Fresno State football players wanted to be heard after so much frustration, so much uncertainty.
A season that had started with their coach leaving the position due to health problems, only to deteriorate more with four defeats in six games during an exasperating section of mid-season, was now firmly up.
Their temporary coach having stabilized them by all challenges, including their own uncertain future, these players aspired to preserve what could have been the best part of a heavy season.
“We want to jump!” The players sang in the locker room last November after a victory over the state of Colorado which made them eligible for a bowl match. “We want to jump!”
Tim Skipper, the temporary coach who was practically a fressenoidan sentence after playing as a second grain for the Bulldogs before continuing to train for them in various titles, took the best side of what he had to work once again.
It was not the first or last time it would be necessary for this reason. The Bulldogs had tapped him to serve as an acting coach for a Bowl match the previous season after the first fight for the health of the coach Jefford, and now UCLA turns to Skipper to lead her team after the dismissal of coach Deshaun Foster on Sunday after the start of the 0-3 Bruins.
It is a particularly difficult place given the skipper links with his longtime friend, who hired him before this season as a special assistant of the head coach and once called “an honorary skipper”. Skipper’s father Jim was the coach of the Foster runners with the Carolina Panthers. Skipper’s brother Kelly had been Foster’s Running Backs coach at the UCLA.
“You know, Deshaun is a bit like a family,” said Jim Skipper. “Tim had his work cut, he knows it. But he is ready to take up the challenge. He was an outsider all his life.”
This could be the biggest Tim Skipper test, much higher than the six consecutive games inside the three yards line that the middle secondary helped Fresno Styme Ohio State for a goal line in 2000. Among the greatest difficulties faced with the skipper gathe the morale of the team and the maintenance of the alignment after a victory which led the fire of the coach. There is also an offense and a defense that rank among the worst in the country and a persistent sanction problem.
“I know that from the outside, people can watch and say that talent does not change, this imposing schedule does not change, how can we expect different results?” said Paul Loeffler, Fresno State radio advertiser. “But I would say that it is a guy who can promote belief for young men because he believes. It is tirelessly positive and it is not a false positivity.
“There is a gravity where I think the players would buy and as difficult as it will be for him because of the proximity that he and Deshaun have long been, I think that the way he attacks this opportunity will probably be colored by his experience last year.”
It was easy for Fresno State to turn to Skipper in July 2024, given his performance by guiding the Bulldogs towards a 37-10 victory against the state of the New Mexico in the New Mexico Bowl at the end of the previous season. The triumph of the bowl was welcome a relief of a sequence of losses of three games and concerns about Tedford after the coach moved away to solve health problems.
After the match, Skipper devoted victory to his boss.
“He did a wonderful job to prepare our team and prepare for the bowl,” said Terry Tumey, former nose -nose Ucla who appointed interim coach skipper in December 2023 when Tumey was sports director of Fresno State. “This is a much larger step, of course, but it is not a foreign proposal for him to be in an interim situation and take over and keep things from a distance because the administration defines his next direction.”
Less than a year ago, Skipper seriously made the state of Fresno to give him the permanent work of the bulldogs. The team experienced a departure of 5-3 before the waste in the second half against Hawaii and the Air Force was followed by a defeat against the UCLA in which the Bulldogs succeeded only one basket after half time.
Four days later, the sports director of Fresno State, Garrett Klassy, hired the coach of the seconds of USC Matt Entz as a new coach of the Bulldogs. Skipper finally found a landing point on Foster’s staff.
“He’s just someone who is very competent and he knows me,” said Foster in July. “So, it’s just someone I know I can trust, and I’m just delighted to be able to add someone with this type of knowledge to our team.”
Given an unexpected new opportunity as a replacement for Foster, Skipper, 47, could use any persistent disappointment of his last interim stop as motivation.
“Knowing Tim,” said Tumey, “he will want to prove that he has what it takes to be a head coach, whether this is this opportunity or elsewhere, and therefore he has something to prove too. I think that our entire UCLA program, we all have something to prove.”
The long career as a skipper coach included stops in the west of New Mexico, the state of Sacramento, the state of Colorado, Florida, Nevada Las Vegas and the center of Michigan, in addition to several relays in Fresno State. He is mainly trained in defense, but spent four seasons as a half-door coach.
Scheduled to meet the UCLA media for the first time Wednesday morning, Skipper is known for a magnetic personality that allows it to quickly strengthen players. He has already established a significant change by authorizing photos and videos to take during practices after his predecessor prohibited this custom.
“He is so authentic, he is so engaging, he has a smile of a million dollars and he is just present,” said Loeffler, “so I think he has a gift in terms of connection.”
But it is not a softie. Pat Hill, the former legendary coach of Fresno’s state of Fresno for having saved his mantra “everyone, at any time, anywhere” with victories on the opponents of the main conferences, said that his star defender of the only time who ranks as the second platform in the history of the school would take up his last challenge.
“When he enters a room, take the stature – he’s a little guy, he measures 5 feet 8 – but he orders the room and he will immediately get the team’s respect,” said Hill. “I guarantee that the team will play with more emotion and that it will play harder now.
“I do not know what will be the victories and the losses with the people they have, I really do not know enough, but from the point of view of leadership and the transmission of a message to the team, it will be exceptional.”
Tumey said that the expectations of the opening of the UCLA Big Ten against Northwestern on September 27 should be for the skipper to stabilize the program, make sure that the Bruins are competitive in the conference game and support its players.
But what happens if UCLA begins to unexpectedly rolling a victory after another?
“Hey, Stranger Things has happened,” said Tumey. “I was part of this 0-3-1 football team [in 1983] It ended up going to pink Bowl. So you never know.
