Mendenhall's past suggests a solid future for Lobos

Dec. 11—Yes, Bronco Mendenhall won the news conference.

But they all do that.

Rocky Long won the news conference. Bob Davie won it. Danny Gonzales won it. Mike Locksley won it big time. Remember "We may need to add another digit to the scoreboard?"

Clearly, then, winning the news conference when introduced as a new University of New Mexico head football coach does not guarantee wins on the field.

Here, though, from the past-is-prologue department, are a few things that set Mendenhall apart from any of his predecessors.

We'll start with the obvious: 17 years of experience and 135 victories as a head coach. No previous UNM head coach approaches those numbers.

But there's more, far more.

For starters: innovation.

At that introductory news conference on Thursday, Mendenhall was asked what style of offense he planned to run at UNM. It will not be, he said, an offense that opposing defensive coordinators can prepare for as this, that or the other thing.

"What if you can't name it?" He said. "Where do you start preparation-wise? I like that approach for UNM — where they don't know what they're going to see or what they're going to get."

But Mendenhall's background is on defense, so we flash back to Nov. 9, 2002.

San Diego State came to University Stadium that night with a high-powered passing attack triggered by quarterback Adam Hall. As the Aztecs' offense came to the line of scrimmage, in their offensive system at the time, Hall would get the play signaled in from head coach Tom Craft based on the defensive shell he saw from the opposition.

Not that night. Mendenhall, then the Lobos' defensive coordinator under Long, had his five defensive backs line up 10 yards off the ball in a horizontal row — like a picket fence — not declaring their coverage until the ball was snapped. Craft and Hall were left to guess what the coverage was, and they were wrong most of the time.

The Lobos won 15-8, holding SDSU to 153 yards passing (it helped that it was really windy that night) and 183 yards total offense.

Relationships:

After the 2002 season, BYU coach Gary Crowton offered Mendenhall the job as the Cougars' defensive coordinator. For Mendenhall, the move would mean coming home; his 70-something parents lived in Utah. And, no doubt, the move would mean more money.

Yet, Mendenhall agonized. Leaving UNM would mean leaving the players with whom he'd forged a powerful bond.

"He was so special when he was with us," former UNM linebacker Nick Speegle told KRQE-TV on Thursday. "He made all of us want to bust our butt as hard as we could, every single play. We would have run through walls for that guy, if we could."

Finally, as Mendenhall pondered, Long offered a public ultimatum: make up your mind, or I'll fire you and make up your mind for you.

It didn't come to that. Mendenhall left for BYU.

After the 2004 season, Crowton resigned as Cougars head coach after a third consecutive losing season. It was by no means a given that Mendenhall would get the job.

Mark Paulsen, then the strength and conditioning coach at UNM, strongly believed Mendenhall was the right man the Cougars — felt so strongly, in fact, that he called then-BYU athletic director Val Hale and said so.

"I told (Hale), Paulsen told the Journal, "'I'm sure you've done your own research, but I have never been around a coach I have more respect for than Bronco Mendenhall.'"

That conversation with Paulsen took place in 2010, when Mendenhall brought the Cougars to Albuquerque to play UTEP in the New Mexico Bowl.

Paulsen's opinion had not changed in the ensuing years.

"I've never met anybody like him," Paulsen said. "I've been around a lot of coaches in 30 years, and he's unique."

Mendenhall indeed is unique in his own drummer that he marches to. This is a man with interests outside of coaching: horseback riding, fishing, surfing, above all his family.

He ended his highly successful tenure at BYU in 2015 to take over a Virginia program that had gone to one bowl game in the previous eight years. After taking the Cavaliers to three bowl games in his six years there, he walked away from coaching. Now, he's back.

Might he do the same or something similar at UNM — leave for another job, take another break, leave coaching for good? You never know.

Yet, in the here and now, Mendenhall, 57, brings to UNM a background and a foundation that no past Lobo football coaching hire has matched.

So, here we go.