Tony Sanchez and New Mexico State are all potential, and that's okay

The way forward for the Aggies and their new coach may not be entirely clear, but it's brimming with possibility.

Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.

New Mexico State is in a place that many G5 programs with surges of sudden success find themselves in, even if it’s not for the usual reason. Jerry Kill, the architect of the Aggies’ ascent to a 10-5 CUSA debut last year, is gone after just two years at the helm, on account of exhaustion from the ever more demanding task of being a college football HC rather than being poached by a P5 program. The circumstances under which NMSU is making a hire in the hopes of continuing their ascendancy are unusual, but the resulting situation itself is quite typical.

Kill’s decision to step down isn’t really the interesting thing here, at least for New Mexico State. What’s far more fascinating is the conundrum faced by possibly the worst program in the sport’s history, which has just realized glory beyond its wildest dreams and now has to figure out how they can maintain that momentum. That in itself isn’t too wild (San José State is in a similar position after Brent Brennan’s departure), and the historical odds against NMSU have a few comparisons (ULM is an equally impossible job)—but, obviously, the combination of such a historically challenged program and such soaring peaks in the last couple seasons is a lot rarer.

To put it more simply: the Aggies have just made more bowls in Kill’s two seasons than they did in the preceding sixty. How do you make a hire in a situation like that?

The move they made was…well, not very encouraging, on the face of it. Tony Sanchez is many things to New Mexico State—an alum and former star receiver, a member of Kill’s offensive staff for the last two seasons—but his name is most recognizable from his miserable five-year tenure at UNLV. That’s likewise a hard job to win at even at the best of times, but Sanchez’s 20-40 tenure leaves a lot to be desired when considering his profile for another top role in FBS. His performance as NMSU’s receivers coach hasn’t done much to sway opinion, either.

So…what’s going on here? Why not take advantage of New Mexico State’s massive accomplishments in the last two years to set the program up for the future? It’s certainly not an easy place to win, but if ULM can pilfer an assistant who’s at least obviously good at that job, surely the Aggies could do the same, right? Is there anything deeper here?

Well, maybe. In a roundabout way, you could argue that Sanchez was responsible for success at UNLV, albeit success that came years after his firing. He’s close with the wealthy Fertitta family, whose members include the former CEO of the UFC and the owner of the Houston Rockets, and that association led to major financial contributions that brought the program’s facilities up to competitive levels in the MWC. Sanchez himself was unable to get the program off the ground, but there’s a case to be made that his arrival kicked off a decade of investment into Rebels football that had been desperately needed for ages, culminating in Barry Odom guiding the program from the basement of the Mountain West to its winningest season in forty years.

That’s an attractive possibility, if a similar future is on the table for New Mexico State. If this is the long game, it might be a much better and more lasting way to carry the achievements of the Kill era forward. Serious funding could turn NMSU into a program that has the resources to be reliably solid, rather than one that has to hope for one-off jumps like Doug Martin’s 2017 bowl season and the recent surge under Kill. It’s a tantalizing prospect; there’s no doubt of that.

Is it realistic, though? The Fertittas have ties in Las Vegas and Houston, but not much connects them to Las Cruces, and it’s a lot harder to raise money in an isolated desert city than in…well, an isolated desert city with a booming gambling and tourism economy. NMSU needs structural upgrades just as direly as UNLV did, but it’s far less certain that even an aggressive push can actually produce much change in that regard.

This is all very dismissive of the possibility that Sanchez could actually be a good enough coach to lead a team to victory, just one who didn’t get the investment he needed in time at UNLV. I’m not sure if I believe that myself, but in his defense, he’s got a decade of college coaching experience now that he lacked when he signed on with the Rebels straight from the high school ranks. New Mexico State’s offensive success behind Diego Pavia and a solid receiving corps was a key factor in the Aggies’ success last year, so maybe he has learned a thing or two. Who’s to say?

Thing is, though…it may not matter too much if Sanchez has developed into a solid, FBS-level coach. New Mexico State needs a lot more than that to succeed, at least in their current state; when you lack for resources in the Group of 5, the odds are endlessly stacked against you until you can leverage some combination of luck, skill, and on-field success to get onto your conference rivals’ level. If you can’t, making merely good hires simply isn’t enough—and it’s a rather bold statement to even suggest Sanchez meets that bar.

There’s a lot of uncertainty to pin one’s hopes on with this hire, in short. Maybe Sanchez proves the perfect man to continue building on the foundation Kill laid, and just being good for long enough drives NMSU to fortify the program until it can keep contending in CUSA indefinitely. Maybe Sanchez’s connections to one of the richest families in the United States come through, and the Aggies get enough outside contributions to stack up against their conference rivals more consistently. Each possibility is a bit of a shot in the dark, but that’s what a team in New Mexico State’s position needs, isn’t it? To take a chance on a move that could turn the history of this perennial bottom-feeder around, even if the path to that potential transformation is so uncertain, so unlikely.

Jon Bois, as usual, can probably put it better than I can.

There are so many unknowns. You shove something out there into the horizon, so far off you can’t see it. You have no control over where it goes.

You just hope it finds its way.

The Last Five Years

Yeah, I’m not exaggerating when I say things were bad before Kill showed up. After a miracle 7-6 season in 2017 that snapped a bowl drought dating to 1960, the Aggies won just eight games in the following four seasons, including a dismal 2020 campaign in which they only played the spring 2021 FCS season and still didn’t finish with a winning record. Sure, moving to the similarly awful Conference USA probably helped a bit with their rise in 2023, but there was nothing fake about their stunning 31-10 blowout at Auburn during the final weeks of Kill’s tenure, the first SEC victory in program history. NMSU has more than earned their place deep into this year’s edition of The New Guy—that #50 ranking is equally real, and equally deserved.

Predictably, the returns aren’t great. There was hope that Pavia would stay, creating some much-needed offensive continuity for Sanchez to work with, but he eventually departed for Vanderbilt. Still, there are some pieces back on that side of the ball, where the Aggies rank 98th in returns; if they can settle on a quarterback between Parker Awad, Jeff Davison, Deuce Hogan, and Brandon Nunez, they’ll be in position to keep some success going on offense. The defense, though…well, it put in some solid performances in spring training, and DC Joe Morris has given reason to believe in his capabilities given his performance at Sam Houston State, but it’s hard to do a lot with 26% returning production. A bit of a rebuild seems inevitable here; avoiding a rapid return to the territory of one- and two-win seasons is the hope.

The Next Five Years

Five years might not be enough to get the full picture of how Sanchez’s tenure could change New Mexico State. After all, there is that possibility of a long-term, UNLV-like transformation, one that might only be fully realized well after his own efforts as a head coach fall short (or lead him elsewhere, as the case may be). Serious investment could do far more for this program than a temporary rise to the top of FBS’s weakest conference—it could make those periods of contention far less temporary, for one thing.

But, again…it’s a bit presumptive to assume this hire can’t be about the possibility of Sanchez simply being good, yeah? I’ve made a point in the past of emphasizing that we never really know if a coaching move will work out or not, and even if you take out what might be a key factor for Sanchez’s promotion, that still holds true. His on-field capabilities are less of a definite downside than one might assume, and there’s a certain value to staying within the program in response to an abrupt, unexpected coaching change.

The reality, of course, is a little bit of everything. As with any hire, there’s no precise plan for how every bit of Sanchez’s tenure will play out, no guarantees that the Aggies will or won’t go down any given path. It’s all just potential and possibilities for now, and that’s always a nerve-racking place for a team to be—but it’s also a rather exciting one for New Mexico State now, and that’s a far less familiar feeling. For the first time, we’ve seen how good this program can truly be; even with a relatively quiet hire like Sanchez, the ability to rebuild and establish a firmer foothold in the higher tiers of college football is clearly there, and that’s as much reason to be optimistic about a new coach as you ever really need.