Heavy favorite Bulldogs need early rally, late stand
ALBUQUERQUE — Jordan Mims ran for 165 yards and two touchdown and caught five passes for 71 yards and another score to help Fresno State beat UTEP 31-24 on Saturday in the New Mexico Bowl.
Fresno State (10-3) won the bowl game for the first time in three tries.
Jake Haener was 26 of 41 for 286 yards and a touchdown. His status had been somewhat in doubt when he briefly entered the transfer portal after coach Kalen DeBoer took the job at Washington.
Mims’ 22-yard catch and run late in third quarter gave the Bulldogs a 26-17 lead. But it was setting the tone with the ground game that was important, he said.
“The offensive line, we preached running the ball hard all this week,” Mims said. “Even though they have a good defense, it’s all about us and what we do and I think we showed that [Saturday] by running the ball.”
Taking advantage of Mims was a key part of the game plan, said Bulldogs interim head coach Lee Marks.
“We knew we were going to be able to rely on Jordan,” he said. “To be honest, he’s such a good player. One cut, get vertical, just downhill. He told me coach, ‘I’m not going to get tired. And he did not. That’s tremendous for him.’ ”
The Miners (7-6) pulled to 26-24 early in the fourth quarter on Calvin Brownholtz’s 51-yard touchdown pass to Trent Thompson.
But Fresno State got a field goal, followed by a UTEP safety, before the Bulldogs ran out the clock.
UTEP’s Gavin Hardison threw for 252 yards and a touchdown. But one play after completing a 27-yard pass on fourth and five, Hardison fumbled at the end of a 10-yard scramble and the Miners never saw the ball again.
“Fresno has a really good
can happen to change that in the future? I mean, in my mind that’s not a concern to me. Is anything 100 percent? I guess not. As far as I’m concerned, this game’s moving forward and this was a big step, a big positive step moving forward.”
The decision whether to return for 2022 will be made later, but there’s money to be made, for sure. The payout for this year’s game is reported to be $1.05 million, a bounty to be shared by the teams and the conferences they represent.
Getting the fans back helps, Siembieda said, but there are other concerns out there.
“The hard sell is not our sponsors and our partners,” Siembieda said. “Well over 90 percent of our stakeholders who were with us before the pandemic are with us now, and we’ve got a good number of new partners [who] have come on since. In fact, the enthusiasm, the passion from our stakeholders over the past month is really what got me to the finish line because it convinced me that the people who are invested in this thing really want to make sure that this thing comes back.”
The message to the teams? Have fun.
In that regard, nothing has changed for the New Mexico Bowl’s pomp and circumstance in the days leading into the game. Both teams and their fans are treated to a week’s worth of events designed to put Albuquerque and the state in a positive light. There’s cookouts and pep rallies, video games and bowling nights.
There was a time when only the country’s best teams got invited to a bowl. The rapid expansion of postseason games began in the 1990s and continued well into the last quarter century, including the birth of the New Mexico Bowl in 2006.
It was designed to pit a team from the Mountain West against regional and national competition. The MWC has had nine different schools make at least one appearance with the league going 11-5 since its inception.
“It’s great to be in a bowl because it’s a reward,” said hall of fame running back Eric Dickerson, the New Mexico Bowl’s keynote speaker this year. “Back when I played you had to win, like, nine or 10 games and sometimes you still wouldn’t get to a bowl. That’s the difference these days, but it’s the payoff for what you did.”
That the New Mexico has had the game this long is of no surprise to Siembieda. A former TV sports anchor at KOAT-TV and a popular talk radio host on KNML-AM, he has been the bowl’s director since Day One.
“I might’ve been the only one stupid enough to think we were going to be here long haul; I thought this ballgame had a future here,” he said. “There’s nobody who wants to sell out this game more than I do, but I also know what’s going on. The pandemic has impacted all of us, and the way I see it, [Saturday] was really encouraging because in some respects it’s a rebound, like we were starting all over again.”
Of course, the dream matchup always involves the University of New Mexico. The Lobos have played in the game four times. Coincidentally, four of the bowl’s top five crowds have come with UNM involved. The lone exception was the 2010 matchup between UTEP and BYU.
While Saturday’s matchup didn’t exactly inspire sports fans from around town to forsake the threat of the coronavirus — not to mention holiday shopping and a gametime temperature of 35 degrees — to buy a ticket and watch what was actually a pretty entertaining game, it did show that the New Mexico Bowl is a lot more resilient that some people probably care to admit.
Siembieda said there’s no way to know what role a possible expansion of the College Football Playoff will have on lower-tier bowls like his but did say these games do serve a valuable purpose.
“Teams like these, they deserve a place to play, and they’re certainly not going to get it in an expanded playoff,” he said. “I’m doing everything I can to grow this thing, to promote New Mexico and keep this game alive. It’s a process, but we’re on the right path.”
GAME NOTES
Fresno State completed a 10-win season despite losing its head coach to Washington. The team’s interim coach, Lee Marks, is rumored to soon be joining Kalen DeBoer in Seattle. Marks was DeBoer’s running backs coach and run game coordinator this past season . ... UTEP had its 54-year run without a bowl victory continue at least another 12 months. The Miners (7-6) are now 0-3 in New Mexico Bowl appearances. They haven’t won a postseason game since the 1967 Sun Bowl, a 14-7 win over Ole Miss.