Lobos football still trying to build brand fans will embrace
By golly, there it is! Look, kids, New Mexico definitely has a football team. Says so right here on the Mountain West Conference website and, sure enough, it’s still called the Lobos. They play a full schedule and everything.
They wear red shirts and their field even has lights and stuff.
Of course, you’d never know it if all your information was gleaned from certain media reports about the prospectus of the 12-team conference. In a story issued two weeks ago by The Associated Press chronicling the MWC’s outlook for 2017, UNM wasn’t mentioned once.
The Lobos have made two straight bowl games and are coming off a nine-win season in which they tied for the league’s Mountain Division title behind an offense that has somehow made running the ball out of the option as exciting as the run-and-shoot.
A number of key players return from 2016, including the starting quarterback and a defensive line that, for once, finally has guys big enough to resemble an actual defensive line.
Yet in this instance, the team was literally non-existent.
To be fair, UNLV wasn’t mentioned in the story, either. What’s more, the AP did circulate another story specifically about Lobos football, a piece that ran in The Washington Post and USA Today.
Still, it has to make one wonder just what New Mexico has to do to get out from its own shadow. Crack the Top 25? Beat Texas A&M on Nov. 11? Go somewhere other than the Gildan New Mexico Bowl?
The Lobos’ losing ways have made skeptics of generations of fans around these parts. Attendance has sagged despite the recent success, and every day seems to bring another promotional push from the school to get people to buy season tickets and show up on game day. Winning should make it easy, but it hasn’t.
Picked fifth in the division this season, UNM has (on paper) a team good enough to make another run at a Mountain title. The schedule isn’t exactly favorable as most of the toughest games (Boise State, Wyoming, San Diego State, A&M and Tulsa) are all on the road. To repeat last year will take some doing.
Head coach Bob Davie is optimistic and, characteristically, pragmatic when addressing the bleak forecast some might have for his team. He wants the respect and the attention but isn’t willing to pout publicly when it doesn’t come.
Let people overlook them. Let them talk about everyone else in the conference except them. None of it means losses in the standings
and Davie knows his team will have a chance to prove it over the next three months.
“Everywhere we go, people have witnessed the turnaround and we do have credibility,” he said in the story that appeared in The Post. “But it doesn’t get that much easier. It’s very competitive to get young men to come to Albuquerque, New Mexico. … We continue to build the brand. The key thing is, we get an opportunity for a few more guys to visit. If we can get him in here to visit and have the opportunity, we will open his eyes. We’re going to battle for everything we get. And that is really the mindset here.”
It may be the mindset here but it’s clearly not the case everywhere else.
Not yet.