AD looks ahead to second year
Aggies are all in on Sun Belt football
Mario Moccia replaced McKinley Boston as the New Mexico State athletics director on Jan. 5, taking over an athletic department short on revenue, unstable in conference affiliation across the board yet remarkably successful on the field of play.
Moccia sat down with the Las Cruces Sun-News to take a broad look back on his first year atop the athletic department at his alma mater and what he believes lies ahead. Here are excerpts:
LCSN: What would you consider your biggest victory or biggest accomplishment in the first year?
Moccia: From talking to some people, I sense maybe there is some enthusiasm surrounding the athletic department as a whole. When you talk about successes, our student athletes are doing great in class, we have had really good success in Year 1 with conference championships. … I am not coaching or tutoring them. When you ask holistically, maybe just a renewed interest or enthusiasm or optimism surrounding the program. … We were one of the few schools in Division I football that was not aligned with a national multimedia rights company. To have somebody as prominent as Learfield come in and guarantee significant dollars (in June, NMSU and Learfield Sports entered a seven-year multimedia rights agreement worth $7 million in guaranteed revenue), that certainly goes into the Top 5 category from an administrative standpoint.
LCSN: When do you expect a decision regarding future Sun Belt membership? Can you discuss a backup plan if your football membership is not extended?
Moccia: The athletic directors are getting together in January. There is a Sun Belt meeting in Tempe around the national championship game. It’s my understanding that sometime in March, the presidents will be together to discuss, among other things, our affiliate membership. As far as a backup plan is concerned, we have been pretty focused on staying. We want to be prudent, too. With us having two more years even if there is the worst news, we still have two more years in the Sun Belt. I think that is adequate time to do some planning. I think any pre-planning may give people the notion we would be OK. In our minds, there is no other option. That is why we have done whatever we can by televising games and doing what we can.
LCSN: Is reaching the NCAA Tournament as good as the New Mexico State men’s basketball program can do in the current college basketball landscape?
Moccia: Anyone would tell you, including (head coach Marvin Menzies), that we could win more games. We won a lot of games last year and if (guard Daniel Mullings and center Tshilidzi Nephawe) were healthy the whole nonconference season, we would have won more. I wasn’t here for that, but I just saw the impact of those guys when they were on the floor. We don’t have any seniors this year, so there will be some growing pains. To win a tournament game, the reality is 15 (seeds) beating 2 (seeds) has happened a handful of times since the inception of the tournament. It’s just very rare because you are playing an elite school. We know the only way to avoid that, because the Western Athletic Conference other members’ RPI are poor, is to schedule as well as we can in the non-conference and then win as many as we can. … I think we are scheduling some pretty good teams.
LCSN: Are there any short-term or long termplans for cost-of-attendance scholarships?
Moccia: We talk about it every day. There is no fat in our budget. Right now, there is not a pot of money that would be able to fund that. When we put together planning, we would like to talk from a legislative standpoint if there were potential resources that could be put toward cost of attendance. There are benefits of keeping your top New Mexico athletes at home. If New Mexico were to do it and we weren’t or UTEP were to do it and we weren’t, that is an unbelievable disadvantage. … More or less, all of the monies are going to the 17 sports to travel, recruit, purchase uniforms. That is what makes revenue generation incredibly important.
LCSN: Is (current women’s basketball assistant coach) Tamara Inoue going to remain as the senior women’s administrator?
Moccia: That’s to be determined. We have a tremendous relationship and even though I have a great desire to have a standalone SWA, I don’t know if our budget can absorb that right now.
LCSN: Can you discuss future facility projects, apparel contracts, for the next year?
Moccia: We have a fund in the Foundation in Advancement that can be used for specific things. We can’t use it for budget, we can’t use it for salary. We wanted to do a master plan and we would hire an architect. FNS put out a request for proposal. What we want to do is hire a firm to do a master plan. We know what our needs are. We would like to have a new track and a locker room. Soccer lights and a press box. Maybe draw a new football press box. A softball stadium to mirror what (we) did in baseball. There are specific needs that programs have. … We can put price tags to it. We can put it in front of a donor to say this is what we would like to do when funding becomes available.
… The footwear and apparel deal I would hope would be announced soon. (There were three bids as the university’s deal with adidas expires in June.) Our goal is to improve our visibility, our recruiting. The reality is can we get more stuff and can that stuff look great and attract kids? We want to be aligned with someone who wants us. … Baseball infield turf is a huge project we are moving forward on. It will be done 100 percent privately. That is a big project to complete that before the season. … We want to break the all-time attendance record for women’s basketball on Jan. 23. I think the all-time record is 4,427.