When San Diego State take the floor under head coach Brian Dutcher on Saturday night for the first Final Four appearance in school history, they’ll be representing a city not traditionally known for its rich basketball history. San Diego briefly hosted the NBA’s Clippers for six unmemorable seasons before they relocated to Los Angeles. And while SDSU has fielded a team for more than 100 years, on-court success has largely proven hard to come by.
All of that changed when Steve Fisher arrived in 1999, taking over a lowly program that ranked among the worst in Division I. Fisher, who had led Michigan to the 1989 national title and coached the famed Fab Five a few years after, spotted potential in an unfancied program that had just built a brand-new arena, despite coming off of a four-win season and having failed to reach the NCAA tournament in the previous 15 years. Fisher re-hired Dutcher, his longtime assistant from Michigan, and the two of them got to work.
Nearly a quarter-century later, Dutcher has the Aztecs two games from the unthinkable: a national championship.
“It’s a vision Coach Fisher had all those years ago when he came to the Mesa, and we recruited and told people this is what we were going to do,” Dutcher said on Sunday after SDSU defeated Creighton to punch their Final Four ticket. “They all thought it was just recruiting talk, but here we sit.”
Back then, Dutcher watched as Fisher would speak to anyone who would listen about his ambitions for this dormant program, spending his time doing speaking engagements in the city, at times even walking around campus handing out free tickets. The early returns were unconvincing: the Aztecs won just five games that first season. But it wasn’t long before the vision would show signs of progress, winning 21 games in year three and reaching the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1985.
Fisher and Dutcher had a philosophy when it came to roster construction. They wanted to build a team that could defend and rebound at a high level and they recruited to that. SDSU has been known for its size and athleticism in the Fish/Dutch era, a quality that is consistent with the recruiting style and philosophy of their Michigan teams. Their teams had an identity and a plan for how to win. For instance, the Aztecs’ practices would include rebounding drills every day, where some coaches, like Roy Williams of Kansas and UNC, never once used a rebounding drill as part of their training.
When Fisher finally handed over the keys to his longtime sideline partner in 2017, Dutch and his staff continued to recruit for size and defense.
“It starts when you recruit them,” Dutcher said Thursday. “It can’t start when they show up on campus. When we recruit them, we tell them, we defend at a high level here. If you don’t want to play defense, then we’re not the place for you. But if you do defend, we’ll let you play with great freedom offensively. And that’s kind of what we are.
“So when they get there, they’re not having success, even though they’re scoring, it’s like, hey, we told you, we’re defense-first. And you have to defend in order to earn an opportunity to play offense. And so it’s a culture. It’s something we’ve always preached. And I think we’re pretty good at it.”
The success of the Aztecs’ culture speaks for itself. They are consistently one of the best defensive teams in the country and this year’s side has been no exception, ranking fourth in the country in adjusted defensive efficiency and among the nation’s best in total rebounding rate.
The Dutcher-led Aztecs have also benefited greatly from the transfer portal, which has allowed them to play with mostly experienced, older players. This year’s group features nine guys with the ninth averaging 15 minutes. They don’t have a freshman or sophomore in the rotation. They rely on fresh legs and rotating bodies – all of whom understand their identity of defending and rebounding. The size and athleticism across the roster has proven a nightmare for opposing offenses. The Aztecs can pressure the ball and if they get beat, which happens rarely, they have elite rim protection on the back line. They also have the ability to switch most screens, negating any advantage the offense is trying to obtain.
Just ask top-seeded Alabama, the pre-tournament favorites who committed 14 turnovers, had eight shots blocked and were held 18 points below their season average in their Sweet 16 defeat to the Aztecs.
“Our culture is set by our four-year guys and five-year guys, guys that come in as a freshman,” Dutcher said. “We have guys that invest a lot. And they spend their four and five years in our program. But then we also take transfers. So in the early transfer years, when they had to sit a year, that would automatically make you older because now they’ve sat a full year and they’re getting their fifth year.
“Now that the culture has changed a little bit with the portal and instant eligibility, we found a way to maintain our age and our experience level.”
Fisher and Dutcher built this Aztecs program from nothing. Viejas Arena has gone from practically empty in the 1990s to leading all California schools in home attendance, outdrawing name-brand programs like UCLA, Southern California and Stanford. While they may only just be appearing on the radar of casual fans, these Aztecs have been winning consistently for the past 20 years – a credit to the culture painstakingly cultivated by Fisher and Dutcher.
“From the day we stepped on campus Coach Fisher and I all those years ago, we thought it was a possibility,” Dutcher said Thursday. “We sold it in recruiting. We didn’t just say it, and it wasn’t empty words just to get a kid to come. We believed if we did what we were supposed to do, we could make a Final Four, we could win a national championship.
“So that’s what the message is. We believed it could happen. That’s our culture. Some people might say it was a fantasy, but obviously we’re sitting here today.”
