Start over: Lobos football needs a complete reboot
We’ve reached the rainbow pinwheel portion of the Lobo football season. Not just this season, really, but of the last few years.
Option A: Wait it out and hope things get better or, Option B: Yank the cord and reboot the entire system.
It’s time for the University of New Mexico to choose Option B. Push the reset button, reboot the entire program and try a different direction. New coaching staff, new marketing plan, a new initiatives in the recruiting and budget departments.
It might not — in fact, probably won’t — make things better overnight, but it’s the path the school absolutely has to take.
It goes without saying, but the fans don’t care anymore, as witnessed by a stadium that is regularly 60 percent empty. The play on the field is uninspiring and confused.
The mood around the state is nothing short of indifference.
Anyone around the team knows head coach Bob
Davie’s heart is in the right place. He cares about Lobo football and works his tail off in an attempt to put a winning product on the field, but he’s failing. College football is, at its foundation, a business of winning.
He’s not doing enough of it. At this point even he sees that things aren’t working, admitting as much in his most recent postgame press conference. The system is broken and he has lost his target audience.
Sure, he has the program setting records in the classroom. His players are making outstanding grades and staying out of trouble, doing community outreach programs that benefit people around them. By all appearances, he has good kids under his watch.
Thing is, the fans don’t care. The don’t show up on game day to point toward the field and say, “That linebacker is an art history major with a 3.7 grade point average.” They want a winner, they want a running back who can make posters out of tacklers, they want a defense that doesn’t rank as one of the nation’s worst, they want a hero at quarterback and a few players who might one day play in the NFL.
It’s not entirely Davie’s fault those things aren’t happening. Recruiting to a mid-major program hundreds of miles from the football hotbeds is an impossible, thankless task. Every coach before him and every single one in the future faces the same problem.
Davie’s contract runs through the end of the 2021 season. He’s a proud man who is admittedly a little stubborn. He wants to see this thing through. Firing him means buying out the remainder of his contract, something a cash-strapped school can’t afford.
Remember, this is an athletics program that just got done paying off former basketball coach Craig Neal; that just eliminated multiple teams to make ends meet; and is still operating without a multimedia rights agreement that was generating a guaranteed $4.5 million
under its previous partnership.
The right thing to do is have Davie step aside voluntarily, let him leave on his own terms. He deserves nothing less. Firing him would be a slap in the face to a man who literally almost gave his life to his team.
Less than two months ago he nearly died in his own locker room. At 65, he has earned more money as a coach and broadcaster to comfortably spend the next 25 years sitting on his front porch watching his grandkids and taking lavish vacations.
Stepping aside could open the door for someone like Danny Gonzales, the Arizona State assistant who grew up in Albuquerque and played and coached at UNM. Whether a man like him is a better X’s and O’s guy than Davie isn’t the point.
What Gonzales or anyone like him represents is the possibility of what could happen with a reboot.
An improvement? Debatable. A new direction and a fresh slate? Definitely.
Time to unplug.