Bronco Mendenhall's second act begins at New Mexico
After two years away from the sport, he's back in the game with the downtrodden Lobos.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
Following the 2018 season, Fernando Alonso retired from Formula 1.
It wasn’t a move that particularly surprised anyone. The two-time world champion was still clearly capable of elite performance, but the previous decade seemed to have had a personal vendetta against him—first with a Ferrari that was just barely bad enough that Alonso could only drag it to three second-place finishes in the championship, then a move to McLaren immediately precipitating the storied team’s worst era in decades. He’d also turned 37 that year; if his level of skill hadn’t already started to dip, it surely would soon.
A curious footnote in the decision, though: Alonso made a point of the fact that he was not retiring for good. He just wanted out of the current situation at McLaren (fair enough), but he seemed to fully believe he’d be back in F1 after his so-called sabbatical. As one year turned to two and the former titan approached his 40th birthday, it become obvious that this wasn’t happening. Alonso had moved on, investing his efforts in IndyCar and endurance racing.
Then, out of nowhere, he came back. After two years out of the sport, and at an age far older than almost anybody has ever made a comeback at, Alonso returned to F1. He immediately found results, and miraculously, they got better with time. Judging by points and championship placements, last season was his best in a decade, and he’s still going strong today; now 42, he qualified an impressive sixth at the Bahrain Grand Prix just last week.
Now, why do I bring this up in an article about a New Mexico football coach?
As it turns out, Alonso makes an oddly fitting comparison for Bronco Mendenhall. The Lobos’ new top man had similarly at the highest level of college football since the early 2000s, and like Alonso, he chose to step away amid a lull at Virginia due to personal dissatisfaction with the sport. Like Alonso, he made sure to clarify that he wasn’t retiring, and like Alonso, it didn’t seem fully believable. He’s a well-regarded coach, sure, but it’s hard to take multiple years off from the sport and find a job at the age of 57.
It’s a statement about how excellent Mendenhall’s career has been that, ultimately, his age and recent time away proved no obstacle when he decided to return this offseason. In seventeen years at BYU and Virginia, his teams finished under .500 just twice (years one and two at UVA) and won nine or more games on seven occasions. His tenure with the Cougars carried them through a transition to independence and is arguably the primary reason that program is now in a power conference; his tenure with the Cavaliers led to their first New Year’s Six bowl since 1996, a four-game winning streak in the South’s Oldest Rivalry after seven straight defeats, and a win over Virginia Tech for the first time since 2003.
The biggest point of criticism against Mendenhall is that the highs haven’t been all that high; he hasn’t had a team finish in the top 25 since 2009, although the 2011 BYU team definitely should’ve been ranked and the 2019 Virginia team had a pretty good argument too. But under the circumstances in which he coached those programs, a .500 floor and a nine-win ceiling is impressive stuff.
New Mexico, certainly, would take those results in a heartbeat. The Lobos have had a nine-win ceiling for the past 40 years anyway, and Mendenhall is certainly capable of reaching it more frequently than three times in four decades. Right?
Well…I think very highly of Mendenhall, and if anybody can get UNM off the ground, it’s him. But this is a hard job to find stability at—there’s a reason they sought out one of the most reliably solid coaches in the sport—and while the highs of their success have been strong, they’ve been difficult to replicate. When Rocky Long coached the Lobos in the late 1990s and the 2000s, it took him a full decade to replicate Dennis Franchione’s 1997 campaign and lead them to a 9-4 finish. Three years later he was the head coach at fellow MWC team San Diego State…where he went 9-4 in his second season, then went on to double-digit wins in four of the next seven years.
It’s not easy to win here, sure. But lots of G5 programs are like that, and many can’t point to seasons as good as the peaks UNM has enjoyed in modern history. Turning that success into a standard, though, has proven unbelievably difficult. More than the simple fact that he’s a great, almost universally admired coach, Bronco Mendenhall’s ability to do exactly that is what makes him the perfect leader for New Mexico as they try to overcome their history and establish themselves as a consistent contender in the Mountain West.
The Last Five Years
The Lobos never really built much momentum in four seasons under Danny Gonzales; their five-year peak here consists of a 2-0 start with wins over Houston Baptist and New Mexico State, right before finishing 1-9 that season. New Mexico has been firmly mired in the bottom 25 since that high early in 2021—first because of an utterly incapable offense (130th in PPG in ‘21 and ‘22), then when the offense soared to the FBS average, because of an equally incapable defense (126th in PPG in ‘23).
New Mexico ranks 123rd in returning production going into 2024, so I wouldn’t expect much in Mendenhall’s first season. The good news is that the defense truly has nowhere to go but up; the bad news is that the offense was genuinely not that bad last year, averaging a respectable 27.2 points per game, and only three teams lose more than UNM on that side of the ball. Defense was Mendenhall’s specialty as an assistant (including during his 1998-2002 stint in Albuquerque), so it shouldn’t stay that bad for too long.
The Next Five Years
Barring disaster, or a P5 program swooping in to snap up Mendenhall, it’s hard to see New Mexico in such a bad place five years from now. There’s a lot that can be said about how difficult it’s been for even good coaches to win here, but college football isn’t the same as it was when Franchione and Long led the Lobos. It’s broadly become easier to build a program in the G5—less because of NIL or the transfer portal, as some would suggest, and more because almost every FBS team feels pressure to invest in competitive facilities and resources.
New Mexico is no exception. As recently as this week, the university sought state funds for the football stadium, indoor practice field, and main athletic facility. Mendenhall, too, represents an investment; his base salary is $1.2 million, nearly double the $700,000 in Gonzales’s contract. UNM is never going to have investment on the level of programs like UNLV or CSU, but running a program with 20th-century facilities is a much bigger albatross than simply lagging a step behind conference rivals in more minor perks.
If they can keep putting the money in, there’s no reason Mendenhall shouldn’t succeed. He’s one of the most trusted program-builders in college football, and New Mexico is lucky to have him at the helm. If he sticks around, it’ll be exciting to see what he can do as the second act of his coaching career gets underway at a longsuffering MWC program that, for once, can look forward to a bright future.