Scotty Walden prepares to walk the tightrope at UTEP
It's a tough job, but the Miners know that's no reason to overthink the pick.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
Remember the last time UTEP won a bowl? The Miners’ new head coach, Scotty Walden, certainly doesn’t—it happened over twenty years before he was born.
That fact says a lot about this program. For one thing, it’s a testament to just how long UTEP has been plugging away at football; most historical bottom-feeders arrived in FBS sometime in the 1990s or 2000s, but they’ve been at the highest level of college football since 1935, and they’ve spent more than half a century chasing their next bowl victory, a drought longer than even the likes of ULM, FIU, and UNLV can imagine. And, of course, it tells us how deeply mired in mediocrity they’ve been—their fifty-year peak is ten wins in a terrible 1988 WAC, a 51-6 loss to the conference’s only really good team, and a 38-18 defeat in the Independence Bowl.
Just as importantly, though, it’s only true because Walden is remarkably young for an FBS coach. Many rising FCS stars who take jobs at this level have relatively short careers, but even by those standards, Walden is an outlier. At 34 years old, he’s the second-youngest HC in FBS, after only Arizona State’s Kenny Dillingham. He’s not even old enough to have been alive to see those 10-3 Miners in 1988, which means the best UTEP teams in his lifetime went 8-4.
This isn’t merely a consequence of the program finding one candidate so appealing that they decided to overlook his inexperience—though Walden does arrive with impressive bona fides from Austin Peay, where he led the Governors to their second-ever playoff appearance and was a finalist for the Eddie Robinson Award1 last season. UTEP was determined to get a fresh face with this hire, with other candidates including 32-year-old Texas Tech OC Zach Kitley and 36-year-old UNLV OC Brennan Marion.
A glance at G5 football in the surrounding region is illuminating as to why the Miners valued youth so highly. Programs in this region often live and die by comparison to their neighbors (and rivals), and UTEP is no exception. New Mexico State is the closest FBS school to El Paso by a wide margin, and the Aggies have found both success and instability with older, more seasoned coaches lately. Jerry Kill (62 years old) led them to an impressive 10-5 campaign in 2023…but due to health issues, he resigned thereafter. Tony Sanchez (50 years old), a veteran HC but not necessarily an inspiring choice given his 20-40 record at UNLV from 2015-19, is at the helm for NMSU now.
In many ways, UTEP’s approach to this hiring cycle feels like a direct, intentional contrast to their rival over the state line. After all, the Miners are replacing a nine-loss coach while the aggies replace a ten-win one; it’s valuable to have a recruiting counter against a nearby program competing for many of the same players. There’s a good chance Walden’s youth and promise, especially compared to a coach who went nowhere the last time he took a top job, will sway a handful of three-stars to the UTEP roster.
This goes deeper than just a momentary, direct comparison against New Mexico State, though. The culture of program comparison in the Texas region is less about wanting to directly beat local rivals and more about trying to determine what works and what doesn’t. In a state divided between so many competitors, resources of every kind are limited, and the lone program way out past the Pecos River is even more constrained in what they have to work with. Identifying something that can make them stand out isn’t really optional for the Miners—you could argue that they can’t win at this level unless they find a way to distinguish themselves. UTEP isn’t like many G5 programs, where investment and a talented staff can piece together enough wins to create long-term momentum. To win here, you have to be a shark: if you stop moving forward, you’ll die.
Scotty Walden is the sort of coach who welcomes that challenge. Remember, he’s arriving from Austin Peay, a program which has changed conferences seven times in the last thirty years. Walden himself has bounced around a lot: even in his playing career, he played at three different schools and played both quarterback and safety during his four college years. Since he started coaching at Sul Ross in 2012, he’s been part of five further programs (including UTEP), never staying in one place for more than four seasons. He knows what instability is like, a valuable thing to understand at a job where just one coach has won 20 total games since Bob Stull moved on after that 1988 season. And he sees the need to harness that instability and lead a turnaround with a sense of urgency, arriving in the wake of Dana Dimel’s six-year tenure that produced little but a single 7-6 season fueled by a weak schedule.
The Miners need to make moves without wasting time. They’re in an awful conference, which gives them the opportunity to start winning quickly and build the plane as they’re flying it, so to speak. But it also means they’re at rock bottom as a program, having ended up in a conference with the practical strength of an FCS league, even if it’s still FBS in name. The build to relevance will be a tough one, and at such a historically weak program in a place where it’s difficult to gain a foothold, the margin of error is punishingly slim. Walden has passed every test in his short career with flying colors thus far; he’s one of the most fascinating hires of the 2024 carousel to watch going forward, balancing on a razor’s edge as he tries to build a consistent winner at one of the most demanding jobs in football.
The Last Five Years
Sometimes, a guy is just a coordinator. Dana Dimel impressed as an OC at Kansas State in the mid-1990s, leading him to coach at Wyoming (a respectable 7-6, 8-3, and 7-4) and Houston (a disastrous 3-8, 0-11, and 5-7). Sixteen years later, Dimel was once again impressing as an OC at Kansas State, and UTEP was the team that decided his ability as a head coach might have improved. After that seven-win season in 2021, the Miners went downhill at a rapid rate, and 2023 saw them finish 3-9 with a 2-6 record in a bad CUSA. There was no point dragging things out any longer, and now Dimel can go back to doing what he does best2 while UTEP can pursue success with a guy who actually looked good at his last coaching stop.
Their immediate prospects are…well, they finished 126th in FBS last season, so take a guess. Insofar as they matter, bottom-25 returns only make matters worse, and the Miners should be expected to be bad in 2024. As ever for a CUSA team, though, opportunity abounds in the schedule—especially with non-conference games against Southern Utah and Colorado State. Throw in a selection of Sam Houston, FIU, Louisiana Tech, Middle Tennessee, Kennesaw State, and New Mexico State, and there’s probably a path to a bowl if UTEP isn’t utterly abysmal. They probably will be, and somebody’s gotta lose the games, but still.
The Next Five Years
UTEP is one of those jobs I’d consider deceptively hard. Their historical record is quite bad, it’s true, but they’ve popped up for a bowl appearance or two every five to seven years this century, with remarkable regularity that keeps them from ever staying in a really long rut. They’ve got more than enough money to compete in CUSA and (ostensibly) a strong recruiting region to work from; it’s not immediately apparent how tall a task it is to get something off the ground here.
Those occasional bowls—and the fact that only once since the 1950s has UTEP reached them in back-to-back seasons—are a hint at the problem, though. Momentary success is achievable, but this program has a very long history and a very large sample size that demonstrates how difficult it is to build something sustainable. It’s probably not a bad guess that, in their last hiring cycle, the Miners targeted Dimel because he’s been around so long and might’ve been less inclined to parlay success in El Paso into a more attractive spot elsewhere.
With Walden, they’re gambling on the opposite. He’s young, dynamic, and risky, the kind of hire that could succeed or fail spectacularly in half a dozen different ways. The Miners obviously feel that the upside is worth it, though, and I think it’s an easy idea to get behind. Who wouldn’t want an up-and-coming HC like Walden to lead the way, even if he ends up using success here as a stepping stone for future offers? As with this program as a whole, the devil’s in the details, but it’s important not to focus on them too much and miss the more obvious takeaway here. UTEP is throwing its weight behind a coach who’s done nothing but impress thus far, and it’s not hard to be convinced that he can keep it up, even at a job as tough as this.
The FCS Coach of the Year award, effectively. Surprisingly, Walden was the only 2023 finalist to take an FBS job for 2024.
Or just retire. He is 61, after all.