PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Curt Cignetti did it at Indiana. Bob Chesney is doing it at ninth-ranked UCLA. Pat Fitzgerald is attempting to do it at Michigan State. Win right away, that is.
Cignetti inherited a 3-9 program and guided the Hoosiers to an 11-2 record and a berth in the College Football Playoff in his first season. Chesney arrived to a similar situation in Westwood, taking over a 3-9 team that is undefeated going into Saturday's game against
Michigan State (2-5, 0-4 Big Ten).
“Anybody can do it,” Fitzgerald said while indicating no disrespect to his coaching colleagues. “You're nowhere close to being satisfied with the standard, but you're creating something that is obviously what we're diligently working on."
Fitzgerald lived losing as a player, too.
His first two years as a Northwestern linebacker in the mid-1990s, the Wildcats were a combined 5-16-1 overall. His final two years, they won back-to-back Big Ten championships and lost to USC in the 1996 Rose Bowl game.
“Losing sucks,” Fitzgerald said. “I don’t sleep very well, food tastes like crap, dog barks at me. It’s awful. You know how you fix it? Win. That’s what I told the team.”
The Bruins (6-0, 4-0) — one of six remaining unbeatens in the nation — and the Spartans meet in Pasadena for the first time since the 1966 Rose Bowl game, when UCLA won the New Year's Day showdown 14-12.
The Spartans will visit the historic stadium on Friday to get pictures for their social media accounts, as Fitzgerald put it. But he has no plans to use the venue as inspiration.
“We got plenty of motivation,” he said. “We’re not winning, so there’s the motivation.”
Chesney initially respected Fitzgerald as a player, admitting he read “High Hopes: Taking the Purple to Pasadena,” the 1996 book by Wildcats coach Gary Barnett that covered Fitzgerald's senior year.
When Chesney coached at Holy Cross, he often visited Chicago, home to many of the school's alumni, when Fitzgerald's sons were being recruited to play college football. Several Holy Cross players came from the same high school as Fitzgerald's sons and they knew him.
“There's pretty deep connections,” Chesney said.
Michigan State’s banged-up team might take more hits at key positions. Starting quarterback Alessio Milivojevic and starting running back Jaziun Patterson were listed as questionable Wednesday on the injury report. Milivojevic’s backup, Cam Fancher, is out with a knee injury, and Patterson filled in for standout Cam Edwards after he was injured last month.
Bruins quarterback Ty Dieffenbach will be making his second start on Saturday, with first-stringer Nico Iamaleava sidelined for the rest of the season after knee surgery.
The 6-foot-6 senior completed 22 of 33 passes for a career-high 264 yards in his first FBS start last week, a 17-7 win over Wisconsin.
"You can tell they have complete trust and confidence in his arm,” Fitzgerald said. “He can really rip it.”
The Bruins' offense leads the Big Ten in rushing yards per game (231.0) and rushing touchdowns (21).
The Bruins have made themselves into one of the best stories in college football, but their fans have yet to turn out in droves.
Average attendance is 32,978 through three home games at the Rose Bowl, located about 26 miles from the UCLA campus. The school recently began offering students free admission to football, and men's and women's basketball games, and a paid bus runs from campus to Pasadena. Current capacity is about 81,258 because of tarps covering seats in the upper end zones.
"I hope we're making people proud," Chesney said. "I hope they release the fear they might have of anything else and just support the hell out it and enjoy this journey.”
Interim athletic director Tim Harris adopted a transparent count using scanned tickets at the gate to track actual attendance rather than typically inflated counts based on ticket distribution.
“Jump on, come on, man,” wide receiver Landon Ellis said. “I think the progress that we've made from January when we all arrived to now is just out of this world. So if you're not all the way in, I don't know what you're doing, but I would get on it.”
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AP Sports Writer Larry Lage in Detroit contributed to this report.
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