Of the 41 states in the union that have a Football Bowl Subdivision team within their borders, none have more than Texas.

For 12 days, as teams nationwide dig into preseason drills, USA TODAY Sports’ college football reporters are traversing the state of Texas and visiting each of its one dozen FBS programs. AT&T presents Two Weeks in Texas …

Day 10: Texas State

SAN MARCOS, Texas — On a wall just outside Dennis Franchione’s office at Texas State University’s football complex, framed newspaper covers trace the arc of a career that barely seems possible.

At 38, he was an NAIA coach scratching out wins in nowhere Kansas and thrilled to get his big break making $60,000 a year at the school then known as Southwest Texas State. Fewer than a dozen years later, he was the head coach at Ala-freaking-Bama, a meteoric rise worthy of respect in and of itself even if the way that particular chapter ended (or others in Franchione’s career) left some hard feelings in his wake.

But the last act of Franchione’s career may turn out to be his most fulfilling. After the journey that took him to New Mexico, TCU, Alabama and Texas A&M, “Coach Fran” has come back to his roots and back to the place that, in many ways, started it all.

“I’ve always taken over the down jobs or rebuilds or whatever you want to call them,” Franchione said. “Coming back here, this pony probably doesn’t buck quite as hard as some of them I’ve had, but that’s OK. I get to coach, and I really like our players right now. I’m kind of an old ballcoach, I guess. I’m having more fun coaching right now than in a long, long time.”

So little is known nationally about the football program at Texas State — the “Southwest” prefix got chopped off in 2003 — it couldn’t even get one of the Sun Belt Conference’s bowl bids last year despite a 7-5 record and a resounding head-to-head victory against Arkansas State, which also finished 7-5 but was invited to the GoDaddy Bowl.

Despite the extreme disappointment of staying home for the holidays — “Telling the team we didn’t get (a bowl bid) is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in coaching,” Franchione said — simply having more wins than losses was a major step for the Bobcats, who are entering their fourth season in FBS.

And even though Franchione may be remembered more for the clumsy way he left Alabama after just two years or the controversy that bubbled at Texas A&M around his ill-advised decision to sell an inside information newsletter to boosters, it is undeniable that he can build a winner.

He did it at New Mexico, a program so bad it lost a game 94-17 the year before Franchise arrived but was contending for the WAC title by the time he left. He did it at TCU, which had been to just one bowl game the previous 13 years, posting three winning seasons and laying the foundation for what Gary Patterson turned into a national power. Heck, he even did it in Tuscaloosa, cleaning up the mess left by Mike DuBose and winning the SEC West in 2002 despite NCAA sanctions that prohibited the Crimson Tide from playing in the league championship game.

Now he’s doing it at a place he knows well, albeit from 25 years ago when its profile was smaller and its athletic ambitions weren’t so big. But Texas State, like a handful of other schools, seized opportunity during the realignment wave of 2010 and moved up from FCS with dreams of cashing in on its location and exploding enrollment of 31,000 undergraduates.

“I was in the back yard messing around and got the call about this job and I had to go and talk to (my wife) about it because I’m not sure she wanted me to coach anymore,” Franchione, 64, said. “I said, ‘How’d you feel if I went back to Texas State to coach?’ She said, ‘I could do that’ because we loved being here the first time. We were both fired up.

“I always felt, and I feel even stronger about it today, that this school can do whatever it wanted to. It has the enrollment, it’s developing the alumni base. I don’t think there’s any limit to what this school can be.”

Still, there have been and continue to be challenges. Initially, Franchione struggled to pull players out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area because Texas State had no identity as an FBS program. The players he inherited were recruited to play FCS, and some probably weren’t even that good. The schedule was tougher than anything this school had ever faced.

Then, even when the school found some success last season, it didn’t receive a just reward.

“It was frustrating, but if we had made one more play, done something different maybe things would’ve gone our way,” quarterback Tyler Jones said. “A lot of it has to do with attendance, who you beat, when you beat them, how you travel, stuff like that, but we had some things we needed to do as a team that fall back on us. Our slogan this year is ‘Leave No Doubt,’ so it’s a mentality we have to have and remember the goal.”

Making a bowl game was Franchione’s goal when he took the job, and it seems the Bobcats are getting closer all the time. The school has upgraded the stadium. It’s funding full cost of attendance scholarships. The roster, top to bottom, is now full of players recruited with FBS in mind.

And Franchione is well on his way to bringing his career full circle; a turnaround artist putting some final brushstrokes on his last project.

“It’s not ‘Mission Accomplished’ yet,” Franchione said. “I like our coaches. We’ve had good continuity. I like our players. We’ve got a good administration. We’ve got good people here, a great community. I think we have a chance to win, and at the end of the day, when you get on the bus you hope you have a 50/50 chance. At some places you don’t, but we do.”