Colorado State coach Sonny Lubick recalled the formula for college football success as offered by Bear Bryant.

" 'Bear' said it was like in real estate," Lubick said. "Instead of location, location, location, it is scheduling, scheduling, scheduling."

There, facing Lubick and CSU in the first four games of the season are merely heated if not hated rival Colorado, and then Pacific-10 power California, followed by road games with defending Conference USA champ Houston and the Mountain West's favorite, TCU.

CU is what it always is to CSU, and the other three are all ranked by somebody, Cal as high as seventh.

At what point is Lubick allowed to exhale?

"I'm wondering if maybe they aren't trying to tell the old man something," Lubick said. "Is it time for me to go or what?"

Pessimism does not cling to Lubick, nor even dare to pause in his presence. So this big Whew! of a beginning can also been seen as an opportunity.

"I'm not saying we won't win a few of those," Lubick said. "But there is small margin for error. It is going to be challenging early on. And what if we win those games?"

Well, in that case, all is forgiven, if anything needs to be with Lubick, the architect and mainstay of CSU's football glory. If ever a coach could do no wrong, he is the coach, though two losing seasons and one dead-even in the last three years has tended to cause a bit of a squirm in Fort Collins.

Two of those losses have come to CU at Folsom Field, each down to the last play of the game, a memory so vivid Lubick can run back the sequences like a voice-over narrator.

"The clock runs out, we are a yard short, they win, (2004)," Lubick said. "We get the touchdown, they get the (squib) kick, their kid kicks a field goal (2005).

"I'd like to thank whoever agreed to playing two years in a row at Folsom Field."

Scheduling. Scheduling.

I asked Lubick why play so emotional and season- defining a game as Colorado in the very first game of the year. The result is inordinately heavy on the seasons of both teams.

Other big rivalries - Ohio State-Michigan, Army-Navy, Cal-Stanford - come at the end. Florida-Georgia is in the middle, as is Texas-Oklahoma.

"Conference scheduling (oh, that again) makes it hard to do it any other time," Lubick said. "And you've got to play it some time. We've lost the game and gone on to have very good years. We've won and not."

More likely the real reason is that it is still considered too local, with Colorado having the upper hand and pulling the occasional threat to back out altogether. Until CSU is consistently the more impressive program, as it was for several years under Lubick, CSU will show up when scheduled and win as often as not.

Or the game can become so important in the national scheme of college football, TV will take over the scheduling and put it wherever it fits their needs. Just as Fox Sports is using the game Sept. 1 at Invesco, starting it at 10 a.m., where it is clearly the best of those offered then and where it will conveniently get out of the way for more glamorous games later.

Lubick says without blinking or winking that CSU ought to be better. In fact, "we're going to be good," he said.

Most coaches at this time of year will moan about missing pieces or injuries or just plain bad luck, but just as Lubick does not wince at the schedule, neither does he back off on a team he thinks will be just fine.

"We've got the most starters back since I've been here (18; nine on each side of the ball)," Lubick said. "And we've got seven or eight more who have played a lot.

"We've still got to go do it, of course. But I still think we're pretty good. I'm not trying to oversell it, I'm just practicing positive realism."

And if the beginning and the usual middle conference schedule is not tough enough, the Rams finish with the Border War at home against Wyoming, scheduled at noon the day after Thanksgiving, the same day in fact that another rivalry will be starting two hours earlier down the road in Boulder, CU-Nebraska.

"There are no gimmies," Lubick said. "It's like the new coach who came on board and looked at the schedule. He ran his finger down the list. He asked the head coach where the gimmies were. Maybe we are the gimme, his coach said.

"When I first got here, we were it."

And lately, too. Not that it can't change. Or won't.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

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