Secondary’s Primary Goal: Get Detmer : College football: Aztecs will try to avoid a repeat of last year, when they were burned repeatedly by the BYU quarterback.

SAN DIEGO —  Detmer.

The name arrives in town about a week before the player. It kind of floats in from Utah, heads toward the host team’s campus and spends a few days haunting the locker room.

It makes coaches cringe and defensive backs squirm.

San Diego State knows this. The Aztec secondary has become a group of Siskels and Eberts after all the film they have watched featuring Brigham Young quarterback Ty Detmer.

And Aztec reviews aren’t good.

“Last year, I was embarrassed,” SDSU sophomore safety Chris Johnson said. “It was my first start, and I wanted to put on a better showing.

“This week, we’re going to play lights out. As far as the defense goes, this is going to be a different game this year. No ifs, ands or buts about it.”

What Johnson remembers most about SDSU’s 62-34 loss last year is BYU tight end Chris Smith and fullback Matt Bellini going wild, hauling in a combined 281 yards worth of passes. Smith and Bellini have moved on, but one guy remains.

Detmer.

In last season’s game, he riddled the SDSU secondary for 514 yards passing. He completed 26 of 38 passes, three for touchdowns. Two years ago, he completed 23 of 33 passes for 327 yards and three touchdowns in a 48-27 rout of the Aztecs.

And SDSU is supposed to control this guy Saturday?

“There’s probably not a better college quarterback who operates and understands the offense as well as he does,” SDSU secondary coach Ron Mims said. “We just don’t want him to get hot and execute with regularity.

“He has a very, very good knack for finding the open guy and finding him at the most opportune time for them. We just don’t want to put ourselves in situations where their open guy is their big-play guy.”

Adding to the pressure on the SDSU secondary this year is that junior Gary Taylor, SDSU’s best cornerback, aggravated a groin injury Saturday and will not be at full strength against BYU.

And, backup cornerback Zac Stokes suffered a severe concussion Saturday and his availability for BYU is uncertain.

Coach Al Luginbill, who prefers employing a three-man cornerback rotation anyway, is hoping that Taylor is well enough to be included.

So is Mims.

“We’re going to evaluate it every day until Wednesday,” Mims said. “We’ll have a better idea then.

“My gut feeling is that Gary Taylor will play some. We’ll probably get into some type of rotation and keep everyone fresh.”

They need to be fresh, because the cocked arm of one guy can be as dangerous as Al Capone’s loaded gun.

Detmer.

Aztec defensive backs say they are not scared of the prospect of facing him. Things will be different this year, they say, because they are now sure of what they need to do.

“If we work on our techniques and do what we’ve been coached, we’ll be fine,” Johnson said. “We’ll be in position to make plays.”

Still, sometimes that doesn’t even help. One thing Johnson remembers vividly from last year’s BYU encounter is Detmer “making throws the average college quarterback doesn’t make.”

Mims said the biggest problem last season was a couple of bad matchups.

“Bellini was their go-to guy, and he caught nine passes,” Mims said. “He had a nice day. We tried to match a cornerback on him and that obviously was not the thing to do.

“Their tight end had a nice day, too. They schemed it so that there were some situations we hadn’t seen.”

Of course, it wasn’t all schemes.

Much of it was Detmer.

“He puts the ball where you’re not going to get it,” Json said. “Either the receiver gets it or no one does.”

Additionally, Taylor has been impressed with the way Detmer scrambles and reads coverages.

“When he scrambles, the receivers have a tendency to extend their routes,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the Aztec defensive backs will do nothing differently this time, other than to be on the lookout for Detmer’s scrambles and to make sure they don’t lose track of the receivers during these times.

“Instead of covering our man to the end of the play, we have to cover him past the end until the whistle blows and the play is done,” Taylor said.

Assuming Taylor is healthy enough to play at least part of the game, SDSU’s cornerback rotation will probably consist of Taylor, sophomore John Louis and freshman Eric Sutton. And just in case, Luginbill is working dimeback Robert Griffith at cornerback this week, too.

Louis is a lanky, athletic guy who is still young enough to have trouble concentrating for an entire game. And he has blown a few coverages because of this.

Sutton is a true freshman from Inglewood who has started two games for SDSU and gotten significant playing time in several others.

As for the BYU offense these guys will face, Mims said it is not noticeably different from last year’s. Only Taylor and Johnson, though, played in that game.

“(BYU is) doing the same things,” Mims said. “Offensively, they’re self-sufficient. Their kids understand the offense . . . they run precise routes, and Detmer is very adept at reading coverages on the run and knowing where he has to throw the football.

“I don’t think you stop players like him. You give them the opportunity to stop themselves. You give him some illusions so he doesn’t read what he thinks he’s seeing, and hopefully he’s wrong in what he reads.”