New Mexico Football Overdue a Major Celebration That Starts With a Miner Shutdown
When last the University of New Mexico football team played host to UTEP in a conference game, the Miners celebrated an October victory as if they had won the Super Bowl.
That was in 1998.
The teams meet again as conference foes on Saturday when the Lobos (3-1) entertain the Miners (1-3) at University Stadium, at what I’ll unofficially call Rocky Long Field (because he’s the winningest coach in UNM football history; he had two other stints as an assistant coach and he was the team’s starting quarterback in the early 1970s).
Long was head coach when the schools were members of the Western Athletic Conference in ’98. UTEP came away with a 22-19 win on a Miners touchdown with 15 seconds left in the game.
Miners coach Charlie Bailey had his team running all over the field after the win. Apparently, he had been upset with the way the Lobos celebrated a 44-17 win over UTEP in the 1996 season finale that gave UNM a 6-5 record – that had nothing to do with Texas-El Paso and everything to do with securing its first winning record since the 1982 10-1 season.
Which leads us back to Saturday’s game and current Lobo coach Jason Eck’s march for the first 10-win season since that magical 1982 run.
A win Saturday would give the Lobos its best five-game start to a season since 1997 when the program started off 6-0 under coach Dennis Franchione, the leader of the aforementioned 1996 team.
Eck and Franchione shared missions to bring the Lobos into the national college football conversation. Franchione’s ’97 Lobos earned a ranking in the Coaches poll.
Eck’s Lobos are marching toward that end. They already lead the nation in one statistical category – turnover margin.
New Mexico is an unfathomable plus-14 in turnover ratio with 14 takeaways and zero turnovers. If you go back to Game 7 of the 2025 season, UNM is plus-20.
That’s probably why the team is 9-2 in its last 11 games.
Somehow, that puts UNM’s offense in the spotlight vs. the Miners. Having established a starting quarterback for the season in Toa Fa’avae, the Lobos have to be prepared for the inevitable turnover.
Can Fa’avae keep a clean slate and continue to build into a starting QB the Lobos will need to capture a conference championship for the first time since 1962 and help UNM get that elusive second 10-win season in school history?
Eck said he was encouraged with Fa’avae’s improvement by entrenching him as the QB vs. New Mexico State in the Lobos’ 42-18 victory last week.
Thirty-eight years is a long time to wait for history to repeat itself, but Jason Eck’s Lobos are on the verge of making it happen.
Standing at 3-1 with the nation’s most absurd turnover margin (+14 with zero giveaways), New Mexico enters Saturday’s long-awaited conference clash against UTEP eyeing its best five-game start since 1997—and taking another massive step toward the program's first 10-win season since 1982. But to keep the march toward a historic Mountain West title alive, newly entrenched starting quarterback Toa Fa’avae must navigate a fiery rivalry, settle a score nearly three decades in the making, and do the hardest thing in football: keep the slate spotless.