The Fresno State athletic program has never seen a year like this one.

The school year began in early July 2007 with a Fresno County Superior Court jury returning a multi-million-dollar verdict for former Bulldogs volleyball coach Lindy Vivas in her sex discrimination lawsuit against the university.

It ended in late June with the Bulldogs baseball team stunning the college sports world by winning the national title, then returning to the cheers of more than 11,000 fans at a campus homecoming celebration.
The intervening 50 weeks were filled with two other hard-fought legal battles, athletes’ high-profile troubles with the police, the classroom success of hundreds of athletes, a historic conference championship by the women’s basketball team, a strong effort by a young softball team, a dramatic turnaround by the football team, major changes to the athletic department’s finances, and the university’s first Commissioner’s Cup signifying the Western Athletic Conference’s top overall athletic program.

How to make sense of it all? Impossible.

It’s all too big, too fresh, in many ways still too controversial to permit one person to definitively judge 2007-08. Let each observer of Bulldogs athletics decide the year’s significance.

To give readers some context, I’ll provide 18 observations on the past year — two a day beginning today and concluding June 19. All 18 will be published in The Bee on June 20, along with a timeline of the year’s significant events.

The observations will be numbered so they’re not confused with other blogs I post along the way.

I’ve followed Fresno State athletics for 50 years. This past year was one of a kind.