Aggie agony: Blown out in return to football
It took almost a year and a half to get New Mexico State’s football team back onto the field Sunday (Feb. 21). It took the Aggies’ opponent just 24 seconds to put them in a hole they couldn’t climb out of.
NMSU opened its two-game spring exhibition season with a 43-17 loss to Tarleton State at the Sun Bowl.
An NCAA Division II powerhouse moving up to the Football Championship Subdivision next season, Tarleton State took the opening kickoff and scored on 66-yard touchdown run on the game’s second snap.
The Texans struck for another touchdown just three minutes later, setting the stage for a blowout. Their defense recorded a safety in the first half and forced six NMSU punts before halftime.
The Aggies’ lone bright spot was a 94-yard kickoff return for a touchdown by Juwan Price immediately after Tarleton State built a 14-0 lead.
The Texans led 33-7 at halftime, holding the Aggies to just 55 yards and three first downs in a first half that saw NMSU commit 10 penalties for more than 100 yards.
The Aggies managed to score 10 points on two sustained offensive drives in the third and fourth quarters, but the game was out of hand.
NMSU will get two weeks to prepare for its March 7 game against Dixie State at the Sun Bowl.
Hall of Fame
New Mexico State will induct four new members to its Athletics Hall of Fame this year. Among them is former men’s basketball coach Neil McCarthy who, ironically, was removed as Aggies head coach in 1997 and reassigned to an administrative role he subsequently rejected. The school cited his lack of academic commitment, having graduated fewer players (nine) than the number of years he helmed the program (12).
There’s no denying that McCarthy was a force. His teams won a pair of regular-season championships in the Big West and averaged 24.7 wins in a six-year period between 1989-95. The Aggies reached the postseason seven straight seasons and made five consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament.
His 1991-92 team reached the Sweet 16 as a 12 seed. Lobos fans will remember that one; the West Regionals were held in The Pit and it was the downstate rival that was welcomed as the hometown team. NMSU was beaten by No. 1 seed UCLA, but the most memorable thing from that weekend was the infamous “game face” news conference that became one of thenIndiana coach Bob Knight’s most famous quotes.
Look it up on YouTube. In the annals of postgame media moments in The Pit, it ranks right up there with anything Jim Valvano said after N.C. State’s championship run a decade before.
Knight’s Hoosiers would beat UCLA two days later to reach the Final Four.
Clickbait
The Athletic knows how to clickbait.
Aside from solid sports reporting and in-depth features, the paywall site posts the occasional piece that tempts you, casual reader, with catchy headlines that have you reaching for your debit card and paying the monthly fee.
A story posted Feb. 9 did just that. It posed the question: Which college has the best combination of football and men’s and women’s hoops coaches? Like most clickbait stories, the headline was better than the theme because, in this case, it wasn’t a deep dive into the 340-something schools out there, ranking each from 1 to infinity.
Instead it was a sampling of each writer’s pick for the top school of their choice. Interesting, but still. It would have been fun to see how far down the list New Mexico and New Mexico State would have been.
A local angle was still there, though. Staff writer Brian Hamilton picked Oregon, whose basketball coaches include Eastern New Mexico grad Dana Altman (Ducks men) and former Lobos 3-point specialist Kelly Graves (Ducks women). Altman was a Greyhounds guard for the 1978-79 and 1979-80 seasons, while Graves still ranks fifth all-time in UNM history in 3-point accuracy.
Baseball
The UNM baseball team opened its season over the weekend in Surprise, Arizona. In fact, they’re still there, having played Oregon State on Saturday (Feb. 20) and again Monday (Feb. 22), bookending things with Friday’s Feb. 19 opener against Gonzaga and a game against Kansas State on Sunday (Feb. 21).
The Lobos have put a memorial patch on each sleeve of game jerseys to honor two men whose recent passing hit the program on a personal level. New Mexico businessmen R.D. Hubbard and Johnny Cope both passed away in 2020 and the team is paying tribute by wearing black circular patches with their initials in white lettering.
Cope was raised in Hobbs and made a small fortune in the oil industry in the southeast part of the state. It was there that he forged a long-lasting friendship with Ray Birmingham, then the baseball coach at New Mexico Junior College and the UNM current coach.
Hubbard and his wife donated money to build the UNM baseball clubhouse at Santa Ana Star Field, a building that bears his name.