By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

A football team that hasn't been winning. A program short on funds and fans that is Division I in name only. An athletic department in shakeup.

All of them sum up the situation at San Jose State, where Dick Tomey was named the head football coach yesterday. But the challenge he confronts really isn't all that different from one he undertook here, at the University of Hawai'i, just over a quarter century ago.

Some of the same terms — struggling, dead-end, financially strapped, etc. — that now fit at San Jose State were thrown around in Manoa in 1977 when Tomey, then a 40-year-old assistant at UCLA, rolled up his sleeves and took on his first head coaching job. It would be a providential pairing for both.

The Rainbows were 3-8, had lost their final two games of 1976 by a combined 127-3 score, had a declining fan base and a bare-bones budget when Tomey signed on. Things were so bleak that not only did Tomey have to recruit new players but he had to re-recruit the ones who were already there.

A daunting task to be sure. But after being passed over for a head coaching job that he thought he had at Arizona, it was a challenge Tomey embraced with an evangelical zeal and painstaking attention to detail.

Rarely could he be heard to speak of the hardships, only the opportunities. In a 5-6 finish that first year, one of only two losing campaigns in his 10 years at UH, he'd not only won over his players, but an entire state that came to look on Saturday nights at Aloha Stadium as a can't-miss event.

By the time Tomey left UH — for Arizona in 1987 — it was as the school's winningest coach (63-46-3) with football and, indeed, the entire growing athletic program, on a solid financial footing.

Before being pushed toward the exit at Arizona in 2001, where John Mackovic would show them what bottom really looked like, Tomey was the Wildcats' winningest football coach (95-64-4 with two Top 10 rankings).

After losing out to Herman Frazier for the athletic director's job at UH and to Mike Price for the football coaching job at Texas-El Paso and re-paying his dues as an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers and University of Texas, Tomey is back where he has longed to finish out his career, as a head coach.

He is 66 and will be 67 when the 2005 season kicks off. He is at San Jose State, a once-proud program that was 2-9 in 2004 and has seen but one winning season since 1993 and not many fans through the turnstiles in recent years.

There is a yawn from the community and indifference among students whose turnout, on average, is less than 1,000 per game even with free admission and drawings for computers. Total attendance has been about 7,000 — worst among 117 Division I-A schools. There is an angry faculty that has asked the administration to drop football.

And, now there is Dick Tomey. Which, history tells us, means San Jose State now has a fighting chance.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.