Lobos’ Vegas homestand to end with Fresno St.
UNM wrapping up season after seven weeks in bubble with no positive virus tests
The wagon train that took the Lobo football team from its homeland in Albuquerque to the bright lights of Las Vegas, Nev., is about to wind down.
Saturday night, UNM plays its final game of the 2020 season against Fresno State. It’s one last chance for the team to show that its biggest victory wasn’t last week’s upset of 18-point favorite Wyoming or that this woefully outmatched group of unproven players led at halftime in three of its six games.
Instead, it comes in the form of a big zero, as in no positive COVID-19 test since the Lobos uprooted operations Oct. 26 and moved into a resort in Henderson, Nev., practicing and playing their “home” games at UNLV’s Sam Boyd Stadium.
Since late summer when the pandemic began to ratchet up toward the numbers it saw by late November, Lobo football has been immune to the virus’s spread while tucked inside its bubble 570 miles to the west.
“I really, really, truly think that if college football would have [done] what the University of New Mexico did, you’d have significantly less games canceled,” first-year head coach Danny Gonzales said. “I don’t know that it would have been an issue. We did it, and our administration should get a ton of credit for what they’ve done.”
Since Nevada became UNM’s home, hundreds upon hundreds of coronavirus tests have all been negative. To date, the Lobos are believed to be the only college football team in the country without a positive test since the season started. For UNM, there was not one practice missed, not one player ruled out with the virus.
Only the season’s first game, Oct. 24 at Colorado State, was canceled when New Mexico’s public health order made it impossible for the Lobos to travel and return home without being subjected to the state’s mandatory 14-day quarantine.
Two days later, the Lobos left town for Las Vegas, which had less strict rules on larger gatherings than New Mexico.
“I miss home,” Gonzales said. “We all do. Heck, I miss my wife, my kids. The players miss their girlfriends. Coaches have families and lives at home.”
Inside University Stadium in Albuquerque is a fleet of about 60 cars, none of which has moved for the last seven weeks. They belong to the players and staff; parked inside the locked gates of the stadium until the team returns home Sunday night.
There’s no telling how many vehicle batteries will need to be jumped, how many houseplants need to be watered, how many pets, friends, family members and restaurants need to be tended to.
Once it’s over, the Lobos will be given about a month off to catch up on life. They can go home, visit with friends and do what they must. Not until mid-January are any of the players — every single one of them, even the seniors who are allowed to return next season, thanks to an NCAA extension — expected to report for offseason weight training.
Gonzales said he has drawn up no fewer than four schedules for UNM’s spring practices, each of which uses different times and days to comply with any public health order that may be in place. The schedules could commence as early as February or as late as April.
as early as February or as late as April.
Last year’s spring schedule, Gonzales’s first after taking over as head coach last December, was cut short because of the coronavirus. That mid-March moment marked the official start of what has become a bonkers road for the Lobos’ football family.
The team’s Nevada bubble was criticized and debated, some saying the estimated $70,000 a week UNM paid to have the team move was a waste of money.
Seven weeks later, Gonzales begs to differ. The athletic department will reap roughly $4 million in TV and multimedia revenue for completing a football season.
As he spoke about the last two months, Gonzales recalled an initial meeting last year when he was the defensive coordinator at Arizona State.
He met with UNM athletic director Eddie Nuñez and UNM President Garnett Stokes, one in which the school’s mission for football was laid out.
“The only way it was going to work is if we had the right support,” Gonzales said. “And it starts with President Stokes and Eddie. If myself and those two are on the same page, then you’ve got a chance to be really good. They’re proving that everything they said in that meeting when we met in Phoenix is going to happen, and they deserve a bunch of credit. I don’t think people know how much credit they deserve.”
After last week’s win ended with a celebratory ice bath and his players dancing off the field,
Gonzales was quick to give credit to his administration and to the players who pushed all their proverbial chips to the center of the table and said all-in with the crazy 2020 football plan.
That also includes the support staff that has pitched in to make it all work; from the administrators who helped put decals on the players’ helmets and student managers who jumped in at practice to provide extra bodies, to the staffers who hung signs at Sam Boyd Stadium and those who went above and beyond their job descriptions to get it done.
“I said it a bunch of times: Trainers, equipment, marketing, event management staff — everybody is doing everything,” Gonzales said.
“I have more people loading trailers after games and cleaning up and handing out meals, making sure the kids have everything they need. Laundry, and then give credit to UNLV, too. They’ve been a big help.”
By Saturday night, it will all come to and end. By Sunday evening, the signs at Sam Boyd will be removed, the painted end zones scrubbed clean, the dozens of rooms at the Hilton Lake Las Vegas Resort and Spa vacated.
Win or lose against Fresno State, the measure of success for 2020 will be measured not in wins and losses, but in how an athletic department came together to get its football team from Point A to Point B without stepping on landmines.
“That said,” Gonzales said. “I would have preferred a few more wins.”