Fresno State's Hill has earned our loyalty

Posted at 10:50 PM on Monday, Nov. 23, 2009

The morning of his first game as Fresno State football coach, Pat Hill suspended a star running back police suspected of assault.

Hill wanted to make a statement. He wanted to tell Fresno and everybody in college football that he would run a clean program. But his decisive action was met with cynicism by some fans because the Bulldogs wouldn't need Michael Pittman to beat lowly Portland State.

And so it has gone for 13 seasons. Hill's best never is quite good enough to satisfy the insatiable demands of Fresno State boosters and, perhaps, the expectations of Athletic Director Thomas Boeh.

Despite winning 99 games and raising the program's academic standards to an admirable level, Hill is twisting in no-man's land with one season remaining on his contract.

If you say that anyone with a job in this economy is lucky, you're right. But in college football, it's much harder for a coach to recruit good athletes when you can't promise that you'll be around when they're seniors.

Hill already would have a new contract at a lot of places. He's the 23rd winningest active college coach, and the football program's NCAA academic progress rate is virtually the same as USC's.

But Hill is unappreciated here, largely because of his poor record against Western Athletic Conference kingpin Boise State and the lofty goals he set for the program.

Amazingly, critics casually dismiss Fresno State victories over universities such as UCLA, Georgia Tech and Wisconsin, and the fact that Bulldogs are headed for their 10th bowl game under Hill. They say that these teams weren't any good and that Fresno State only plays in minor bowls.

The truth is, given the economic challenges of the California State University system, Fresno State doesn't have any business beating UCLA and other schools from Bowl Championship Series conferences. But the Bulldogs do -- 14 times since 2000.

And if you believe that Fresno State should be beating these teams, credit Hill. The football programs at sister CSU schools San Diego State and San Jose State are barely afloat and rarely defeating anybody.

Fans have cited Hill's contract as a reason for the school to hire someone else, the thinking being that he hasn't delivered enough bang for the buck. The contract, depending on how many incentives Hill fulfills, pays between $900,000 and $1.2 million a year. But I'm fairly certain that the 57-year-old Hill would accept less to finish his career at Fresno State.

Fresno prides itself on being a loyal-to-a-fault, dirt-under-your-fingernails town -- a description that pretty much sums up Hill. He kept Dan Brown as his defensive coordinator while Brown battled terminal brain cancer for two years. Hill sticks with his quarterbacks through thick and thin. He has sold the school and the San Joaquin Valley on more than 50 national television appearances.

The danger for Fresno State in not signing Hill to a new contract is the signal sent to fans: Maybe Hill's our man; maybe he's not. This creates a situation in which the anti-Hill faction roots for the Bulldogs to lose in the hope of getting a new coach. Not good.

Letting Hill dangle in the wind also says that academics and recruiting athletes who stay out of trouble aren't important to the university. Given Fresno State's athletic past of NCAA violations, academic scandal and million-dollar sexual discrimination verdicts, you'd think that an average of eight victories a year, playing big-name opponents and preparing players for success after football would mean something.

Apparently not.

As the Bulldogs get ready for their regular-season-finale against Illinois -- just another big-conference program with a $70 million athletic budget -- nary a word is coming out of Fresno State about the future of the coach who has kept his word from Day One.