With Ken Niumatalolo, San José State shouldn't settle for less

The longtime Navy coach is an expert at making do with limited resources, but what if SJSU gives him the tools he needs to be great?

Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.

It’s a technicality to say that Brent Brennan earned a power-conference gig despite never surpassing seven wins at his first coaching stop—after all, his best season was that 7-1 campaign in 2020, when San José State very likely would have won ten or more games over a full-length schedule. But it’s not that far off from the unvarnished truth, either. That Spartans team was pretty lucky to have as strong a record as it did, and while it was undoubtedly good, it probably wouldn’t have earned the second-ever end-of-year AP ranking in program history with another five or six games of sample size.

And beyond 2020, Brennan’s ceiling did indeed sit at seven wins: in his last two seasons at SJSU, his teams went 7-5 and 7-6, losing bowls to end both years. In fact, San José State never won a bowl game under Brennan’s guidance, and finished a whopping 14 games under .500 overall in his seven years at the helm¹. Devoid of context, his résumé doesn’t seem all that special; you could argue it’s actually pretty mediocre, and certainly not enough of a standout for reigning near-NY6 team Arizona to snap him up.

We’ll talk more about why they did, and why it was actually a pretty sensible move, in about three months, when this series winds it way to the top teams replacing the coaches that got them to those heights. But one key reason also points the way for what the program Brennan leaves behind should expect—SJSU is a tough job.

Obviously, we’re far from unfamiliar with those. This year alone, we’ve looked at ULM, UTEP, and New Mexico, three of the tallest tasks any coach in FBS can face. But San José State can feel somewhat out of place in such circles, because…well, it really shouldn’t be that hard, right? Usually, difficult G5 jobs arise on account of disadvantageous geography—a rural town in Louisiana and two fairly isolated cities in the West, say—and San José State shouldn’t have to worry about that. California is rich recruiting territory, the program enjoys a prime position in the heart of the Bay Area, and the competition is both shallow compared to the crowded Southeast and unusually weak with Cal and Stanford typically sitting below the typical P5 standards.

In theory, this should be the perfect setup for a G5 team to succeed; indeed, a few hundred miles down the coast, nominative neighbor San Diego State has built a strong program in circumstances that should be even tougher, carving out a space in southern California despite the looming presence of both USC and UCLA. And yet, despite all these factors in their favor, the Spartans have struggled for decades to get off the ground.

So, what gives? In a word…money.

San José State has the third-smallest endowment in the Mountain West², and since joining the conference in 2013, they’ve fallen under its median football spending in nine out of ten years as a member. Average FBS spending has risen 58% over that span, while average MWC spending has risen 55%; SJSU’s expenses have climbed just 23%, and they actually spent less on football in 2023 than they did in 2018³. Compared to San Diego State, which has been above the conference average every year of the last decade and raised its spending on football 59%, it’s not hard to see why San José State hasn’t capitalized on its potential. The institution simply hasn’t demonstrated an interest in funding football to the extent it needs to have a chance.

Is that likely to change anytime soon? Brennan demonstrated that this program can be solid even without vital improvements to salaries, facilities, and recruiting funds, and he did so in a more lasting way than previous success Mike MacIntyre (who had one 11-2 season and bounced to Colorado). His isn’t the only SJSU program pushing for more resources, either; in 2022-23, men’s basketball went 21-14 in Tim Miles’ second season as head coach, tying their record win total and finally picking up their first conference tournament win as a Mountain West member.

There’s an obvious lesson to be learned from that campaign and that miraculous 7-1 season the football team had a few years back…as well as the 9-23 year that followed in basketball and the 5-7 year that followed in football. The brief surges of success don’t have to be brief, if the athletic department gets the funding it needs and deserves. And very recently, that’s started to change.

Last year, San José State opened the Spartan Athletics Center, a structure four years and $70 million⁴ in the making. At the time he left for Arizona, Brennan was making $2.3 million a year, the second-highest salary in the Mountain West. The program has an NIL collective (Blue & Gold Unlimited), albeit one that needs work to compete at a high level. And, adding to the SDSU comparison, the Spartans’ response to losing possibly their best coach ever…was to hire another program’s best coach ever, one who earned serious consideration from the Aztecs earlier in the same cycle.

There’s not much to say about Ken Niumatalolo that I haven’t already discussed in last year’s article on Brian Newberry, the man hired to replace him at Navy. To make a long story short, the Midshipmen made that coaching switch in an uncharacteristically embarrassing fashion, with the end of a fifteen-year tenure marred by a global pandemic and unbecoming micromanagement by AD Chet Gladchuk Jr. Navy’s 11-23 finish does still reflect somewhat poorly on Niumatalolo, but his pedigree of success at another unquestionably difficult job—particularly in building on the foothold established by a solid predecessor in Paul Johnson—makes him an excellent fit at SJSU.

Niumatalolo can probably win here even if the Spartans pull out of these tentative attempts at spending like a program with their potential should. He’s got tons of experience doing more with less, and while he won’t be running the triple option, that shouldn’t stop him from eking out some impressive results from a potentially weak roster.

But I really hope San José State isn’t hiring a coach from a program that has to be economical because they themselves want to be economical. The investment they’ve rewarded Brennan with has kept 2020 from being a complete flash in the pan, and there’s no reason to back out now. If they keep supporting football with the belief that it can and should compete with the Mountain West’s best on an annual basis, they’ll undoubtedly be a contender. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The Last Five Years

One has to wonder if Brennan would’ve even been on the table as a potential Arizona coach if SJSU hadn’t turned things around in the middle of 2023. The Spartans started 0-2 with losses to ranked USC and Oregon State teams (reasonable), then fell further to 1-5 with losses to Toledo, Air Force, and Boise State (a bit less reasonable). The back half of the schedule put up a bunch of tomato cans, though, and San José State knocked them all down, winning six straight against a bunch of teams that would finish under .500—plus Fresno State and UNLV, which went 9-4 and 9-5, respectively. The comeback put SJSU in the postseason for the second straight year, the first time they’d managed that since 1986-87.

Niumatalolo will have some work to do in order to get the Spartans back to that level. They return just 42% of their production from last season, 118th nationally, and experience near-total turnover from an offense that averaged 38.7 points per game in that winning streak. Quarterback is the biggest thing to figure out, which makes for a rather interesting situation given Niumatalolo’s option history, and it’s only gotten more interesting as the offseason has developed. Former Oregon transfer Jay Butterfield started as the presumptive favorite, with new recruit Anthony Garcia a close second, but Garcia followed Brennan to Arizona and two other options have surpassed Butterfield with the coaching switch. Niumatalolo has been high on Walker Eget, who’s spent the last two years as a rarely-seen backup, and Emmett Brown, a WSU transfer who got significant first-team reps in spring practice. There are plenty of other questions to be answered on the roster, but finding the right QB from a packed room could answer a lot of SJSU’s questions.

The Next Five Years

It’s easy for discussions about San José State to get bogged down in depressing territory, as is often the case with programs that won’t buy in as they need to. It’s a lot more fun to talk about bad teams that make it clear how much effort they’re willing to put in. Take South Florida and Charlotte, for example, programs which haven’t been good in a long time or ever, but undeniably consider football a top priority worth throwing their weight behind.

SJSU is taking steps to put themselves in that discussion, but the flashy moves—like that new athletic center and Brennan’s high salary—belie the fact that the Spartans continue to lag behind their MWC rivals in overall spending, and don’t seem to be catching up just yet. Maybe that’ll change with time, but as exciting and good as this hire is, it also invites skepticism that San José State might be looking to get by without the investment that could take this program from good to great.

Can Niumatalolo win despite a lack of support for the athletic department? Oh, almost certainly. I’m inclined to believe his late decline at Navy was mostly a product of COVID-19 and meddling from Gladchuk, and even the meager resources available at San José State should make his job easier than it ever could’ve been at a military academy. But the ceiling for this team goes a lot higher than what it’s largely been able to demonstrate, and becoming a premiere MWC program—perhaps, someday, a power-conference program?—would be worth the increased expense, in my opinion. If SJSU takes this coaching change as an opportunity to improve further rather than an excuse to stagnate, they’re in prime position to make major strides and establish themselves as a consistent contender. Here’s hoping they see this chance at glory for what it is, and strike while the iron is hot.

1. Granted, a 3-22 start dug a pretty big hole that he spent the rest of his tenure slowly climbing out of, but still.

2. As of 2023, per NACUBO.

3. All of these stats on football expenses per the Knight Commission.

4. Somehow, of all the numbers in this article, this one is by far the least certain. $70 million shows up a ton in reports on the center, but there are a few off cases where the estimate is put at $60 million (or “$60+ million”), plus this one San Francisco Chronicle article that pins the number at a bizarrely specific $58 million but links to another Chronicle article with no mention of the cost. It doesn’t really matter that much, but, like…surely SJSU knows how much money was actually spent on this thing, right? That feels like something they should know.