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Emphatic special teams analyst Fred Guidici.
Chapter six of the weekly summer series on the Spartans’ position groups. This week we examine San Jose State’s special teams ahead of the 2026 season.
Some numbers you can argue with. This one you can’t.
San Jose State made 12 of 23 field goals in 2025. That’s 52 percent in a sport where anything under 70 gets a kicker benched and anything under 60 can bury a season. The Spartans missed all three tries from 50 plus, went 3 of 7 from the 40s and somehow left two on the table from inside 30. Eleven missed field goals is roughly 33 points, which is a cruel figure for a 3-9 team that spent October and November losing games by inches.
So when staff moves were announced back in January, one name stood out to anyone who has followed this program.
Fred Guidici is back. Again. And this time the timing might matter more than the title Guidici holds.
Ask him about coaching titles, by the way, and he waves it off before the question finishes.
“The title thing never bothers me,” said Guidici. “Everybody knows what’s going on.”
Guidici comes home to help, again
Guidici is a 1989 San Jose State graduate now on his third tour with the program, which tells you everything about how he’s wired. His resume reads like a Bay Area football atlas: a defensive assistant under Bill Walsh at Stanford, a season with the Raiders, the SaberCats of the Arena League, 16 years at Menlo College including three as head coach, a stop at College of San Mateo and three separate Spartan tenures dating back to 2012.
“Every coach or even the guys you work with is a great new learning experience and you evolve with the times,” Guidici said of his journey. “Rules have changed and you know what’s funny? The game’s not complicated. People are.”
Guidici continued, “We make this thing harder than it’s supposed to be, but at the end of the day you’re working with 18-to-23-year-old kids who need guidance. And these kids need us, especially in today’s world. Some come from one-parent homes, some raised by grandparents or aunts or uncles. They need guidance.”
The Spartan chapters are the ones worth rereading. Guidici’s 2012 unit set a school record for kick-scoring points while posting the program’s best single-season field goal percentage. The 2013 team was the co-national leader with seven blocked kicks, three of them in one game against San Diego State. Then at Stanford from 2023 to 2025 he helped develop Joshua Karty into a PFF All-American and a sixth-round pick of the Rams while Karty and Emmet Kenney both climbed into the top 10 in program history in field goal accuracy.
That’s the technical case. The human case is simpler.
Ask around the building or anyone he knew over the years and the description never changes: patient, prepared, generous with his time and genuinely invested. Specialists live alone with their failures in a way no other position does. Guidici’s gift is making that lonely job feel less lonely, which is precisely the medicine this room needs.
For Guidici, the medicine works because the patient never really changes.
“It’s the same kid, just insert the name, whether it was Bill Walsh or Pop Warner in the ’30s, to Dave Chaney, to Gerald Willhite, to Jeff Garcia, to Tyler Ervin, to today’s Jabari Bates,” said Guidici. “The kid’s gritty. He loves to compete. No game is too big. That’s all of what I love about being back here.”
What went wrong in 2025
The autopsy is short. Denis Lynch went 8 of 16 and is gone. Mathias Brown went 4 of 7 in relief and returns. The Spartans also surrendered a kickoff return touchdown and generated almost nothing in the return game themselves, managing just eight punt returns for 57 yards all season.
The one bright spot wore number 49. Trent Carrizosa averaged 45.6 yards per punt with a 40.4 net and dropped 14 inside the 20. The San Jose native quietly put together one of the better punting seasons in the conference while everything around him wobbled.
Guidici, it turns out, has known the Carrizosa family since Trent’s brother Michael was punting at Palma High in Salinas, California.
“Trent’s been awesome. If his ball location and his hang time and distance keep up and his ratio works out, he’s really got a chance to be an NFL player.”
So does Guidici expect the woes to vanish because he walked in the door? Guidici cracks up at the premise.
“Those are big shoes,” said Guidici. “Players make coaches look like they know what they’re doing or not know what they’re doing.”
“After the things that happened last year, it was just unfortunate. All I’m going to bring is positive energy and instruction. I don’t have some secret sauce that’s going to make them play harder or compete harder. I just want them to play for each other. That’s what I keep banging home.”
The Sinatra swing
The answer to the kicking problem might have already announced itself in April. The spring scrimmage ended with transfer kicker Trajan Sinatra drilling a 54-yard field goal, a poetic closer for a team that was a few made kicks from a bowl game last year.
“Trajan had a great spring and capped it off on that very last play,” said Guidici. “I’m telling you, we were all holding onto it, because that was a great way to end the spring.”
Nothing about Sinatra’s arrival was accidental.
Niumatalolo called Sinatra the staff’s No. 1 priority in the portal and praised his consistency across all 15 spring practices. The junior is a San Jose kid out of Silver Creek High who took the long road home through Foothill College and Idaho State, where he proved himself enough that the preseason magazines noticed. Phil Steele put him on the second-team All-Mountain West squad next to Carrizosa, giving the Spartans the rare distinction of two preseason all-conference specialists on a unit that was a punchline eight months ago.
Guidici already has a frame of reference for what he’s working with and it comes straight from the program’s own record book.
“Trajan, compared to other guys I’ve had here, he’s like an Austin Lopez or a Matt Mercurio,” said Guidici. “Those were two guys that didn’t have big boomer legs, but they were accurate legs inside of 50. Even Trajan will tell me if he thinks it’s too far, or he’ll go, ‘Hey, I can hit this one.’ All three kids have that same cool, calm confidence about them.”
The expectations that come with that recognition are real and Sinatra hasn’t blinked yet. Guidici built Joshua Karty from raw leg to All-American at Stanford. Now he inherits a kicker with good range, hometown stakes and something to prove. That pairing is the whole bet.
The projected depth chart
Placekicker: Sinatra is the clear favorite after his spring showing and preseason recognition. Mathias Brown (Jr) keeps kickoff duties; booming 24 touchbacks on 57 kickoffs and stays ready as the field goal insurance. Joey Fernandez (Jr, K/P) from Monterey Peninsula College is the wild card who could factor at either spot.
Punter: Trent Carrizosa (RS Sr). Entrenched. Also the likely holder. Fernandez backs him up.
Long snapper: Dylan Aguilera (RS Sr) via Lafayette College, with Sam Cowart (So) behind him.
Returners: Wide open and Guidici isn’t pretending otherwise.
“On the return thing, I honestly have no idea yet until fall,” said Guidici. “Coach Ken had us concentrate on getting two things done during spring camp: make field goals and punt well. That’s what he mandated and that’s what we did. We had returners catching balls, but we didn’t put any return stuff in. These new kids that came in in the summer changed things dramatically, but yes, there’s a couple kids in there who are going to give us a shot.”
Jabari Bates is the only back with return reps, but is also coming back from injury, while speed options like Jase Nix, Dominique McKenzie and Carson Clark will get long camp looks.
The expectation and the worry
Guidici’s official title is special teams analyst, which limits his on-field coaching role but not his influence on scheme, preparation and the mental rebuild of a kicking room that lost its nerve.
The worry now isn’t who kicks.
It’s whether a junior college and FCS product carrying preseason all-conference expectations holds up when the first meaningful attempt comes in front of 70,000 at USC on August 29th. Spring legs and September legs are different animals and the rebuilt return game is still full of question marks.
Guidici’s answer to the USC question is the closest thing he has to a philosophy.
“The same as if the game was at our place against an Idaho or a Cal Poly,” said Guidici on kicking at the Coliseum. “The field’s 100 yards. The goal posts are the same height and width. You just don’t hear the noise. Just go one-for-one.”
“My thing with the specialists, snappers, punters, kickers; we just want to go one-for-one. I don’t say 100 percent or eight of nine. Just go one-for-one right now. And at the end of the day, how many times did you go one-for-one?”
That extends to the entire operation, made or missed.
“Even if it goes through, they all have to check in with each other. ‘Hey, that was good.’ ‘Hey, the ball was tilted too much.’ ‘Hey, the snap was a little behind me.’ Those guys have to communicate during the whole game. If something is off and one person doesn’t communicate it, that’s your fault for not communicating.”
On game days, Guidici lets the players flow.
“I stay out of their way and let them concentrate on what they need to think about,” said Guidici. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, field goal alert’ or ‘Hey, punt alert’ and those guys are locked into their zone. They know what they need to do.”
As for the big stage at USC itself, Guidici points to the program’s passport.
“We’ve played at Auburn twice. We beat Arkansas at Arkansas. We’ve been at Texas, at Utah, at BYU. They went to Texas again last year and competed their butts off. Played Stanford and had a chance to win that thing at the end. My point being, our kids don’t back down from anything. They actually savor it.”
The overall expectation should still be one of significant improvement. Get this group to merely average 72 percent on field goals and the Spartans pocket roughly 20 points they gave away last year. With Sinatra’s range, Carrizosa flipping fields and Guidici connecting the dots, that number should be conservative.
It’s the whole ballgame. And nobody in the building knows that better than the guy who keeps coming back to fix it.
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