Week 1's best David

San Jose State is coming off a miraculous turnaround season last year. Can the Spartans do it again?

The 2020 college football season was weird for every team, thanks to the pandemic.

But in the midst of a trying year for everyone around the country, the San Jose State Spartans built themselves an image of one of the most resilient teams in the country.

The Spartans, who had won just eight games in the last three seasons and hadn’t won more than six games since their incredible 11-2 season in 2012 heading into the 2020 season, had to move to 6.5 hours north to Humboldt State to practice because of Santa Clara County’s coronavirus restrictions, played a “home” game in Las Vegas and, despite all of this, went 7-1 and captured its first conference championship since 1991.

Between the coronavirus-related storylines, journeyman quarterback Nick Starkel playing the best football of his 16-year college football career and coach Brent Brennan coming home to build the best team the school has seen in ages, the Spartans were an easy team to root for in a year where there really wasn’t much to root for. Brennan finished fifth in Coach of the Year voting, and it’s easy to be mad at that until you realize that he finished behind Jamey Chadwell, Tom Allen, Nick Saban and Luke Fickell. Tough but good company to be a part of.

But now that college football is back to “normal” in 2021, the Spartans likely want to be more than just a fun side story. After thrashing college football juggernaut Southern Utah in Week 0, San Jose State trek down south in a college football California Clasico against USC.

Nobody’s thinking that San Jose State, who enters the game as two-touchdown underdogs and have an 9% chance of winning according to SP+, has a shot at taking down the No. 15 Trojans. But let’s still take a look at how the Spartans got here anyway.

Building a high-octane offense

San Jose State is not known for its football prowess, at least in my lifetime. The Spartans haven’t had any sustained success since a stretch between 1974 and 1991 where they had 10 seasons with at least eight wins and/or a conference championship. Since then, there hasn’t been much to celebrate, with just four bowl game appearances since 2006. All of that makes their 2020 season even more impressive.

The Spartans won a combined three games in Brennan’s first two seasons in 2017 and 2018 before going 5-7 in 2019. San Jose State’s offense finished 123rd in yards per game in 2018 and 122nd in yards per play and moved all the way to 50th in yards per game and 23rd in yards per play the following year. On the scoreboard, the Spartans went from scoring 21.2 points per game in 2018 (117th in the FBS) to 30.1 points per game (57th in the FBS).

As with pretty much any offensive turnaround, it started at quarterback for the Spartans, who had posted a positive EPA per play on passing plays just once since the cfbfastR era began in 2014. Senior Josh Love, who would go on to be the best quarterback with the last name Love to enter the 2020 NFL Draft, improved dramatically from 2018 to 2019. He threw for about 2,000 more yards, improved his touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio from 14:9 to 22:8, saw his completion percentage jump up from 56.1% to 60.9% and finished the year 48th in QBR after placing 114th the previous season.

On the spreadsheets, the Spartans went from an overall EPA per play of -0.17 in 2018 to 0.12 in 2019. Love and the passing game improved from a -0.10 in 2018 to an 0.19 that finished 14th in the country. The running game lagged behind the passing attack at -0.2, but the Spartans were also one of the most pass-happy teams in the country, finishing the year 129th in rushing attempts per game.

Brennan and offensive coordinator Kevin McGiven had already reformed one struggling, experienced quarterback, so it was time to do it again. The Spartans brought in Starkel, who was now on his third team since starting his college career in the long forgotten year of 2016.

Starkel spent his first three seasons at Texas A&M and was set to be the Aggies’ starting quarterback in 2017 before losing his job to Kellen Mond after an injury in the season opener. He transferred to Arkansas for the 2019 season and started five games for a horrid Razorbacks squad. That season included a loss to no other than San Jose State, as the Spartans notched their first win over a Power 5 opponent since 2006.

The super senior flourished in San Jose and was even better than Love was in 2019. Starkel completed 64.2% of his passes for nearly 2,200 yards, 17 touchdowns and seven interceptions. He finished the year 41st in QBR and was on the All-Mountain West Second Team behind Nevada’s Carson Strong.

Of the 99 quarterbacks with at least 150 passing plays last season, Starkel finished eighth in EPA per pass, ahead of household names like Trevor Lawrence, Spencer Rattler, Sam Howell and Ian Book. Granted, that’s without accounting for strength of schedule, especially since the Mountain West didn’t have any non-conference games.

Still, the Spartans also had to overhaul the other side of the ball if they were ever going to move the needle.

Shaping up defensively

San Jose State scored at least 30 points in eight of their 12 games in 2019, but its problem was that the defense gave up at least 30 points six times. The Spartans scored 117 points in a three-game stretch against Boise State, Hawaii and UNLV late in the season and lost all three games because the defense allowed 132.

The Spartans completely flipped the script in 2020, posting their first negative EPA per play on defense in the cfbfastR era (remember, negative EPA is good on defense).

San Jose State went from 98th in scoring defense in 2019 to 15th in 2020. The Spartans were 19th in the nation in rushing defense as well.

But the San Jose State defense’s biggest strength last year was its pass rush, as the Spartans were 10th in sacks per game. Cade Hall and Junior Fehoko teamed up for 16 of the team’s 26 sacks, and both return in 2021. Both also helped the San Jose State defense stifle opposing running backs, posting a -0.09 EPA per play on runs.

Continuity a recurring theme for the Spartans, who return almost everybody, including Starkel, on both sides of the ball. San Jose State is ranked 27th in Bill Connelly’s returning production statistic heading into 2021.

Conclusions

Is San Jose State going to beat USC on Saturday? Probably not. Are they going to be among the best Group of 5 teams in the country? Probably not when teams like Cincinnati and Coastal Carolina exist. They’ll face stiff competition in their own conference from the likes of Boise State, Fresno State and Nevada. Even last year’s team lost its bowl game to an upstart Ball State team. Connelly’s SP+ rankings have the Spartans as the 84th-best team in the country.

But the bigger story here is how Brennan and his staff created a dynamic offense in the span of two years and added a dominant pass rush to guide a team to an undefeated regular season. The Spartans have completely overhauled themselves over the last two seasons, now it’s time to try to prove that they can stay.