Sweeney’s End Not Way He Imagined

This was November, one year ago. We were talking inside his Duncan Building office. I wanted to talk with Jim Sweeney about the end of his football coaching career. He wanted to tell a story about Bear Bryant. Only months later could I understand the relevance.

He spoke about the loyalty of the coaching staff under Bryant, about the ones who would never leave him. His assistants resolved to carry Bryant when he no longer could do it himself.

The story had come out of nowhere, and it soon floated away. We were on to something else. Its significance didn’t hit me until a few months later, the season over and Sweeney firing coaches and blaming everyone else for his demise. That day he wasn’t speaking so much about Bryant as he was talking about himself. He was talking about his staff. At the time, there still seemed to be an element of denial about why his program stopped winning. He was searching for a savior, and Sweeney, a former Washington State coach, had stopped trying to find him in the mirror.

He should have known better: Head coaches are always alone.

Start alone, end alone.

Sweeney announced Thursday that he is retiring as the Fresno State coach. He is 67 years old, and working on his third-straight losing season. He is out of support, and out of time. His legacy is a championship legacy, and deserves to be tarnished no more. He is doing the right thing.

He had himself a helluva of career, yes, but Sweeney always expected to go out on the shoulders of his players, a big bowl victory, and eventually the old coach would take his rightful place on history’s throne. Every coach dreams it, few live it. He had a chance to go out on top, a Freedom Bowl victory over USC in 1993. Everybody believed this was the beginning of the most glorious era of Fresno State football ever, only to find out a few years later, it was the end.

Sweeney had always worked best as the underdog. He was always the hard-rock miner’s son, coaching his way outpost to outpost - the Montana high schools of Butte and Flathead, to the colleges in Bozeman and Pullman, all the way to Fresno. Always the street fighter, always the coach at the school who had to work twice as hard as the others.

This stopped four years ago. There is so much a coach can do at Fresno State, and Sweeney had done it. Success can change a man. Especially the older ones. They work a lifetime to get to a moment, one to hold onto forever.

Finally, it comes and maybe they start running a step slower. Maybe they expect the profession owes them, or assistants ought to carry them. They can justify it a lot of ways. It happened to a football coach named John Majors at Tennessee, and Pat Dye at Auburn, and a basketball coach named Rollie Massimino at Villanova.

It has happened everywhere. Maybe it worked that way for Bryant at the end. Maybe his assistants carried him. There was only one Bear Bryant. This business of coaching college football is cruel. For every coach who has tasted success, there are dozens unwilling to leave their office, who won’t see their wife, their kids. They will watch film until they are bug-eyed, write love notes to 17-year-olds until their wrists fall off. Most of them get one shot to be a head coach. They’ll be damned if they’re going to let it slip away without a fight.

This is what Sweeney has been up against the past few years. Was he willing to still pay the price? Was he able? He was an outsider for a lot of reasons. He was brash. He was loud. He would say anything, he would do anything. He worked best this way. He worked best when he felt like he was coming from behind. Football was his ticket to college. It made him popular, it made him wealthy. It made him a winner. It was an edge that made Sweeney a warrior, made him a great coach.

Somewhere along the way, he lost it. Slowly, the realization hit him. Until he decided to quit this week. Oh, there were things that spurred him in these final seasons. Yet they were temporary.

Jerry Tarkanian was hired. Everybody was talking about his basketball team and its future, and maybe it motivated Sweeney for a time. It couldn’t sustain him, though. Jim Sweeney had to still want it for better reasons than that.

And near the end, he had a lot of trouble finding them. What was left for him to do? You get the idea he spent some time asking himself that question, and soon his program had slipped and there was no time to recover. He had no time to piece everything back together. He is 67. What he had is gone, and gone for good.

No assistant coaches could get Sweeney out of the game on his own terms. Deep down, he had to understand it, right? You start alone, you end alone. He gets his 200th career victory this season, and it will be something for him to always cherish. And yet stumbling into it with everybody crossing their fingers for wins over UNLV and Boise State is a disaster to him.

Jim Sweeney had these final years all laid out. He wanted to name his successor. He wanted to go out a winner. He wanted to fade into the sunset on the shoulders of his players.

All of them do.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: BY THE NUMBERS The 32-year head football coaching record of Jim Sweeney, who announced Thursday that he will retire from Fresno State at the end of this season: Montana State (1963-1967) 31-20-0 Washington State (1968-1975) 26-59-1 Fresno State (1976-1996) 141-72-3 Career totals: 198-151-4