The San Jose State Spartans are one of three teams to reach a bowl game with just five wins. For the program, the invitation was years of work in school.
There is a lot of complaining and lamenting over the bowl schedule.
There are too many bowl games many will say. The three five-win teams that backdoored their way in certainly support that argument if someone wants to make it. Yes, it is less than ideal for a team that did not even win the majority of its games to find itself with the reward of a bowl game.
Saturday’s AutoNation Cure Bowl will indeed feature a 5-7 team in San Jose State. A 5-7 team from a Group of Five conference unlike Nebraska and Minnesota, two five-win teams filling Big Ten bowl berths. Those schools certainly have the traveling fan base to justify a bowl invitation.
San Jose State?
The Spartans averaged 15,312 fans per game at Spartan Stadium, just a bit more than half the stadium’s 30,456 capacity. This is not exactly the biggest fan base nor the most well-known brand to travel cross country.
The Cure Bowl though has styled itself as a different kind of bowl game. The bowl game is part of a campaign to raise money and awareness to fight breast cancer. Everything about it is about this charitable cause more than the game itself.
San Jose State is looking at the bowl game in something of a similar way. It is not so much a reward for a sub-.500 season (in essence a participation trophy). Instead it is a reward for the hard work that has come from the last four years in the classroom.
The NCAA decided to fill the remaining bowl games with 5-7 teams with preference given based on Academic Performance Rating. It was there that San Jose State had worked tireless in the last few years to bring that score up.
The Spartans are in the Cure Bowl not because of their play on the football field, but because of their work in the classroom.
And that was a lot of work as Elliott Almond of the San Jose Mercury News detailed:
The school had hired athletic director Tom Bowen and Tomey by the end of 2004. Neither appreciated the dire situation until the first report card arrived.
The Spartans posted APR scores in the 800s. Back then, a score of 925 out of 1,000 predicted about a 50 percent graduation rate. It’s now 930.
NCAA officials stripped San Jose State of scholarships and threatened a bowl ban. It led the school’s faculty senate to question the value of fielding a football program. Tomey wondered if he would have a team.
Yes, a decade ago, San Jose State’s grades for its football players was so bad the university considered shutting the football program down. It had become an embarrassment to the university. And it took long to come out of it.
Heading into the 2009 season, San Jose State had lost 57 scholarships over a four-year period for academic violations. The school shifted its recruiting strategy. It may not have equaled wins, but they were going to change things in the classroom.
San Jose State has not been to a bowl game since 2012, as the team emerged from APR sanctions. It appeared the team and the program had righted the ship.
Coach Ron Caragher has less to worry about in the classroom these days. San Jose State was fourth among the five-win teams in APR — Missouri declined a bowl invitation opening the door for San Jose State. The Spartans are an exciting team with an explosive run game, one that should create plenty of fireworks on the field.
San Jose State is here because of what their student athletes do in the classroom. And isn’t that supposed to be a guiding mission of the NCAA?
In an age when there is a lot of cynicism about the NCAA and its educational mission, stories like San Jose State show there is still an educational mission and still rewards for student athletes that go beyond wins and losses.
The cross-country trip will be well worth it for the Spartans for years of hard work to earn it.
