We still have a chance to get it right

FAST FORWARD to 2028 and University Stadium has a 45,000-fan crowd watching the national championship. Football? No, men’s soccer! You see back in 2018 the Board of Regents of the University of New Mexico elected to cut some sports to balance the budget without realizing that the board had two masters which were not accountable to them or the University community, i.e. Title IX administrators and the Mountain West Conference.

Public outcry forced the regents to reverse themselves and to reach an agreement with the conference to allow UNM to continue in the conference while agreeing to disband the football program. UNM agreed to bring soccer back to the Mountain West Conference as Futbol. Title IX administrators realized that cutting football solved most of their issues with UNM. The Board of Regents realized that although many alumni wanted to keep football they were not paying the bills and particularly the liability bills of traumatic encephalopathy — dementia from head injury — that UNM was in the 2020’s being forced to pay.

Jeremy Fishbein stayed the course and was successful in bringing a string of national championships back to UNM. One of UNM’s All-American players was a starter to the U.S. World Cup team that won the World Cup in 2026 in the United States.

Oh, and men’s and women’s skiing returned because the ski industry sued UNM for failure to allow the private-public partnership they had started. The N.M. ski Industry in 2018 was flourishing particularly because snow had returned to the Southern Rockies. UNM’s track and cross country teams’ continued success on the national stage, both men’s and women’s basketball had become exceedingly successful and the UNM Athletic Department operated in the black for the eighth consecutive year.

DR. PAUL R. DUNCAN Los Ranchos