It was 2005 and my first season coaching. Fresno State was playing USC and that night I learned that the phrase ‘Anybody, Anytime, Anywhere’ was real.
And today, with Fresno State entering the new look Pac-12, that phrase is at the heart of my conversation with head coach Matt Entz.
Welcome to today’s episode of THE DAWN, a collaboration between Y-Option and the Pac-12.
Matt Entz first fell for Fresno State on a Saturday night in the Midwest, a young assistant watching the late ESPN game, checkerboard end zones on the screen, Pat Hill pacing the sideline. He’d GA’d for Coach Hill’s old line coach, so he had a rooting interest built in, and it stuck.
Now he leads this proud program and seventeen months into the job, he calls it Midwest California, blue collar mentality echoing the small Iowa town he grew up in. It didn’t take long to see the same thing in his own roster, blue collar young men who grew up dreaming about playing for the Bulldogs.
That dream now comes with a new league, the re-imagined Pac 12, and Coach Entz can feel the excitement building as September closes in. There’s pride in it and pressure too, elevating a program and an athletic department that’s now in Pac-12.
THE DAWN debuted July 1 across the Pac-12’s YouTube and Pac-12 Insider, the league’s 24/7 FAST channel. The series culminates with a finale featuring never-before-seen behind-the-scenes content from the building of this new league. It drops in August, right before the season kicks off.
