St. George • On the first day of Lance Anderson’s emergency boot camp, the new Utah Tech football coach realized how bad things were.

He opened Canvas, a grading portal for college students, and reviewed his players' upcoming coursework. Some had papers due. Others had tests. The Trailblazers’ coaching staff would divide, conquer and make sure every player got caught up.

Easy enough.

Then one freshman came back with an update.

“One of the kids had a quiz due. So they did the quiz and they failed it,” Anderson recalled. “And we come around and it’s like, ‘Did you read any of this [material]?”

The player stared at him confused.

“No, I just saw I needed to take a quiz,” the player said.

Anderson, a 53-year-old who built a career on Stanford’s lush California campus where trees and geniuses grow equally, was flummoxed.

“That’s what we have to do. It’s really more hand holding,” the coach said. “It’s just so hard for me to fathom. ... It’s like, how is this even possible?”

Anderson came to the southern Utah desert to build a Division I program according to his own vision. He knew there would be risks. Since the Trailblazers started their FCS journey in 2020, they’ve averaged 2.5 wins a season. Resources would be low and the days would be long.

“I knew there would be challenges,” he admitted.

But never did Anderson imagine he’d inherit one of the most dire academic situations in the country. Utah Tech ranked second to last in the NCAA’s most recent Academic Progress Rate report. Only Bethune-Cookman in Florida was worse.

“There were so many guys with straight Fs. Straight Fs and a D,” Anderson said.

Since then, it’s been hit with sanctions and lost practice time. If Utah Tech’s APR doesn’t dramatically improve, the Trailblazers will be forbidden from holding spring practices.

Meanwhile, they’ve won only one game in 412 days.

And now it is on the old Stanford man to revive them.

How it fell apart

In the weeks before Anderson opened up his first fall camp, athletic director Ken Beazer walked into his office with a problem.

Utah Tech’s academic issues had gone too far, and the NCAA was cracking down.

The NCAA was stripping away four hours of practice time a week. On top of that, the Trailblazers were forced to take a mandatory day off from football and dedicate it solely to academic activities. Essentially, where most teams practice five days a week before a game, Anderson was going to have three-and-a-half.

“I know it is the rule, it just feels unfair. Like this is nothing we had anything to do with,” Anderson said.

When Anderson interviewed for the job last offseason, he didn’t even ask about the academics. Why would he? Everything was fine at Stanford. So the first time it was brought to his attention was in the spring when he was already on campus.

And the issues were glaring.

According to Anderson, players weren’t going to class. There were no academic advisors for the football team. There were no consequences for poor academic performance.

Junior linebacker Jared Fotu said the team was “lackadaisical and that just crept into the culture.”

One player put it this way: ‘Coach, I was never held accountable. I was never punished by the last staff,’” Anderson remembered.

The coach’s first thought was to increase the study hall hours. But he soon realized the problems were too systemic.

Stanford freshmen get about three advisors per player, Anderson said.

The way Utah Tech’s study hall operated was football players would check into a room with every other athlete on campus. Without advisors or staff overseeing things, they’d be left to their own devices for hours. They were there to punch the clock and check a box.

“They weren’t getting results,” Anderson said.

Professors came up to Anderson and said players were “taking some of the easiest classes offered at Utah Tech” and still failing.

“It was very, very bad,” Anderson said. With certain players, he thought, “I just don’t think he even tried or knew” what do to.

Beazer thought it was the latter. He didn’t believe the last coaching staff was “neglecting” the issues, or players were neglecting academics, but they didn’t understand the possible sanctions. In fact, when he assumed the job in 2022, nobody was in charge of monitoring APR issues at all.

“My first year here, what really raised the red flag, was there was confusion about who was actually doing the APR,” Beazer said. “I said, ‘Well, somebody’s got to do it. You do it right here.’ I mean, that’s not quite how it was. But by the time we started locking in, you had about a month-and-a-half until you had to turn all your data in.”

It didn’t help the program lost dozens of transfers as they transitioned to the FCS. Fotu felt as though, “almost half our team dipped out of here.”

“We lost a lot of [APR] points through retention,” Beazer said. “... I wouldn’t label it as a cultural problem. I would label it as kind of unknown. The transition period.”

So Anderson instituted his own measures. He moved the study hall in-house. Each position coach would be directly responsible for their players — helping them with their assignments and turning papers in on time. Some coaches even brought in their spouses to help.

It would be an extra lift. Utah Tech doesn’t even have its own video coordinator or any recruiting staff; Anderson blocks out 30 minutes every day to hand-write letters to recruits. But academics had to be the No. 1 issue — everything else be damned.

“All the kids bring their own computers, and we get one-on-one,” Anderson said. “Show us your assignments, what you have left, look at your grades. It’s been eye-opening. Some of the kids just need that one-on-one. It’s hard on our part because it adds to what we need to do.”

He then made Friday a no-practice day. It was the day before a game, but it was better than interrupting practice plans throughout the week, he thought.

“Players say, ‘We’d like a little bit more review at the end of the week. We’d like to be able to have a meeting, or a short practice,” Anderson said. “But we just can’t do that.”

If their grades weren’t high enough, Anderson would bench them in games. If they weren’t attending class, they wouldn’t practice. Because if the grades didn’t change, more penalties awaited — that includes losing spring practice and part of the offseason.

“There were great things about the last coaching staff and some not-so-great things,” Fotu said. “There’s been some great changes that Lance has made.”

How did they not know?

When Anderson found out about the academic issues, he went home to his wife, Sherri, and stayed up for hours researching the potential penalties.

It was all laid out for them online. The NCAA academic progress report is publicly available and measured on a zero to 1,000 scale. Programs are measured on a four-year average of academic performance. If they fall below the 930 mark — which means a 50% graduation rate — they can start getting sanctions.

Utah Tech was at 887.

Beazer said he didn’t know there would be penalties in Anderson’s first season. He thought Utah Tech had four years to get its grades up after it transitioned to the FCS. Anderson was coming in during year three.

“I was saying, ‘How can we [get a] penalty?’ We haven’t had four years yet. And [the NCAA] said, ‘Well, transitioning schools are three years.’ That caught my attention right off the bat,” Beazer said.

Anderson said he never asked about the academic situation and wasn’t told of a problem.

If he had known, would Anderson have taken this job?

“I don’t want to answer that,” Anderson said. “I am very committed to this job. There are days you doubt. Did you do the right thing? Would I be more happy doing this? But this is my opportunity to be a head coach.”

And Anderson always wanted that. At Stanford, he rose from a defensive line coach to the associate head coach. As he built up the program with David Shaw, he saw how he would run his own program.

When Shaw was fired in 2022, Anderson had a choice. He could try for an NFL assistant job or go down a level and get a head coaching gig. Vic Fangio nearly hired him with the Miami Dolphins. But when that fell through, Anderson decided to take a gap year as Boise State’s analyst and start looking for a head coaching spot.

Morehead State and Marist called. But when Utah Tech came, he zeroed in. He was familiar with recruiting Utah and grew up in Idaho.

“I thought we could recruit Southern California, a short drive to Phoenix and Las Vegas,” he said. “I believe in the foundation.”

But then the academics derailed that vision. He called Shaw and Fangio to get their take.

“Stanford was taking over a 1-11 team, a bad program that hadn’t been to a bowl in years,” Anderson said. “There was a lot of work there, but it was different than this. I think they were shocked. You have to stay strong and be firm.”

It’s led to some growing pains. Utah Tech is currently 1-10. As players were suspended and practices cut short, Anderson told his team this “isn’t about the wins and losses anymore. It’s about the love of the game.”

Still, in the back of his mind, he knows he doesn’t have forever to win. “You look at the product, it’s frustrating to everyone involved” he said. “But I don’t feel anything from Ken where it’s like we’re failing.”

Beazer agreed, “I’ve talked to him on many occasions, ‘Lance, I’ve got a lot of patience, and I didn’t bring you in here thinking this is going to be a one-year fix.’”

Anderson needs academic advisors — the football team still has none. And it will take years to get the APR where university officials want to see it. Beazer is optimistic the APR will be over 930 next season, but still worries about the transfer portal and staying over the threshold longterm. He hired a third-party APR consulting firm to help.

Anderson admits some of the struggling players will still be on the roster next year. And if they keep going below 930, the penalties will only get stiffer.

“I’m still asking around to see what will happen,” Anderson said.

Until then, he told his coaches to stay the course — no matter how much work it takes.

And it’s taken a lot already. Recently an athletic staffer asked Anderson for his favorite restaurants in St. George so the program could set up an event there. Anderson thought for a second then just laughed.

“I didn’t even know. I just haven’t had time,” he said.

The head coach hasn’t been hitting the town.

He’s been too busy hitting the books.

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.