San Diego State: basketball’s best-kept secret makes Final Four debut

W hen San Diego State take the floor under head coach Brian Dutcher on Saturday night for the first Final Four appearance in school history, they’ll be representing a city not traditionally known for its rich basketball history. San Diego briefly hosted the NBA’s Clippers for six unmemorable seasons before they relocated to Los Angeles. And while SDSU has fielded a team for more than 100 years, on-court success has largely proven hard to come by.

All of that changed when Steve Fisher arrived in 1999, taking over a lowly program that ranked among the worst in Division I. Fisher, who had led Michigan to the 1989 national title and coached the famed Fab Five a few years after, spotted potential in an unfancied program that had just built a brand-new arena, despite coming off of a four-win season and having failed to reach the NCAA tournament in the previous 15 years. Fisher re-hired Dutcher, his longtime assistant from Michigan, and the two of them got to work.

Nearly a quarter-century later, Dutcher has the Aztecs two games from the unthinkable: a national championship.

“It’s a vision Coach Fisher had all those years ago when he came to the Mesa, and we recruited and told people this is what we were going to do,” Dutcher said on Sunday after SDSU defeated Creighton to punch their Final Four ticket. “They all thought it was just recruiting talk, but here we sit.”

Back then, Dutcher watched as Fisher would speak to anyone who would listen about his ambitions for this dormant program, spending his time doing speaking engagements in the city, at times even walking around campus handing out free tickets. The early returns were unconvincing: the Aztecs won just five games that first season. But it wasn’t long before the vision