COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’89 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH : GRIM TRUTH : Shoestring Budget for Football Has Mike Knoll’s Staff Tied in Knots at New Mexico State

Certain things thrive in the arid expanse of southern New Mexico: chiles, pecans, a missile range.

College football coaches do not.

The one rise on a flat vista of losing seasons stretching to 1968 at New Mexico State was a 6-5 season in 1978, Gil Krueger’s first year as coach. It raised expectations enough to get him fired four years later after he failed to win more than three games in a season.

They fired the coach before him, and the coach before that. They fired the coach after him, Fred Zechman, and now you can find him selling life insurance on South Main Street, an Aggie booster membership plaque on his wall.

They haven’t fired the next guy yet, but most figure that is only because the school couldn’t afford to buy out the last year of his contract after the Aggies went 1-10 last year.

Out here in the desert, folks like to say, there are a lot of coaches’ bones.

“Bleached bones,” says Al Gonzales, New Mexico State’s athletic director. “Head coaches’ and assistants’.”

Mike Knoll, the coach they haven’t fired yet, uses the same phrase, but he is not ready to admit he will be next.

In the fourth-year of a four-year contract, Knoll has a winning percentage of .121. He also has a season-opener Saturday against Oklahoma in Norman. For an inkling of how that might turn out, refer to the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. record book. In 1982, when New Mexico State played Nebraska, the Cornhuskers set an NCAA record for total offense with 883 yards in a 68-0 victory.

Three years ago, Knoll was a 34-year-old coach with a resume that included a job as defensive coordinator at Tulsa under John Cooper, now at Ohio State, and jobs coaching the secondary and linebackers at Miami under Jimmy Johnson, now coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

He had been a finalist at New Mexico State the year Zechman was hired. He also tried for jobs at Southern Illinois and North Texas State.

He got the New Mexico State job the second time around, after Zechman was fired.

“Mike’s a hard worker,” said Johnson, who some say might offer Knoll a position with the Cowboys if he is fired at New Mexico State. “Even though he knew the job was difficult, he wanted the opportunity to be a head coach. We visited about it. I advised him that it was going to be a difficult chore.”

Now, three seasons and four victories later, Knoll has been called the worst Division I head coach in America by one magazine, Don Heinrich’s College Football.

“Seems like I was a better football coach at the University of Miami than I am at New Mexico State,” Knoll said. “I don’t necessarily agree with that.”

He might not be the worst Division I head coach in America. But he does have one of the most difficult jobs, although there are certainly others, among them Kansas State. The Wildcats not only went 0-11 last season but suffered the indignity of losing to Kansas, which won only one game and lost to New Mexico State, 42-29.

Knoll’s flaw may be that he believed what every other coach who ever takes a job at a struggling program believes: “You believe in your heart you can be the guy to turn it around,” he said.

Said Zechman, who was fired in 1985 after going 8-25 in three seasons: “Egos in coaching assume everything you do will work.”

At New Mexico State, precious little has worked, and administrators acknowledge that money is a main problem. New Mexico State runs its football program on $1.23 million a year, about 25% of what the big-time schools spend. Some other schools in the Big West Conference run their programs on limited budgets and have more success, but schools such as Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach have the advantage of a location that limits the costs of recruiting and team travel.

At New Mexico State last year, a university-wide budget cut caused by smaller-than-anticipated state contributions reduced the football recruiting budget to $20,000. Knoll limited recruiting to New Mexico, West Texas and Arizona, destinations reachable by car. Hotels became a luxury; one assistant slept on a friend’s couch in Phoenix for eight weeks.

The budget affects every aspect of the program. Last February, the assistant coaches were forced to turn off their long distance phone lines in an effort to save money. They haven’t turned back on.

This fall, Knoll will be working with a staff of only six full-time assistants, three below the NCAA standard. The tight ends and the receivers will be coached by graduate assistants.

What are they to do? Should Knoll get up earlier than he already does, at 4:30 a.m. each day? Would more hours make them win another game?

“At some point, you have to start looking inward,” said Gonzales, who was acting athletic director for three years until this year. “Instead of saying, ‘Boy, the guy was bad . . . ‘ Maybe it’s not the coach. Maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s what we’re providing.”

Knoll persists. He is something of a coach’s Norman Vincent Peale, a man who points out how often Abraham Lincoln failed before succeeding, one who still urges his players to think of themselves as winners.

“People who have self pity, that’s the first step toward self destruction,” Knoll said. “Granted, we have not achieved the level of success we are going to at New Mexico State. But by no means have we reached the stage where we throw up our arms and say it can’t be done.”

Whether it can be done at all, or in the time Knoll has left, is difficult to say.

“The only things I concern myself with are things I can control,” Knoll said. “That may sound like a pat answer, and maybe it is. But right now, I’m not worried about anything but this season.”

Knoll acknowledges that he has made mistakes at New Mexico State, one of the first of which was saying at a preseason news conference with other league coaches that the Aggies would go 12-0 in his first season, winning 11 regular season games and the California Bowl.

That was taking positive thinking to the extreme.

Mickey Clute, president of the Aggie Sports Assn., recalls the reaction of supporters.

“I think they bought it,” he said. “He convinced all the people here. All of a sudden here comes this guy from an extreme winning tradition, with a tremendous amount of energy, very positive, and he tells the people what’s going to happen. Maybe they didn’t believe it in their hearts, but they wanted to. You had to believe he was going to have success.”

The Aggies went 1-10, the victory by 24-21 over Cal State Fullerton, after which the team took a victory lap, celebrating what remains the only Big West Conference victory in six years in the conference.

Knoll also had come in with a belief that the Aggie program needed discipline. He outlawed earrings, long hair, wanted everybody to live on campus.

The rein was too tight. Before spring practice began, assistant John DiFede estimates, more than 20 players had quit. Still, the emphasis on discipline persists. Last spring, the Aggies practiced from 6 to 8 a.m. It is the sort of thing that makes a genius of a coach--a coach who wins .

There have been other mistakes--errors of football strategy and emphasis, errors in choosing assistants. Last year, Knoll felt it necessary to fire offensive coordinator Stu Rogers with two games left in the season. The Aggies were averaging 15 points and Rogers had vehemently criticized his players in public.

“It’s important our players feel good about themselves,” Knoll said. “They’re bombarded with negativism.”

Said Phil Vinson, who played at Los Angeles Hamilton High School and will be the Aggies’ quarterback this season: “I don’t think anybody in this town believes in us but ourselves.”

The program has not always been in such a state. The most successful coach in Aggie history, Warren Woodson, won 63 games, lost 36 and tied three in 10 seasons ending in 1967, when he was forced to retire at 65. Under Woodson, the Aggies had the nation’s leading rusher for four years in a row, and twice won the Sun Bowl, in 1959 and ’60.

“The tradition is there,” said athletic director Gonzales, who played for the Aggies for four seasons ending in 1967. “It’s a long way back, but the tradition is there.”

Woodson’s successor, Jim Wood, was 21-30-1 in five seasons.

Wood’s successor, Jim Bradley, went 23-31-1 in five seasons. Now head coach at Roswell High School, Bradley has won back-to-back Class AAAA New Mexico state championships, and there are those who would like to see him back at New Mexico State.

Krueger, next up, went 17-37-1 in five seasons. Then Zechman. Now Knoll.

“It’s just like moving cars in and out,” said DiFede, Knoll’s top assistant. “Had one for four or five years? Let’s get a new one in here.”

Jim Fisher, a professor of agronomy and horticulture at New Mexico State and the faculty athletic representative, has watched the cycle.

“Zechman had a good offense,” he said. “Last year, offense was our most severe problem. We just trade one set of qualities for another. Zechman never had a good defense, but Knoll does better at that. There’s always some curiousity about whether a new coach can do it. Then they lose a few games and people lose interest and the cycle repeats itself.”

Jim Sweeney has seen three coaches fired at New Mexico State since he became coach at Fresno State.

“I felt that Zechman was very close to getting it done,” Sweeney said. “Then when he left and Mike came in, the first time we played against them Mike did a tremendous, tremendous job of stopping us on offense (a 17-14 Fresno victory). I felt like he was going to make his mark immediately on the conference. . . . As far as I’m concerned, Mike Knoll is the right person. I don’t think they could do better. But usually, they just fire the coach.”

Said Clute, the booster-club president: “I’m not sure the program is well-served in going into the four-year cycle. But who’s to say? We don’t know whether retaining the coach would change anything. . . . If we had the money, and weren’t doing anything, then we could say it was the coach. But we’ve never been in that situation.”

The situation changes little. As always, supporters say the town is too small to regularly fill the 30,000-seat stadium or the booster coffers, and that New Mexico’s population is too small to produce enough Division-I caliber talent to stock the programs at New Mexico State and the University of New Mexico.

There is reason for optimism, however. The state legislature has passed a tuition-waiver bill that allows colleges to waive tuition and fees for athletes up to the maximum number of scholarships allowed by the NCAA, with the stipulation that at least a quarter of the scholarships must be given to New Mexico residents.

The bill, which was signed by the governor in March and goes into effect in next July, will save considerably more than $100,000 in the football budget immediately, and will allow New Mexico State, which currently has about 60 football players on scholarship, to move closer to the NCAA maximum of 95.

Gonzales called the bill the most significant move in the history of New Mexico athletics, the state’s “commitment to be competitive.”

It is probably too late for Knoll.

More and more, New Mexico State is modeling its aspirations on the success of Texas El Paso, a school less than an hour south of Las Cruces, and a team that New Mexico State beat regularly until the past few years.

“Imagine!” Gonzales said. “We used to beat them!”

Under Coach Bob Stull, now at Missouri, UTEP went 7-4 in 1987 and 10-3 last season, including an Independence Bowl loss.

And there has been progress. New Mexico State won one game last season, and lost three others by five points or fewer.

But there is no credit for “close” on Knoll’s record.

“If I was a normal John Doe walking around,” Knoll said, “I might look at Mike Knoll’s record and say, ‘Jiminy Christmas, that guy’s not a very good football coach.’ But there are other intangibles out there entering into the entire scene.”

When will the cycle end? When will the coach arrive who can make winners of the Aggies?

Soon enough, some other coach will ignore the geographically imprecise sentiment printed on a local postcard, “Las Cruces: 100 miles from water, next door to Hell.” Some other coach will instead be taken with the stark beauty of the Organ Mountains. That, and the belief that he is the one guy who can turn the program around.

Knoll believed, and somehow, he still seems to. But on occasion, the exterior of impossible positiveness fades. Could there be a worse job out there, a more certain roadblock for a career than a stint in this corner of the desert?

Knoll still smiles when he says it.

“If there’s one tougher than this, I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch.”