Three takeaways from Fresno State spring football, including: How will portal affect roster?

Fresno State finished its 15 spring practices on Saturday, and there were some definite bright spots. But the Bulldogs also have critical pieces to replace including quarterback Jake Haener and his top three wideouts from an offense that led the Mountain West Conference in scoring last season, and are far from a finished product.

“I think the energy of the players and how they worked and competed with one another was very encouraging,” said coach Jeff Tedford, who has led the Bulldogs to two titles in four seasons at his alma mater. “We have a lot of work to do, but the attitude of our team and the work ethic of our team is aligned to continue to improve.”

A call on a starting quarterback won’t be made for some time. The Bulldogs deployed a number of combinations along the offensive line through the spring, looking for best fits.

There are questions, but still four months for the Bulldogs to find credible answers.

What could be gleaned from the spring as the Bulldogs head into the summer, fall camp and then a 2023 season that features a favorable schedule in conference play? Here are three things that stood out:

The defense could be epic

Fresno State down the stretch last season had all of its pieces working from coordinator Kevin Coyle on down and the results were there. The Bulldogs allowed just 9.0 points per game over their final four games including a 28-16 victory over Boise State in the Mountain West Conference championship game and a 29-6 victory over Washington State in the Jimmy Kimmel L.A. Bowl.

The Broncos averaged 29.5 points per game on the season, and 34.3 in eight games started by quarterback Taylen Green before the title game matchup. The Cougars averaged 26.1 points per game, and 31.0 against their non-Power Five conference level opponents.

The Bulldogs kept building to that through the season, and it is now a baseline going forward. “The more knowledge the guys have the more you can put in,” linebackers coach Tim Skipper said. “As they started getting comfortable, we could start to think, ‘OK, we could do this, we could do that.’ In football, the coaching side is always stealing stuff, so we were stealing stuff from the NFL, stealing stuff from other schools that we saw on film and we added it to the system because it fit us and it kept growing, growing, growing.

“The guys could handle it. They were playing fast and at a high level, so we kept giving them more and more and more so offenses were seeing different things from what they were seeing in the film room. It just all worked together. It was a good mix of gumbo, right there.”

The only bad thing about it, Skipper said, is the season ended.

But the Bulldogs have experience returning in a lot of the right places and a number of versatile pieces including defensive lineman Devo Bridges, nickel Morice Norris and linebacker Tuasivi Nomura, so Coyle and the defensive staff figure to have a lot of fun game-planning opponents.

They ended 2022 miles ahead of some of the offenses they matched wits with, and in the spring built on where they left off and how to best utilize developing and new pieces to the puzzle.

The Bulldogs, with Coyle and staff calling the shots, could be a nightmare for opposing offenses from game to game.

“To be honest, I’m having a blast with these players and with the great staff that we have,” Coyle said. “We have a lot of variety in the scheme, but they’ve handled the multiplicity outstanding.

“We as coaches are in that never-ending pursuit of finding the next thing. We study everybody. We study the top college teams. We talk to the best coaches in the country. We study the NFL teams and talk to the NFL coaches and we look for things — not to dramatically charge what we do; we like what we do, we have confidence in it.

“But what can we tweak? What can we add? What wrinkle can we do with a package that is easy for us, but poses some real serious problems for the offense?”

Worth noting: the two Power Five teams on the Bulldogs’ schedule, Purdue and Arizona State, will be operating in new offenses under new coaching staffs and both averaged less than 28 points per game last season; the Boilermakers were at 26.6 and the Sun Devils at 26.1.

Wideouts not there quite yet

Wideouts Jalen Moreno-Cropper, Nikko Remigio and Zane Pope are gone. Of the returners, Erik Brooks had 37 catches last season and Mac Dalena had 11.

While there is talent in the room, the consistency catching the football is not yet there.

“A lot of work to do,” Tedford said. “They’re talented, but they haven’t been under the lights yet. The only two that have been on the field are Dalena and Brooks. Everybody else is new. They show signs of having ability, but it’s going to take a lot more reps until we play to the level that we’re used to playing at that position.”

The three junior college receivers in for spring ball — Artis Cole, Tim Grear Jr. and Antoine Sullivan — are at different stages making a significant jump to FBS football and everything that goes into it on and off the field.

“It’s something where it’s everything from the lifting to the running to the practices and the practice length and the volume of the playbook,” said offensive coordinator Pat McCann, after the Bulldogs’ spring preview.

“The cool thing for those guys, they came from good JC programs, but it’s still just more than they’ve dealt with and that’s always going to be some level of adjustment for those guys. Everything is just more.”

The summer will be important for the wideouts working with a group of quarterbacks led by Mikey Keene, Joshua Wood and Logan Fife. The timing in that passing game, like everything else with an offense that has a lot of moving parts to be replaced, is a work in progress.

“They have progressed. It’s probably still a little bit too sporadic and inconsistent,” McCann said. “That’s the thing with a day like (Saturday) with people here and a little more juice around it and the buildup to it. That will be the big thing when I sit down and watch it and just go, ‘OK, who performed at the level they have been progressing versus who kind of took a step back, relative to the day and the environment?”

Bulldogs into the transfer portal, and a potential target area

The spring NCAA transfer portal window opened on Saturday and will be a frenzy of activity for the next 15 days. The Bulldogs are sure to lose a few players that aren’t in line to play many snaps in the fall or are looking for a fresh start, while also assessing their needs as they prepare to defend their Mountain West championship.

They had an FBS-level offensive line portal recruit on campus Saturday for the spring preview.

“I do know as early as this morning it was saturated with people already in the portal,” Tedford said. “Thankfully, we don’t have a lot of space to make a lot of movements. I don’t know what’s going to happen with our team, if kids want to go in the portal. I don’t know that. We will have exit interviews with them, because now they really have to identify where they are with the depth and if their window has run out is it better for them to move on.

“We still have to really kind of evaluate all of that and then see if we have a major need, which is not all over the place. But if we have a major need we will take advantage of at least looking at it.”

Tedford provided a glimpse at one potential target area after the final practice of the spring in noting that left tackle Jacob Spomer was taking some reps at center late in the spring, a position where Fresno State lost starter Bula Schmidt as a transfer to Central Florida.

Fresno State worked a number of options there during the spring including Spomer, who was the Bulldogs’ highest-graded starter on the offensive line a year ago, according to Pro Football Focus, even though at 6-foot-2 and 290 pounds he fits better as an interior lineman.

“That’s going to be a very interesting experiment, because he is so solid at left tackle,” Tedford said. “But when the dust settles and our roster becomes what it is after recruiting, portal, all that kind of stuff, we’ll see if we can afford to keep him there or he needs to go back outside.”