will be killers, in nine states and covering an odometer busting 23,574 miles.

Factor in an inexperienced squad and a program that loses on a perennial basis, and no team in the country is facing the across-the-board challenges that will confront San Jose State this fall.

The dictionary says Spartans are warlike, brave, hardy, frugal and disciplined, yet by the end of the season these Spartans are apt to be beaten into the definition's antithesis. They'll be fried.

San Jose is this year's Troy State.

Remember the Trojans last season? They were moving from Division IAA to IA, competing as a needy independent and playing Nebraska, Miami and Maryland among others. They were 49-point underdogs against the Cornhuskers and were double-digit underdogs at least four other times.

Somehow they finished a resilient 7-4.

San Jose will see some big betting numbers next to its name this season as well, playing as it does at Washington, at Stanford, at Illinois and at Ohio State (in addition to its regular Western Athletic Conference schedule). In exchange for presenting themselves as sacrificial lambs, the Spartans will rake in $1.2 million in appearance fees while playing only four times at home.

That they're a minus 8 for Saturday's game at Arkansas State is an anomaly that isn't likely to be repeated for some time. They have the nation's 61st most difficult schedule, which is intimidating for a program that hasn't been to a bowl game in a dozen years.

With only 62 players available and not a bye week in sight, widespread carnage is assured. It shouldn't be but a week or two and the Spartans will retreat into a survival mode that relies on instinct and self-preservation.

Of course the early weeks of the college schedule are littered with mismatches, as if it were a ribald tradition. Saturday, for instance, there are no fewer than seven games in which the point spread is in excess of 30, and similar landslides dot the September itinerary.

Lesser teams do it for the money, accepting losses to more heralded schools as a trade-off for retaining the overall solvency of their athletic programs. That's fair enough, and the occasional Alabama-Birmingham at Florida rout is easily dismissed.

But when a team is saddled with a lengthy stretch of rigorous games that it probably has no chance to win, it's arguable that the athletic director and the coach have done their players a disservice. Take the case of Middle Tennessee: the Blue Raiders may be the Sun Belt favorites this year, but if they don't win their conference it may well be an outgrowth of playing at Alabama, at Tennessee and at Kentucky to open the season, as has been cruelly arranged.

Fans, a forgiving lot as a whole, accept that the big teams feast on the lesser ones and fatten their records at their little brothers' expense. But when you see a team such as San Jose crisscrossing the country on something of a death march, it's hard to muster much in the way of sympathy.

However dire it plays out, the Spartans have it coming.