LAS VEGAS — Ohana, the Hawaiian word for family, defines the lasting influence the late Dick Tomey has on college football.
Ohana is a principle on which former Tomey assistant Brent Brennan strives to continue the growth of a San Jose State program that Tomey — the former University of Arizona coach from 1987-2000 — helmed in the last of his three head-coaching stops.
“So much of who I am as a coach,” Brennan said earlier this month at Mountain West Conference media days in Las Vegas, “I owe to coach Tomey.”
In Brennan’s tenure at SJSU — his seventh season of which kicks off Aug. 26 when the Spartans visit preseason Pac-12 Conference favorite USC — the Spartans have reached some impressive milestones: the program’s first-ever defeat of an SEC opponent with a 31-24 win at Arkansas in 2019; the 2020 Mountain West championship, marking SJSU’s first league title since claiming the 1990 Big West crown; and bowl games in two of the last three seasons, an achievement last accomplished in 1986-87.
The Spartans were tabbed to finish fifth in this season’s Mountain West media poll, positioning that would likely qualify for a third bowl in four years. SJSU also boasts the conference’s preseason Offensive Player of the Year in quarterback Chevan Cordeiro.
When the Spartans host Pac-12 title-hopeful Oregon State on Sept. 3, it will mark the first game at CEFCU Stadium since completion of a renovation projected at almost $58 million.
“I think he’d be excited,” San Jose State coach Brent Brennan said of how he believes former UA and SJSU coach Dick Tomey would react to the Spartans' recent success. “I think he’d also still call me and chew me out if we got penalized for something stupid.”
SJSU football is in a much better place today than in was back in 2005. That’s when, four-plus years after his final game in Tucson, Tomey first arrived in the Bay Area with Brennan as one of his assistants.
The Spartans had just one winning campaign in the 12 years preceding Tomey’s arrival — a drought that ended with SJSU capping a 9-4 campaign at the New Mexico Bowl in Tomey’s second season — and in 2004, faced a potential budgetary crisis.
Per a Los Angeles Times report that April, the university’s Academic Senate voted to slash public funding, which made up almost half of SJSU’s already meager $12 million athletic budget, by 50%. The vote was “symbolic,” but only a little more than a decade removed from fellow California State University system schools Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State abandoning Div. I-A football, made for an ominous gesture.
And yet, an undeterred Tomey told the Arizona Republic in 2005 he believed SJSU should have “a terrific football program. And if you don’t have one, you have to fire the coach.”
Tomey — who died of lung cancer in May 2019 at age 80 — did not get to witness SJSU beat Arkansas, nor win its first Mountain West championship, nor position itself as a potential regular contender in its conference.
“I think he’d be excited,” Brennan said of how he believes Tomey would react to SJSU’s current success, though added with a laugh: “I think he’d also still call me and chew me out if we got penalized for something stupid.”
Under coach Dick Tomey, right, the Arizona Wildcats won 95 games over 14 seasons, including a 12-1 mark in 1998.
The same kind of biting humor Tomey offered in 2005 helped SJSU build through the initial lean years of Brennan’s head-coaching tenure when the Spartans went 2-11 in 2017 and 1-11 in 2018.
“When he was still alive, I’d talk to him every Sunday after our game, and he’d always watch all of our games,” Brennan said. “Most of the time, he was pretty critical, but not in an ugly way; in a funny way, like ‘You’ve got to get this under control!’
“But it was all helpful because I was a first time. I was learning as I went, too,” Brennan added.
That unbending frankness manifested at UA with the Desert Swarm defenses that defined the program in the 1990s. Tomey oversaw the highest peaks in program history, first with a share of the 1993 Pac-10 Conference championship and the first-ever Fiesta Bowl shutout in a rout of Miami; then with a final No. 4 overall ranking in the historic 12-win campaign in 1998.
Perhaps more than his humor or matter-of-fact critiques, however, may have been the sense of ohana Tomey brought to Tucson from Hawaii, where he coached from 1977-86.
Brennan’s brother, Brad, played wide receiver in the Tomey latter UA years, including for the 1998 Wildcats and the 2000 squad — the latter a team that started 5-1 and ranked in the top 20 before sputtering to a 5-6 finish that ultimately led to Tomey’s resignation. That 2000 season was the first in which Brent coached with Tomey.
Brent relayed Brad’s observations from the perspective of playing for Tomey.
San Jose State head coach Brent Brennan watches a replay on the big screen during a loss to Ball State in the Arizona Bowl on Dec. 31, 2020.
“‘I don’t remember if we beat Washington State in 1997 or whatever,’” Brennan said his brother told him — UA lost a 35-34 overtime heartbreaker to the Pac-10-winning Cougars that year — “‘But I remember all the team-building stuff and I remember all the things that (Tomey) had us do off the field.’”
Brennan’s ties to Tomey and the Arizona program, let alone that turnaround success with the Spartans, made him a seemingly legitimate candidate to replace Kevin Sumlin at the UA three years ago. On Dec. 23, 2020, the same day Arizona announced Jedd Fisch as its next head coach, Brennan signed a long-term contract extension to stay in Northern California. Eight days later, Brennan coached SJSU in Tomey’s old Tucson haunt, Arizona Stadium, in the Arizona Bowl.
“We have built a lot of that into our (SJSU) program,” Brennan added of Tomey’s influence on fostering culture in addition to developing on-field capabilities. “And I think because of that, we have built a really close vibe.”
That vibe, Cordeiro said, is “the difference between a good team and a bad team.”
Cordeiro, a Honolulu native, transferred to SJSU from Hawaii amid the turmoil that led to the resignation of former UH and Arizona State head coach Todd Graham.
For Cordeiro, leaving the only home city and state he had ever known was a difficult choice that resulted in some initial homesickness.
However, the Tomey-inspired atmosphere of SJSU eased the quarterback’s concerns.
“It was a good transition,” Cordeiro said. “Coach Brennan’s the type of coach you want to play for, that you like waking up everyday, putting on the pads for.”
Brennan said he “felt honored” Cordeiro felt like “we had a program that had the ohana, so to speak, that he was looking for.”
And in that ohana is the enduring legacy of Tomey’s impact.
Arizona football coach Jedd Fisch shares at Pac-12 media day in Las Vegas on July 21, 2023, how improvements on defense shore up what the Wildcats are trying to do across the board to improve this season. Video courtesy Pac-12
