New Mexico is a state full of basketball fanatics and their two D-1 universities both consistently make the NCAA tourney. (As opposed to football, where the two schools are often laughably bad.) New Mexico State has a pretty impressive tradition – 20 NCAA appearances, including making the Final Four in 1970, and the Aggies were always Jerry Tarkanian’s biggest nemesis during UNLV’s glory days of the late 1980s. New Mexico State is one of those places filled with JC’s, foreign players, and transfers from other schools, and so the teams are radically different from one year to the next and fluctuate wildly. (This year they had something like 5 Canadians, including a 7’5” center of Indian descent.) Nowadays, the Aggies play in the lower-level WAC and are perpetually seeded like 12th or 13th and make a quick exit from the tournament.
As for the Lobos from New Mexico, well, they’re a source of considerable angst in the Land of Enchantment. They’ve got a passionate fan base that borders on fanatical and play in one of the sports most iconic venues, The Pit, which is, in fact, a pit. It’s dug into the ground and you walk down the stairs from the entry to your seats. The place is loud, deep, and intimidating for opponents. Between the 18,000 maniacs in the stands and the 5,000 ft. elevation in Albuquerque, the Lobos have a considerable home court advantage. They’ve been verging on being a powerhouse at the sport for decades.
And they always blow it.
I heard quite a few commenters asking in the run-up to the tourney if this was New Mexico’s “year.” Well, no, because it’s never their year. If there was ever “their year” is was this team in 1978, which then promptly, inexpicably lost to Cal St. Fullerton in the first round of the NCAAs. Love the clothes in those pictures and the scores of those games. Holy crap, a team that could actually shoot, which is such a foreign concept in contemporary college basketball. But the Lobos weren’t particularly interested in playing defense, and it caught up to them.
That, right there, is one of the biggest single chokes in NCAA history. All they had to do was beat Cal St. Disneyland and they got to play in the Sweet 16 on their home court. Norm Ellenberger, the coach of that team, had his career came to a dubious end:
The turning point in Ellenberger's career came with "Lobogate," a lurid episode involving forged academic transcripts, payments made for bogus junior-college credits to keep players eligible, and other devices permitting individuals entirely lacking academic credentials to be represented as college students while playing on Ellenberger's team. The episode began with an FBI wiretap on the phone of a prominent Lobo booster, recording a conversation in which Ellenberger arranged with assistant coach Manny Goldstein to transfer bogus credits from a California junior college to the office of the UNM registrar. Subsequent investigation turned up a manufactured college seal from Mercer County Community College in New Jersey, along with blank transcripts and an extensive record of previous forgery … Ellenberger managed to remain popular in Albuquerque even after the Lobogate scandal decimated the Lobo basketball program, forced him to resign as head coach, and left him with criminal liability. An NCAA investigation into Lobo recruiting practices found 57 rule violations, and Ellenberger himself was convicted on 21 counts of fraud two years later. His restaurant ventures continued to do well, but he was never able to return formally to a major head coaching position.
Both schools in the state have had their run-ins with the NCAA over the years. The state of New Mexico is definitely off the beaten path, and recruiting has definitely been done on the fringes. For as much as people love the game there, the state itself doesn’t produce a whole lot of Div. 1 talent. Still, the home court environment and the fact that the team is perpetually successful make it an easier sell to a kid than it could be.
I lived in New Mexico during a particularly galling era of the late 90s, when the Lobos had some of their most talented teams ever, led by future NBA first-round pick Kenny Thomas, and yet they’d get into the NCAA tournament and pretty much just forget how to play (while Utah, their fiercest rival in the new Mountain West, was going so far as actually reaching the NCAA final in 1998). The Lobos were coached by Dave Bliss back then, and using the word ‘coached’ seems like a stretch, because come crunch time in a close game, they always looked completely disorganized. Bliss was a strange guy whose career came to a terrible conclusion after he'd taken the job in Baylor, having left New Mexico, in part because his team's constant underachieving in the NCAA's had become such a source of frustration around the campus and the fan base. A hallmark of his coaching career, be it at New Mexico or at SMU before that, was churning out team after team that should’ve been better than they were, as his ability to recruit top talent was neutered by his inability to maximize it.
The Lobos are now coached by Steve Alford, who I pretty much hated when he was a player, but he’s done remarkably well in his tenure in ABQ so I have to give him some props. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to find the right spell to cast to undo the voodoo curse that is the NCAA tournament. It's bizarre, really, how this higher level of failure can continually perpetuate itself when the players turn over so quickly – what happens in 2013 has no real connection to 1978 of 1998 at all, of course. But once that culture of failure takes hold (and make no mistake about it, losing in the first days of the NCAA's yet again will be construed as a failed season in The Land of Enchantment), it can be absolutely impossible to shake and span generations.
My immediate response to watching the Lobos gag vs. the Crimson and make an early exit from the tournament was to look at the calendar and confirm that it was a day ending in Y, which is about as newsworthy. I do have a fondness for the Lobos, since I consider New Mexico a sort of home state of mine, and I was certainly interested back when I was working the sports desk at the Santa Fe New Mexican. I definitely want them to do well. But until they can win both games on the first weekend of the tournament, I cannot take them seriously.
