Post by panammaniac on Nov 30, 2022 12:14:51 GMT -8
I have to give some props to my alma mater here. Over the past 50-60 years, NMSU has consistently had one of the worst football programs in D-I/FBS. We went to a bowl game in 2017 and won that game to finish 7-6 on the season, but then found ourselves without a conference home and had to play a schedule full of body bag games just to survive. Zero chance of any bowl games during that span and right back to losing ways. Coach Doug Martin was canned at the end of last season - the same coach who got the program to its first bowl game in over 50 years. Over 9 seasons at NMSU he complied a record of 25-74. Martin literally skipped town moments after the clock ran out on his final game. He didn't attend the post game presser and didn't even join his seniors on the field for Senior Day festivities.
Enter Coach Jerry Kill, a renowned turnaround guy. He took over the program after the departure of Doug Martin a day after his last game of the season. Coach Martin was a lame duck and knew his contract almost certainly wouldn't be renewed, so he did literally nothing for recruiting. Coach Kill was on campus a day after the last football season ended. At that time there had been zero recruiting visits, the team was in a shambles, and quite a few entered the transfer portal after Martin's dismissal. It's very unusual for a D-I school to let a coach continue in a lame duck year for that reason, but with the program still not having a conference at that point they had no budget to buy him out. Kill had to rely 100% on whatever he had left, plus whatever he could scrape up from the transfer portal. The first thing he did when he was signed was demand that a certain chunk of his salary be given back to the program so that he could hire an actual qualified OC.
In his first year, with a program full of leftovers, he put up a 5-6 record, with the game in Las Cruces against SJSU cancelled. They have managed to schedule one more game for this Saturday, but it is against Valparaiso who is an FCS school. They will beat them easily and finish 6-6. They could have and should have beaten Nevada in the first game of the season, except they had about a 7 minute lapse in the third quarter where they just played bad football and turned it over a few times. They had a last minute drive against UTEP fall just short, so that was another near miss. They had one home game that they were heavily favored to win against Florida International, but the team just played bad football that night and coughed that one up. Coach Kill chewed their asses out and they never failed to show up like that again. Their last game was at Liberty. They were a 24 point underdog that game and ended up destroying them 49-14. They have applied for an NCAA waiver to get into a bowl game at 5-6 because of the canceled SJSU game and not being able to find an available FBS opponent to play this weekend. There's a decent chance they would have beaten SJSU.
So at the end of the day, a 6-6 team that was very, very close to being a 9-3 team, all with a first year coach playing with practically zero of his own recruits. And 3 of the wins were against MWC school, with darn near a 4th one and a possible 5th one had the SJSU game not been canceled. This would have been a middle of the pack team in the MWC this year. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround.
Our basketball is going to have somewhat of a down year. New coach and almost entirely new roster, but they will rebound strongly and be back to their normal level of competitiveness in a year or two. And they won't suck this year - they will still be up towards the top of the WAC (and believe it or not, the WAC could be a 2-bid conference this year. It's a lot stronger than most people think).
I really believe that once the next round of conference musical chairs settles down, NMSU will end up in the MWC, possibly with SDSU still around and possibly not. We are a fit competitively, geographically, and culturally. Our football has always been a black eye, but I think a couple years of Coach Kill will have them consistently competitive. We will see how it all shakes out.
Enter Coach Jerry Kill, a renowned turnaround guy. He took over the program after the departure of Doug Martin a day after his last game of the season. Coach Martin was a lame duck and knew his contract almost certainly wouldn't be renewed, so he did literally nothing for recruiting. Coach Kill was on campus a day after the last football season ended. At that time there had been zero recruiting visits, the team was in a shambles, and quite a few entered the transfer portal after Martin's dismissal. It's very unusual for a D-I school to let a coach continue in a lame duck year for that reason, but with the program still not having a conference at that point they had no budget to buy him out. Kill had to rely 100% on whatever he had left, plus whatever he could scrape up from the transfer portal. The first thing he did when he was signed was demand that a certain chunk of his salary be given back to the program so that he could hire an actual qualified OC.
In his first year, with a program full of leftovers, he put up a 5-6 record, with the game in Las Cruces against SJSU cancelled. They have managed to schedule one more game for this Saturday, but it is against Valparaiso who is an FCS school. They will beat them easily and finish 6-6. They could have and should have beaten Nevada in the first game of the season, except they had about a 7 minute lapse in the third quarter where they just played bad football and turned it over a few times. They had a last minute drive against UTEP fall just short, so that was another near miss. They had one home game that they were heavily favored to win against Florida International, but the team just played bad football that night and coughed that one up. Coach Kill chewed their asses out and they never failed to show up like that again. Their last game was at Liberty. They were a 24 point underdog that game and ended up destroying them 49-14. They have applied for an NCAA waiver to get into a bowl game at 5-6 because of the canceled SJSU game and not being able to find an available FBS opponent to play this weekend. There's a decent chance they would have beaten SJSU.
So at the end of the day, a 6-6 team that was very, very close to being a 9-3 team, all with a first year coach playing with practically zero of his own recruits. And 3 of the wins were against MWC school, with darn near a 4th one and a possible 5th one had the SJSU game not been canceled. This would have been a middle of the pack team in the MWC this year. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround.
Our basketball is going to have somewhat of a down year. New coach and almost entirely new roster, but they will rebound strongly and be back to their normal level of competitiveness in a year or two. And they won't suck this year - they will still be up towards the top of the WAC (and believe it or not, the WAC could be a 2-bid conference this year. It's a lot stronger than most people think).
I really believe that once the next round of conference musical chairs settles down, NMSU will end up in the MWC, possibly with SDSU still around and possibly not. We are a fit competitively, geographically, and culturally. Our football has always been a black eye, but I think a couple years of Coach Kill will have them consistently competitive. We will see how it all shakes out.
