Seeking an assist from the Lone Star State
Lobos football coach aims to make Albuquerque familiar to Texas recruits.
The road to redemption has many twists and turns, but if you’re asking Danny Gonzales for a map, you should expect it to include a few stops in the Lone Star State.
The University of New Mexico’s football coach has made no secret
Texas is as vital as any state to the Lobos’ reclamation project. Of the 44 players he has signed in the last two recruiting periods — including last week’s announcement of 20 high school recruits — 16 have come from the state to New Mexico’s right.
Nearly one-third of this year’s 104-man roster came from California,
but last week’s signing period made it clear the emphasis is gradually shifting to the east.
Even though Gonzales’ Texas census numbers are short by about 13 million, he said UNM’s future can’t be reached without getting to know the Lone Star State intimately.
“It’s a state of 16 million people, a lot of great football and it’s right next door,” he said, underestimating Texas’ 29 million residents. “Southwest Airlines flies to almost 90 percent of the cities or [those] you can get to within 45 minutes. Realistically, to be able to get those kids back and forth and to get our coaches in and out, you have to be smart in recruiting.”
Being smart starts with recognizing the benefits of Texas high schools. They’ve made “Friday night lights” a part of the football lexicon and developed hundreds of Division I recruits ready-made for the next level.
Gonzales said one of the state’s inherent advantages can also be a negative. What one sees in Texas recruits, he said, is often what you get. Their access to quality coaching, outstanding facilities and schools that emphasize football allows them to develop faster and earlier than players in most other states.
Gonzales said players elsewhere can be overlooked because their potential is harder to see when football isn’t as big as in Texas.
“They’re so well coached [in Texas] that their ceiling isn’t as high,” Gonzales said. “Now if you find really, really good players, their ceiling’s high enough.”
Places like New Mexico — which Gonzales said will always be the starting point for Lobos recruiting — doesn’t have that same luxury. Whereas hundreds of high schools in the Lone Star State have fieldhouses, weight rooms and stadiums, football is more of an activity in other places, Gonzales said.
That, he said, isn’t necessarily a good thing. Not all high school coaches in Texas are paid to teach, giving them access to the players in a way other states don’t have.
“California doesn’t have that, Arizona is 50/50 on that,” Gonzales said. “I mean, obviously here, our two schools that have been the most dominant in the state the past six years are Rio Rancho and Cleveland, and they have that Texas model. They both have fieldhouses, they both have their own stadiums. I think there’s a lot to be said of the football programs and the student-athletes that come out of those places.”
Gonzales said recruiting was harder this year. The pandemic prohibited on-campus visits and severely limited coaches’ access to recruits. Several states postponed or canceled high school football for the fall while general health guidelines make face-toface interaction difficult, if not impossible.
UNM responded by setting up a network of interactive video streams, many of which were designed for recruits to have solo visits with Lobos players. Gonzales said the purpose was to give the recruits the freedom to ask questions they would only feel comfortable posing to a fellow player, but also to give the current players the ability to weed out recruits that didn’t fit the program’s mold.
They would give the coaches feedback on who they thought would be a good fit. Ultimately, Gonzales said, the decision on whether or not to offer and sign a player came down to the position coaches and players in agreeing on who fit best.
In some ways, geography had to be considered.
“You have to understand what Albuquerque is,” Gonzales said. “Kids who are used to being at the beach and those kind of things, they struggle when they get here. If they can make it through two years, they’re going to be just fine.
“Texas kids don’t really have much of an issue coming to Albuquerque. It’s not significantly different.”
The underlying message: Be honest, be direct and sell the theme of UNM football, which is family, physical play and putting the team before all else. The family aspect was something Gonzales took literally. He invited his assistant coaches to let their wives and kids come to work and make their presence felt. That feeling was relayed to recruits.
“I thought our kids did a wonderful job there, but we’ve done a really good job building relationships with these families over Zoom [and] FaceTime,” Gonzales said. “It’s a challenge but everybody had them.”
In a lot of ways, it’s all new to the first-year coach. Last year’s early recruiting period went without a single player inked to a scholarship. Hired Dec. 17, 2019, Gonzales spent most of his first two weeks rolling around UNM’s football complex by himself, assembling a coaching staff that now includes 24-yearold running backs coach Jordan Somerville.
Somerville spent three years as a graduate assistant at Arizona State and jumped at the chance to join Gonzales. He made an immediate impact, burning up phone lines of contacts he’d made to find the best available recruits, many of them coming from Texas.
“Our footprint, the states that touch New Mexico are going to be — right after New Mexico — our priority,” Gonzales said.