‘I’d like those kind of headaches’
Athletic director Moccia says matching Lobos is his goal
ALBUQUERQUE — Uptown problems. He wishes he had them.
Hired as New Mexico State’s athletic director nearly five years ago, Aggie alum Mario Moccia has been pushing the proverbial boulder uphill while watching the upstate Interstate 25 rivals deal with the kind of headaches his people would love to have.
The University of New Mexico has a stable conference affiliation, a growing metropolitan market of over half a million people, a deeper alumni base from which to cultivate relationships and nearly twice as much money to keep the wheels greased.
“When I drive into Albuquerque, I look at all the businesses. That’s something I wish we had; more of an economic foundation with which to market to and which to try to get alums from,” Moccia said. “But we’re New Mexico State, and we’ll try to be the best New Mexico State we can be. And I still will tell you there’s a lot of lowhanging fruit out there. We just have to find it in
our own way.”
Moccia’s small-market Aggies were in Albuquerque on Saturday for the annual Rio Grande Rivalry football game against UNM. The Aggies held tough but eventually lost 55-52 to fall to 0-4. The 107 combined points scored was the second-highest point total in the rivalry’s history.
The game had a paid attendance of 27,269, ending a 10-game streak of home crowds under 20,000. It was UNM’s largest home crowd in two years when more than 32,000 showed up for the last times the two teams met in Albuquerque.
Matching the Lobos in terms of the basics is Moccia’s goal. In the last four years, he has overseen a 300 percent increase in the Aggie Athletic Club. In those four years, however, he had his football program kicked out of the Sun Belt Conference, a league largely regarded as the most insignificant in the FBS.
The Aggies have been relegated to independent status since 2017, the second time they’ve gone without a conference affiliation the last decade. Since 2000, they’ve been in the Big West, Western Athletic and Sun Belt conferences, including two stints in the Sun Belt.
NMSU put together a presentation two years to make a bid to stay in the Sun Belt, but never got a chance to state its case. The conference completed its divorce with the Aggies football program following its Arizona Bowl victory over Utah State to cap a 7-6 season.
“To not have our day in court kind of left us with a little bitter taste in our mouth,” Moccia said. “If you don’t want us in your conference that’s fine, but we wanted to be able to present that report and never did.”
Moccia said he will likely hire a national firm to make its case in the coming months. Part of the consideration is having NMSU pooling its bid with other schools as sort of a group effort to make it more appealing. There are only six independent programs in FBS, the others being Notre Dame, Army, BYU, Liberty and Massachusetts.
“Look, I can call every AD I know to talk about this,” Moccia said. “Our chancellor and our president can call their counterparts, but to really put a package together that makes sense and have deeper discussions that put everything on the table in an organized way that makes sense, I really think we need to look at hiring a firm to help us with this. We are on the cusp of doing that.”
NMSU has a healthy relationship with the WAC in other sports but the league discontinued its sponsorship of football after the 2012 season. The same thing happened to the Aggies in 2000 when the Big West dropped football, forcing a fouryear jump to the Sun Belt from 2001-04.
“I don’t feel we’ve been blackballed,” Moccia said. “I think we’ve historically suffered from geographical disadvantages.”
Being innovative is his primary initiative.
The evolution of AggieVision has allowed for up to 40 national telecasts of NMSU sporting events on the regional Fox outlet in Arizona.
“That’s a heckuva widget to be able to talk about,” Moccia said. “Another selling point is there’s an airport that you can get to [in El Paso] in 45 minutes. I mean, you’re in a big city and it will take you that long, at least, to get to the airport. We share our DNA with El Paso, and that’s one of the biggest cities in the country, so there are a lot of positives we can put forth.”
NMSU’s annual athletics budget hovers between $18 million and $20 million, or roughly 60 percent of UNM’s. Finding ways to squeeze the most out of every penny is part of the job description in Las Cruces.
You can forgive Moccia when he makes light of the notion that the belt-tightening is even worse at UNM, a school that cut three sports last year to help manage its budget.
“Can the newspaper see that I’m laughing?” he said. “When it’s part of the road map you’re given, I’ll put it this way: I can complain in the car all that I want — and I do — but we’re going to keep going forward. We don’t have a choice. We have a really good team to manage our budget and the coaches, for the most part, accept what the limitations are. I think everyone understands we’ve been picking up every rock we can.”
That includes a multimedia rights deal with Learfield IMG College, the same entity UNM canceled its contract with in June.
Whereas UNM got a guaranteed annual payment between $4.5 million and $5 million from Learfield, NMSU gets $1 million.
“Again,” Moccia said, “the kind of problems some people have are problems I’d love to have. I’d like those kind of headaches.”