San Diego State basketball opens its 106th season Tuesday night against Cal State Fullerton at Viejas Arena, and Brian Dutcher is treating it as much more than a routine season opener. With only two returning rotation pieces, nine new players and no NCAA Tournament experience on the roster, the Aztecs are entering the year with obvious talent but plenty to sort out.
Dutcher said the exhibition period has already felt long enough to count as a separate season. “That exhibition season felt like a full year,” he said last Wednesday after beating Long Beach State. “We’re not even to November. We haven’t even given out Halloween candy.”
The message is clear: this is not a finished team yet, even if the ceiling looks promising. San Diego State has already worked through three preseason scrimmages or exhibitions, including an Oct. 16 trip to No. 5 Arizona and then a week later against No. 21 USC, but Dutcher says the learning curve is still steep.
Brian Dutcher: a new group still learning the basics
For Dutcher, the early challenge is not just building chemistry. It is getting the roster fluent in the language of his system and comfortable with the defensive demands that have defined San Diego State for years.
“With this many new guys, as much as we want them to know everything that we’re doing, it’s taking more time than I hoped, just terminology, knowing exactly what we want,” he said. “Sometimes that takes longer than you want as a coach, and that’s what I’m kind of feeling now.”
That is the reality of a season opener built around turnover. The Aztecs have been without the kind of continuity that usually makes October and November smoother, and Dutcher admitted the process has been exhausting.
“It feels like we’ve played an entire season. It’s exhausting,” he said. “But now we have to work every day and make it better.”
Why the first few games matter so much
Dutcher’s point is that the early schedule will help his team identify itself. He expects the first stretch of the season to reveal patterns, both good and bad, that can be corrected once the scouting reports start repeating.
“By the time we play six or seven games, we’ll say, ‘Well, this team plays like USC, this teams plays like Arizona, this team plays like Long Beach State,’ and there will be some repeat performance,” he said. “But right now, with everything so new, every defensive game plan is brand new to this team, so it’s a challenge to get everyone on the same page.”
That is also why the opener against Cal State Fullerton matters. The Titans are expected to provide a different sort of problem, and San Diego State’s coaches even used Wayne McKinney on the scout team because Cal State Fullerton was making a lot of 3-pointers in preseason play.
There is still optimism inside the program. Dutcher said, “I think we have a high ceiling, which I like.” He added that when he looks around the locker room during difficult stretches, he believes the talent is there to reach it. “It may take a while to get to that ceiling, but when I look in the locker room when we’re not playing well or things aren’t going perfect, I feel like we have the talent to get there.”
The Aztecs know what the opener usually looks like
San Diego State has also handled this matchup well before. The Aztecs’ previous two season openers against Cal State Fullerton were lopsided victories, which gives Tuesday night a familiar backdrop even if the roster is very different.
Still, this is not just about history. It is about whether a team with nine new players can begin to look like San Diego State quickly enough to handle the tougher weeks ahead. That is especially true on defense, where the margin for confusion is small and the expectations are high.
Elzie Harrington echoed that point, saying, “We’ve got so many new guys and everyone is learning new concepts, especially at the defensive end – that’s the thing we harp on the most here,” while adding, “I’m fairly happy with how people are picking things up, but I know our best basketball is to come as”
For San Diego State, Tuesday night is the first real checkpoint. The record will matter, of course, but so will the sharper questions: how quickly the new pieces settle in, how reliably the defense travels, and whether the Aztecs can make this 106th season feel less like a restart and more like a step forward.
