When Steve Fisher and his longtime right-hand man Brian Dutcher arrived at San Diego State in 1999, the two tried selling what seemed like an impossible dream to most casual observers: competing for national championships.
At the time, San Diego State was, well, ordinary in the grand scheme of college basketball. It had finished over .500 just once in the last decade, had its last 20-win season in 1985 and had never won an NCAA tournament game. Just two years before, the program had been splitting time between the cavernous San Diego Sports Arena 10 miles from campus and the tiny Peterson Gym back on campus, which seated under 4,000.
Fisher won a national championship (and went to two other national title games) as head coach at Michigan, but this was a different challenge. And yet 24 years after Fisher and Dutcher set out to build a program essentially from the ground up, San Diego State will play on college basketball’s biggest stage Monday for a chance at completing that impossible dream and winning a national title. The Aztecs have a chance to be the first West Coast team since Arizona in 1997 to win a national title, which could further cement the program’s status as a national powerhouse, something that would have seemed unthinkable just 25 years ago.
