September 8, 2007

49er fans may ask `What if?' after upset

Bob Keisser

Just like Appalachian State, Long Beach State's football team once went to the Big House in Michigan to play the Big Ten's resident power, and the trip was a rousing success.

There were no fatalities.

The 49ers came home with as many players as they arrived. The 101,714 who crammed themselves into the stadium were as polite as Red Cross nurses helping the less fortunate with Band-Aids and ice. After the game, Bo Schembechler came across the field to shake the hand of coach Larry Reisbig and complimented his team's character after suffering a 49-0 loss.

The handful of Long Beach State fans and alumni who remember when football was a school activity, back when that big green field on campus was used by men in football pads and not just women in soccer shinguards, had to look wistfully at last week's score of the century - Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32, a Division I-AA team smiting a blueblood on their home field.

The few and the faithful always believed Long Beach State football just needed to find some momentum or the right confluence of events to become a solid player in Division I football, and there were a few heartening signposts on the road.

Like that 21-17 win over San

The 1980 win over Oregon State looks great now, but the Beavers were 0-11 that season.

In 1984, the 49ers opened with games at Oregon, UCLA, Fresno State and Arizona, and while they went 0-4, the average losing margin was under a touchdown. The 49ers weren't close, but there was hope.

That 1987 Michigan game actually was the beginning of the end for 49er football. The program had faced termination in the offseason and survived thanks to the efforts of boosters and a grass-roots fund-raising drive. But the trade-off was booking Body Bag road games for the guaranteed money.

The 49ers made almost as much money playing at Michigan than boosters raised in the previous offseason. The results of these games were predictable: Michigan in '87, Oregon (0-49) and UCLA (3-56) in '88, Oregon again in '89 (10-52), Clemson in '90 (0-59), and Miami in '91 (0-55).

For those scoring at home, that's a cumulative score of 316-13.

This explains why the 49ers dropped football after the 1991 season. The juxtaposition was a total example of beating one's head into a steel bulkhead - a lack of revenue, DOA scheduling, the monolith of gender equity in California, and no fans to speak of.

In his first and only year as head coach, the charismatic George Allen was able to draw a rousing 4,649 to Vets to see his last game and finish with the school's first winning season since 1986.

So the questions are these: What happened between 1991 and 2007 that saw the 49ers drop football and the likes of Appy State then whup Michigan?

While the 49ers, Titans and other California schools had to drop football or at least roll back their dreams, how did so many schools find the resources to make the jump to Division I-A play, like Nevada (1992), Alabama-Birmingham (1996), Boise State (1996), Central Florida (1996), Buffalo (1999), Middle Tennessee (1999), Southern Florida (2001), Troy (2002), UConn (2002), Florida Atlantic (2005) and Florida International (2005)?

Whereas the 49ers once could look at schools named Rutgers, Louisville, Wake Forest, Rice, TCU and Cincinnati as brethren dregs, how did these teams suddenly start bowling, and without the weird shirts?

The quick answer is the great resource trinity: timing, location and money.

The 49ers were competing at a time when California schools were being barraged by gender equity issues that took the Title IX parameters of 1979 and gave them steroids. The NOW drive for equality in scholarships made it nearly impossible for Cal State schools with modest athletic departments - unlike the behemoths like USC and UCLA - to meet the standards and still devote 50 or more scholarships to football.

This coast always had diminished numbers when it came to competitors, and they were spread out among the West, and travel was costly - as opposed to what happened in the South in the '90s, when SEC schools were happy to welcome D-I wannabes FIU, UAB and CFU to their stadiums.

Those schools signed up for the same body bag games, but had the advantage of no extra gender rules, and communities that revolved around the universities, and the time to let a program mature without worrying about budgets. In the case of an Appalachian State, they chose to go the DI-AA route and compete for an annual national title - they've won two straight while having more scholarships (65) than the 49ers ever had when they were bleeding in the '80s.

(It needs to be noted that this wasn't a huge upset. Appy finished last season ranked 53rd nationally among D-I schools in the final Sagarin ratings, just behind bowl teams like Missouri, Utah, Miami and Iowa and ahead of schools named Alabama, Kansas State, Purdue, Kansas, Syracuse and Virginia.)

There's no getting around the money issue. The 49er faithful who to this day rue the decision have to admit that a D-I program can't survive just by filling other stadiums. It needs to fill its own, and the 49ers managed to draw crowds of five-digits just 11 times in their history.

That doesn't stop the wanderlust.

Let's say George Allen didn't pass away from pneumonia on New Year's Eve, 1990. Let's say the former Ram coach lived on and built on his 6-5 team in '90 and went, say, 7-4 in 1991 despite just three home games. He did have Todd Studer and Mark Seay returning.

Maybe they survive the axe and return for 1992, just as Fresno State is leaving the league. Maybe the Big West doesn't invite Nevada to join the league, the team that won the league title, giving the 49ers more traction. Maybe the 49ers' existence inspires Cal State Fullerton to keep football, too, and the conference doesn't add all those strangers from Arkansas State, Northern Illinois, Louisiana Tech and Louisiana-Lafayette for 1993.

Maybe the 49ers win a league title and earn a trip to the Las Vegas Bowl, which replaced the California Bowl as the league's bowl home after Fresno State left. And perhaps, just perhaps, the 49ers get invited to join the Western Athletic Conference in 1996 along with UNLV and San Jose State.

And maybe they still play football today in a renovated Veterans Stadium, or perhaps they find the resolve and money to match the new pointy Pyramid on campus with their own 25,000-seat football/track/soccer stadium, because by then Robert Maxson would have been president and we all knew how much he loved sports and what he was capable of doing.

Then again, maybe not. But thanks to one Saturday in September, as Appalachian State was beating Michigan and earning upset-of-the-century honors, old-time 49ers are allowed to dream.