Jeff Garcia is crazy. He wants the San Jose State football coaching job.

This is the perfect reason that Garcia should be offered the San Jose State football coaching job.

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San Jose State fires football coach Ron Caragher And if that sounds counter-intuitive, then you don’t know the San Jose State football coaching job.

The gig is one of America’s toughest. In any sport. Maybe in any profession. We all know why. As the third most prominent major college program in the Bay Area and one that struggles to draw decent attendance numbers even from its own student body, San Jose State has challenges that you don’t find at, say, Alabama. There are always two or three impossible road games against powerhouse teams (including, yes, Alabama just a few years ago) that the Spartans must play for big paychecks to keep the finances afloat. Competing for recruits against other Mountain West schools with better resources, such as Boise State and San Diego State, is another hurdle.

Over the years, several Spartan coaches have fought their way through those challenges and moved on to Power Five Conference programs (Darryl Rogers, Jack Elway, Terry Shea, Ron Turner, Mike MacIntyre). Many other Spartan coaches have never solved the puzzle and either resign or are dismissed, as Ron Caragher was this week.

That’s the San Jose State way. Despite the Spartans’ niche in the college football universe, the program has developed a spunky reputation for rising up every decade or so to produce a bowl team and has sent several notable talents to the NFL. One of them? Jeff Garcia.

Other alumni may appreciate San Jose State as much as Garcia. Few appreciate it more. As a skinny undersized kid out of Gilroy High, he received no scholarship offers from Division I schools. Even after he played a season at nearby Gavilan College, the only D1 program to give him a chance was SJSU. He jumped on the opportunity and — despite playing for three different Spartan head coaches — managed to quarterback two winning teams and produce the most offensive yards in San Jose State history to that date. Another Spartan alum, Bill Walsh, liked what he saw and helped shepherd Garcia’s career through the Canadian League and NFL.

Since ending his pro football career in 2010, Garcia has been living in Southern California. But he’s had a coaching itch, one that may date to his childhood when he helped his father, a former Gavilan head coach, break down film. The last few years, Garcia has tutored various quarterbacks, has been a Canadian League assistant coach in Montreal and during the 2015 season served as an NFL assistant with the Rams before being dismissed in an offensive staff purge. But he’s kept his head in the game and has told friends he would love a crack at the San Jose State job.

As I have emphasized, that’s one nutty ambition. To succeed at San Jose State, you must work crazy hours, be crazily obsessed with recruiting, and be crazy enough to convince your players they can compete in non-conference games at Texas, Utah and BYU. All three are on SJSU’s schedule next season.

Our Bay Area News Group college football maven, Jon Wilner, has put Garcia on a short list of potential Spartan coaching candidates but has also noted Garcia’s lack of head coaching experience. That’s a fair concern. But I would compare his situation to that of Joe Kapp, another former NFL quarterback, who in 1982 had zero coaching experience but was hired to run the program at his own alma mater, Cal. In his first season, Kapp took a team that was 2-9 the previous year and coached the Bears to a 7-4 record en route to being named conference coach of the year.

I know, I know. Kapp’s next four seasons weren’t so hot. His flaws surfaced. Kapp wasn’t the best recruiter and couldn’t hang onto his assistant coaches, likely because of his emotional highs and lows that made him a tough boss. But my point is, Kapp did make the transition from shallow-resume coach to successful head coach, early on. And Kapp’s weaknesses would not be Garcia’s weaknesses. He’s been around coaches all his life. Garcia knows how they should be treated and nurtured. His grandfather, Red Elder, was Gilroy High’s head coach for many years. And I’ve already mentioned Garcia’s dad, Bob, who was familiar with the recruiting process at Gavilan–both in terms of high school players he sought and four-year colleges that sought his junior college athletes.

Once, I spent an afternoon at the Garcia family home in Gilroy, where Bob outlined how Jeff had been so precocious as a youngster, sitting in on film sessions and other coaches’ meetings. Jeff has been around plenty of crazy and obsessed coaches as an overachieving NFL player who had to win over those coaches. He is also quite familiar with how crazy and obsessed a human being must be to succeed at SJSU. As colleague Wilner opines, Garcia might have to be a head coach who followed more of a CEO model, with experienced offensive and defensive coordinators. I don’t see why that wouldn’t work. Garcia surely has singled out solid men he’d like to hire for those positions. He probably has an entire manual drawn up for how he’d like to approach the San Jose State job to share with athletic director Gene Bleymaier, who will make the hire.

How do I know any of this? I don’t. I last spoke to Garcia more than a year ago. But I have heard enough from people around him to know he has been thinking about becoming San Jose State’s coach for a while. Garcia also liked and re-tweeted my recent thought that he should be the No. 1 candidate for the job.

I am certain about several things. No one would represent San Jose State more passionately. No one has a better understanding of the good and bad about San Jose State’s program. No other hire could bring Spartan football as much attention and–oh, how I hate to use this phrase–brand identity. And as a former Pro Bowl quarterback, Garcia could certainly identify, recruit and develop players at that position.

Yes, there are assistant coaches at other universities that are qualified and might do a fine job as SJSU’s head coach. And yes, it’s possible that Garcia might even agree to serve as an offensive coordinator under the new man if someone else is picked. But it’s hard to believe that having Jeff Garcia be part of San Jose State football would ever be a bad thing.

I think it should be as head coach.