By Aidan Joly
Steve Fisher came to the San Diego State campus in 1999 with a dream.
Before 1999, San Diego State had just one NCAA tournament appearance to its credit in program history and had never had extended success. It had not had a winning season since 1984-85, the year it did make the tournament. It had nine winning seasons in 30 years at the Division I level before Fisher took over.
In the previous season the Aztecs had bottomed out under former head coach Fred Trenkle, going 4-22 and 2-12 in the Western Athletic Conference.
It was a laughingstock of a program.
And this was the program that the man who coached the Fab Five at Michigan was going to take over.
The hiring of Fisher and a move to the Mountain West Conference proved nearly immediately beneficial, as the Aztecs went 21-12 in his third year at the helm and reached the tournament. It wasn’t without some growing pains, going 5-23 in year one with Fisher and failing to win a conference game. It was back in the dance four years later in 2006.
Fisher turned the Aztec program around from one that was a punching bag on the west coast to one of the most formidable programs in that area of the country. He got the program to six more NCAA tournaments, going twice with Kawhi Leonard, the best player in program history, before he retired in 2017.
In eight tournament appearances, the Aztecs had gotten to the second weekend just twice and had never gotten past the Sweet 16. His best team was the 2011 edition, a group that won 34 games before running into the Kemba Walker-led buzzsaw, a UConn team that went on to win the title, in the Sweet 16. That ended a season for a team that spent much of the year within the top 10 in the AP Poll.
The transformation still wasn’t done. In 2017, enter Brian Dutcher, who had been Fisher’s right-hand man both at Michigan and for 18 years at San Diego State. 57 years old upon his hiring, Dutcher had been an assistant coach for nearly 35 years and had never had a head coaching job.
We know what happened from there. In his third year at the helm, San Diego State looked like a team that could win a national title, going 30-2 and ranking as high as No. 4 in the country and was likely to get a 1 or 2 seed in the NCAA tournament, before the onset of COVID-19 came on and stripped the team of its best opportunity to compete for a national title in program history at that point.
San Diego State made the tournament in both 2021 and 2022, but exited in the first round each time. Three years later, Dutcher has San Diego State just one victory away from a national championship. Pretty good for a program that had never made it out of the Sweet 16 just ten days ago.
Fisher, the architect of the San Diego State program, will be in the stands on Monday night as the Aztecs face UConn for the title. Simply put, this run doesn’t happen without him.
San Diego State will have a chance for revenge against two things on Monday night: UConn and the world.
And it all started with an impossible dream more than two decades ago.
AJ Hoops 