It’s a New Era at New Mexico State

New Mexico State President Michael Martin and the 47-year-old recruit had met for nearly an hour. Martin decided it was time to make his pitch.

“I said, ‘Reggie, join us. Place a bet. If you’ll come along and cast your dice with us, A, we’re going to have fun and B, I think we can be successful.’ ”

Reggie Theus, a former NBA All-Star and more recently Rick Pitino’s chief recruiter at Louisville, took the gamble and became the newest face in the makeover of NMSU athletics.

Over the last four months, the Aggies have hired a new athletic director (McKinley Boston), a new football coach (Hal Mumme) and basketball coach (Theus). They’re all part of a plan to turn the athletic corner at a mid-major school that hasn’t been to a bowl game in 45 years and just had its worst basketball season in 39 years.

“If you’re truly committed to excellence, you’re committed to excellence in everything you do,” Martin said. “In teaching in the classroom, in working in the lab, in painting the building and in putting teams on the field. Athletics is a front porch to this place.”

History says otherwise.

Football has been a back-burner program in Las Cruces for decades: four winning seasons in 36 years and no bowl bid since 1960. Things got so bad that from 1988 to 1990, NMSU won a total of three games.

Mumme, with a reputation for providing a quick fix to bad football programs, was hired after NMSU fired Tony Samuel, a former Nebraska assistant who spent eight years at NMSU and had two winning seasons.

Saddled with too small a budget and schedules that included pre-conference mismatches against teams such as Texas, California and South Carolina, Samuel couldn’t get it done and the Aggies decided it was time for a change.

Mumme has produced winning teams everywhere he’s been. He did it at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta State, Kentucky and Southeastern Louisiana, where he restarted a program that had been dormant since the mid-80s.

“I’ve turned programs around, I have a track record of doing that,” says Mumme. “I’ve had four others like this.”

In his first year at Kentucky, the Wildcats beat Alabama for the first time in 75 years. Two years later they played Penn State in the Outback Bowl, the Wildcats’ first New Year’s Day bowl trip in 47 years.

Mumme resigned in February 2001 amid an NCAA investigation that uncovered recruiting violations and led to Kentucky being placed on probation for three years. But the Aggies discard the notion that Mumme was a risky hire.

“That was clearly a factor,” Martin said of Mumme’s problems at Kentucky. “I talked to his former bosses, to several friends of mine in the SEC and several others. I think Hal will be a great coach, but like many coaches, we’ve got to give him enough help to ensure that we have a balanced program. He gets it.”

The hiring of Theus also could be considered chancy, given that this will be the first Division I head coaching job for the former UNLV star and 13-year NBA veteran. His resume includes a year as coach of the Las Vegas Slam of the American Basketball Association and a year as a volunteer coach at Cal State-Los Angeles.

None of that seemed to matter to the enthusiastic crowd of school officials, faculty and fans who turned out last month when Theus’ hiring was announced.

“We don’t want ordinary players, we want extraordinary people,” a smiling Theus told them. “Back when I was playing [with UNLV] this school had a great reputation.”