Editor,
UNM athletic directors must be a huge fan of “Field of Dreams,” since they seemed to have adopted the motto of “if you build it, they will come.” Clearly, no one told them this only applies to dead guy ghost baseball and not Lobo football.
It all started about seven years ago with the Indoor Practice Facility, then the summer 2013 saw a new scoreboard and game turf. This past summer saw the biggest change for the football team: a football-only weight room.
This is a gift from the state of New Mexico for a team that hasn’t seen a winning season in seven years, which makes one wonder what the administration is thinking. The record for the most attendance at University Stadium was set back in 2004, and to date the Lobo football games haven’t even come close to this number.
So my question to the athletic administration, and one that all Lobo fans and taxpayers should be asking, is why, with all these new bells and whistles, are the Lobos not able to replicate or even expand upon past seasons?
Over the past seven years, the Lobo football team has had a record of 10-51. To put this into perspective, the following five Olympic sports – baseball, men’s and women’s soccer, and men’s and women’s cross country, and track and field – produced 21 Conference Titles in this same span.
In the recent report by LoboTV, head Athletic Performance Director Ben Hilgart said “Coach Davie had this vision (the weight room) from day one.”
This is great, but I believe many Lobo fans’ vision looked drastically different from Coach Davie and included seeing other Lobo fans in the stands as well as more wins rather than losses at the end of a season.
UNM is the highest non-BCS school in the Learfield Directors Cup, which doesn’t factor in football, so why doesn’t the administration start rewarding those teams that are helping UNM’s reputation instead of tarnishing it?
Chris Lutz
alumni athlete
