The Athletics Director, a brusque, somewhat likeable Ohio State alum, had a vision when he accepted the UNM position.
In not so many words, he spelled it out. It was one of high expectations, built on equal parts academia and athletics, a branded Midwest, Big 10 mentality brought into the heart of the Southwest and the Mountain West.
Four years later, after an array of mostly successful coaching changes, the green-lighting of the house of horrors known as The Pit renovations, a vote of no-confidence by GPSA, and a bungled investigation into a physical altercation, the fabric of UNM’s identity is still ruffled, if unsown.
The culture of UNM Athletics has steadily and discreetly morphed in the four years I’ve covered sports at the University. With culture change comes the accompanying culture shock, a dystopic feeling of whether to nostalgically cling to the past and tradition or to embrace the opaque, undetermined future.
What does UNM Athletics want its identity to be? UNM the flagship university, or The University of New Mexico, a mid-major in search of national recognition and that emphatically elitist designation typically reserved for The Ohio State Universities of the world?
This is the University’s dilemma.
Welcome to Loboland, a static land of unachieved promise and overly high expectations, where everything isn’t always cherry, but there are silver linings. It’s a place filled with turbulence and triumph, glory and guilt, wins and losses — though if we’re talking football, more losses, and lawsuits, than anything else.
To be sure, UNM Athletics are ever-shifting, like the tectonic plates that lie below the San Andreas fault.
Coaches fail, flounder and succeed, only to repeat the process.
This is New Mexico, where the coaches pull no punches, where players are hailed for their game-day heroics and reviled for their off-the-field shortcomings — the bar fights, the saggy pants and everything in between.
This is New Mexico, where the basketball coach curses out student-athletes for sn ubbing them in the handshake line and gets paid more than $1 million a year to lead the team to a couple of NIT appearances and a second-round exit in the NCAA tournament.
This is New Mexico, which has one of the best, most established track and field programs arguably in the country. This is New Mexico, simultaneously the Land of Enchantment and Disenchantment, where a baseball coach strikes some Beethovian chord with his players and they somehow muster enough resolve to make a late-season push to slip into a NCAA regional.
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This is New Mexico, where our legendary coaches get run off by unreachable, stratospheric goals or a coup of freshmen who no longer want to play basketball — where failure is met with mild disinterest and success with muted satisfaction, abandoned once there is the slightest trace of unrest.
New Mexico: it’s a place where come-and-go is always a part of the sporting vernacular.
In a landscape where coaches usually renege on their contractual obligations to pursue other professional endeavors, we tire of and fire ours — or, to be more politically correct, “mutually terminate” them. Ritchie McKay, Matt Henry, Rocky Long, Rich Alday, Don Flanagan.
Like every other institution, there is the turnstile of turnover.
Players sign with UNM and transfer out. But there are those moments where New Mexico proves its worth, proves that it doesn’t need kneepads to recruit with the powerhouses.
If for just one glorious moment, Mike Locksley showed that when in 2010 Calvin Smith, the four-star defensive tackle, spurned Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas to come to The University of New Mexico. Then there was the crushing, unsettling feeling when he transferred this year to play at a college closer to his hometown of Hialeah, Fla.
In one broad stroke, Smith underlined the dichotomy of UNM’s two identities — who it wants to be and who it is.
That’s what The Pit renovations were about — a University channeling the pro model by building luxury boxes that cater to the deep-pocketed rich. But it just underscores something more futile. As it stands, UNM is more recognized for its athletic facilities than the athletics themselves.
Every once in awhile, one of the big, cash-making sport teams turns in a respectable season. Sometimes a phenomenal one, like the 30-win UNM men’s basketball team.
But we haven’t patented a method to sustainable success. That was the Athletics Director’s vision, a vision that four years later still eludes us like a desert mirage.
This is New Mexico, a fledgling university still trying to hammer out the kinks in its budding culture.
