When Steve Cleveland left home as a teenager for England on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he said family and friends readily understood.

Nearly 35 years later when he left Brigham Young University on another one, taking over the scandal-scarred Fresno State men's basketball team, hardly anyone did.

"My best friend, the first thing he said, was, 'What in the world are you thinking?' " Cleveland recalled.

That was nine months ago and as the 53-year old Cleveland brings the Bulldogs to the Stan Sheriff Center at 7 tonight to play the University of Hawai'i, he is still explaining what the devil made him do it.

For in a lot of minds, not to mention NCAA case files, if coaching at Fresno State wasn't quite the devil's work, it was considered in the same sweltering neighborhood. At BYU he coached in the shadow of a temple. At FSU, he coaches in the House that Tark built. And the swamp he and successor Ray Lopes left behind.

New coaches are often asked to rebuild programs. Cleveland was expected to excavate a toxic landfill and then rebuild. Remarkably, his team comes here 9-6 and, get this, with nobody awaiting bail and only one player on academic suspension.

Winning basketball games was only part of his assignment. Winning them with players who passed classes, drugs tests and fingerprint checks was the rest of it.

In Cleveland, a Fresno native who took BYU to three NCAA Tournaments without whiff of a scandal, the Bulldogs saw their "Mr. Clean." Their white knight and last-ditch hope to save a program from the possibility of the so-called NCAA "death penalty" should things go awry again.

What Cleveland saw in the Bulldogs, however, took a little longer to ascertain. There was a hefty salary and retirement package, to be sure. There was a return "home" to where he had sold programs and sodas at Bulldog games as a kid.

But there was also, as Cleveland calls his mission: "Changing the culture, from the basketball culture to the academic culture to the accountability."

All of which he has undertaken at a school that is barred from the upcoming postseason and coming off one of the lowest academic performance ratings in the nation.

The more he looked at the situation, Cleveland said, the more "I had a real strong feeling that this is what I was supposed to do even though it wasn't going to be easy."

In the midst of a 4-1 start and a long, challenging coast-to-coast road trip, "when I got in front of the team after Buffalo had kicked us around and looked at those players who had given everything they had, I realized this is where I'm supposed to be," Cleveland said.

"That was probably the first time that I really knew that this is where I'm supposed to be. I know this is where I belong. Now we just have to go out and get it done."

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.