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Danny Gonzales Enter Fourth Year At New Mexico
The year for improvement starts now
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Gonzales has his shot this year
The Danny Gonzales era is in its fourth year, and the Lobos are headed to College Station, Texas, to take on Texas A&M on September 2 at 5:00 in their season opener.
The Lobos will hit the road to open the 2023 season opener against SEC Texas A&M for a 1. 6 million payout to the New Mexico Lobos.
I have waited a bit before writing about this team. I have watched them for several practices to get an accurate read of where they are, a meshing of the previous players and new players.
The Lobos have added many transfers, 41 to be exact, to add to the current roster; many of them are players from other programs who should help the Lobos this year.
Some players transferred out of the Lobo program, other than a few higher profile athletes like Cody Moon (SDSU), Dion Hunter (Cincinnati), and AJ Haulcy (Houston); most transfers were not projected to impact the Lobo football team that they desperately need this year.
Welcome to the age of the transfer portal, which is more like a free agency where so many players looking for greener pastures find another home, and coaches have options of taking players who have real game experience but maybe are not playing as much as they think they deserve.
Time will eventually tell the wisdom or lack of athletes’ decisions to look for greener pastures and how it will impact the so-called Power 5 schools and mid-major programs.
There are so many factors besides football the athletes who transfer will have to deal with, everything from credits transferring or not, new culture, and whether they like the team they go to.
When Gonzales took over this program in 2019 from ASU, he used the template for building a program that proved effective for then-head coach Rocky Long.
Long was a master of taking many athletes and players that some more prominent programs often overlooked and would develop them to produce high-profile athletes who a handful went on to play in the NFL on Sundays.
Get young athletes out of high school, many who other schools overlooked, and develop them to make them bigger, faster, and stronger with the hopes of them going on to help the program succeed.
One would only have to look so far to see the perfect example: former 3A Lovington High School in New Mexico, former Lobo and Chicago Bear Brian Urlacher.
Urlacher would be the poster child for a head coach like seeing a player with potential with one scholarship offer from UNM, arrive at 6’3 215 and leave at 6’4 258 at the NFL combine and run a 4.57 40-yard dash; the rest was history.
One could look at his hire by AD Eddie Nunez on December 17, 2019, and see how much potential this coach could bring to the program that has lagged for many years.
As much as the national media puts Gonzales in the hot seat this year, this entire state, the vast majority of high school coaches, are rooting for this native son to be successful.
Gonzales was an excellent hire then, and I believe now, as the Lobos had no way of preparing for many things that would be challenging to the best of coaches.
There were so many things that one could see from an outsider looking in and see this program’s struggles: Covid, lagging attendance, talent level compared to the rest of the Mountain West, and, let’s not talk about the transfer portal and the NILS.
Truthfully, if you took an honest look at this program, COVID-19 affected them more than most teams in the MWC, with lockdowns from the Governor of New Mexico and having to move to Las Vegas for a season.
Gonzales has repeatedly said that talented players win games much more than the coaches, and this would be a marathon, not a sprint.
I agree with him if you look at players who, for one reason or another, impact the team and help elevate the rest of the talent around.
I have been blessed to be part of this program during the highs and the lows since 1999, longer if you count a kid growing up watching them.
I can tell you what made each coach like Dennis Franchione, Bob Davie, Mike Locksley, and Rocky Long, what were their strengths and weaknesses.
Anybody who knows Danny Gonzales realizes this guy is very sharp, has a memory like an elephant, and makes decisions in the program’s best interest.
Bringing in a former successful strength and conditioning coach from SDSU, Derek Baker was huge for UNM.
Getting an offensive coach with the background and success of Bryant Vincent to come to New Mexico will dramatically affect scoring points and spreading the field out against these very aggressive MWC defenses.
One can look at the Rock Long coaching tree; Danny is right up there with the best in the business as far as head coaches who were in New Mexico back in the day.
Blake Anderson, head coach of Utah State (MWC); Zach Arnett, head coach of Mississippi State (SEC); Bronco Mendenhall, former BYU Virginia Head coach; Matt Wells, former Utah State, Texas Tech, and now on staff with Brent Venables at Oklahoma.
I know each of these great coaches, and Danny Gonzales is right up there regarding knowledge of the game and being competitive.
He has yet to have the talent level at New Mexico to compete with the strong and established Mountain West Conference teams.
A good indicator of that is all the incoming freshmen or first- and second-year student-athletes that they have had to play the last few years.
Any coach in FBS knows the danger of putting players who are not as developed as upperclassman, from assignment errors, giving up big plays, just hard to win games.
So this year, after seeing the very talented transfers that were offered the ability to make an impact, the incoming hire of coach Bryant Vincent from UAB, and the fact that his quarterback Dylan Hopkins came along with him is huge for this Lobo offense.
With it as bad as the Lobo offense was last year, ranking dead last in FBS, there is nowhere to go but up for the Lobos so that it will be vastly different on the offensive side of the ball.
With the Lobos in the fourth year of this proven 3-3-5 defense that went up 50 spots under Rocky Long his first year, the Lobos should be able to compete this year for the first time since Gonzales’s hired, if truth be told.
So they will find out next week when they play in a hostile country at College Station against a nationally ranked opponent, especially defensibly.
The Aggies were ranked top 25 defense last year and could be one of the best defenses in the SEC, but the jury is still out. But we will see next week.
Its hard to game plan at practice with a scout team to mimic the speed of the game against a very talented Aggie team, so will see how the Lobo football team handles adversity and responds to it in real time.
After reading so many national publications, you read how bad this program is and will be. But unless my eyes deceive me, after watching spring and recent practices, this team will be legit this year.
They finally found a true proven Offensive Coordinator in Coach Vincent Bryant and his quarterback from UAB Dylan Hopkins, who comes into the Mountain West Conference with 25 starts, 19 wins, and wins over nationally ranked BYU 31-28 in the independence bowl in 2021
So Lobo fans should be excited about this team this year and should be an exciting team to watch with much more balance than last year.
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