← Josh Pate's College Football Show
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Guaranteed Human. It's really easy to sit around and talk about what's wrong. So why don't we do it for a second? You and I were just talking before we press record about a lot of the calendar related stuff. And there's this Senate bill that they're trying to push right now. Some parts of it I like, some parts of it I don't like. But the whole concept of what they're calling the Lane Kiffin Rule, which is painting this negative light on coaches who move before the season's over, which is not ideal to me, ignores the whole problem in the room, which is the calendar, which is why the coaches are moving when they're moving. And so everyone's got thoughts on how you fix the calendar, but you've lived it like you've been involved in searches while the season's going on. You are a current head coach. Describe the current state of the college football calendar to me.
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It's a hodgepodge. It's all put together, and I think there's a lot of things that were changed without looking into the unintended consequences. I think you almost just have to get back to the roots. And the big thing, Josh, they got to move the season up. Football has always been a one semester sport, and now we're sitting where the championship game is the 26th. And the thing I don't feel good about is I just think the College Football Playoff is deeply affected by coaching changes, and those coaching changes are necessitated because of the transfer portal. And I know you love banging on the group of six teams getting killed. Well, I think part of it is they had a big distraction because you have some roll going to Florida and you have Chesney going to ucla, and that's a big distraction. Yeah, just like it was at Ole Miss, just like it was at Oregon with their coordinators leaving. So I think the more we can get our season moved up and finished and then have time for the transfer portal for second semester, the better.
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You know, the one thing I guess if I had some commentary on, like G5, G6, the caliber of your average G5, G6 playoff contender today, to me, pales in comparison to maybe the quality you would have had Boise 2000s of UCF mid 2000 teens, which is where another part of the Senate bill is kind of interesting, where you sit in your shoes right now. It's this great catch 22. Like if you guys go play Michigan week one and a guy jumps off the screen, you're happy because you Had a guy kill it that day. But you also know there's a thing called the transfer portal. I may be seeing the very last of him in the New Mexico uniform. But all of a sudden, if we live in a rule where you got five years to play five, but you also have only one penalty, free transfer, I don't think enough people are paying attention to what that could DO to fortify G5 rosters to where you're not constantly having to look over your shoulder, worried, man, we're having too much success. Our entire roster is going to get gutted, no question.
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And you see it a lot in our league right now. You know, UNLV's quarterback last year, Calandria, started at Virginia, kind of came back to unlv, had a great year, and now he's at Nebraska. Yeah, we had Dorian Thomas, who had a great year for us, had the great game against Michigan last year, had transferred here from Arizona. Now he's at Cal. So you're seeing that quite a bit. I think that would be a very good change. And you know, again, I think probably do something still with the head coaches. If head coaches leave to give the guys an hour, I think that's something they got to look at as well. But I think that'd be a positive change.
- [03:15]
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When you've been involved with your name being mentioned, which is not going to stop as long as you have success. So it's like a really good first world problem. But when you've been involved with the concept that my season's not over, people are coming after me and balancing the responsibility to your team, you want to be honest with your staff, you want to be honest with your family. But then you also want to maintain like the integrity of the competitive edge that you want to have. I don't think there's a perfect way to handle it. What's the best way you found to handle it?
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Well, a couple things I think of that. One, you end up doing stuff late at night. That becomes the answer. It's, yeah, I can talk to you, but it's gotta be tonight after, you know, 8:30, after I finish the responsibilities of my team. And then I spend a lot of time talking with our team about it as well. Because I do think coaches and players are in the same situations now. You know, whether it's agents reaching out to our players and trying to tell them about their opportunities out there. You know, the nice thing sometimes having an agent is you don't have to deal with it personally. You have another person dealing with you But I just try to tell our players and our coaches we got to keep our focus on what we're doing, our job at hand. And by doing that, you'll create value for yourself in the future. If you start worrying about other stuff and getting distracted, your product that you're putting out on a daily basis is not going to be as good and you're not going to create as much value for yourself. And, you know, there's times, you know, it's nice in college football at the FBS level where you have that little break, but between bowl games or between the playoffs, where you have some time to unpack. I think that was trickier at the FCS level when I was an FCS coach because you go right from the regular season into the, the playoffs. So when you're dealing with jobs and, or the portal, that gets really crazy. You know, we had a player, Andrew Marshall, who starts in Nebraska now at Idaho, who was ready to go in. He had a great game against Oregon in 2024, the first game. And that was the same thing. I kind of knew, hey, we're probably not going to have this guy. And he knew he wanted to move on. And, yeah, we had a big talk that was in. The portal opened in December, so it was even more of a mess. You know, he wanted to try to go in day one, and I just kind of told him, hey, and I talked to his parents. I said, we can't have you go in day one and still play for us because I just think it's. It puts too much pressure on you now and our staff. If you have one bad play, it's, well, you're distracted going in. I said, I'll try to help you. I'll call these coaches, try to help you find a spot. But we need you to go in right after our last game. And it's tricky.
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A lot of times when we're talking about the, the coaching carousel season, the majority of the conversation is on the big jobs. Like, if Florida's open, everyone's got an opinion on the University of Florida head football job. But also if you're in the running for the New Mexico job or the Idaho job, far less spotlight is put on those jobs. Therefore, far less people have opinions of those places. Far less people of notoriety have experience at those places. So, like, sometimes when you're trying to feel a place out that you've never been, how do you get a scouting report? Like, how do you figure out what New Mexico is about? Sight unseen, really, for you, before you take this Job.
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Use your network. You know, I talked to coaches who had been here before. Kevin Cosgrove was a great resource for me. He was a retired coach now, but he was a decoordator when I was a player at Wisconsin and spent eight years here on Bob Davies staff. And I probably talked about six or seven coaches who'd been here. You know, TCU was playing in the New Mexico bowl that year, and their. Their GM is a friend of mine, Ryan Dorchester. And so he was here, like, on his site visit for the New Mexico bowl game. And I told him, yeah, take pictures when you go through all the facilities. Send me what these facilities look like. So you got to research it. But again, you're trying. You're. A lot of times it's having those conversations, you know, at night, after you finish practice, after you watch the tape. And now you're. You're trying to do that so I get the distractions. I see why, you know, I'm sure Will Stein and Tosh got no sleep during that time where you're trying to get ready for the College Football Playoff. And you're also working, putting things together at a new head job.
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You're entering your second year here. You've been a head coach since 2022, which means you're still brand new on a lot of people's radars. Like, there are very, very huge chunks of the college football public that know of Jason Eck only recently. But Prez is behind this camera over here. He was born in 1998. You started coaching in 1999. So, like, you've been. You've been coaching throughout the entire adult lives of some of our staff here. And what I want to know is, like, how weird is it sometimes to know your entire journey? And there's like a laundry list of places you've worked. And then still to be aware that I'm like a new commodity. Like, the concept of me as a coach is still new to most people. And they're talking to you, like, trying to get to know you. You know, I've been around for a long time, guys.
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One of. One of. One of my mentors who helped me out, who I. He was administrator, but he texted me that, you know, we had some success as a head coach. He goes, you know, you're a 25 year in the making. Overnight success. But, yeah, I learned a lot. You know, I had 23 years as an assistant coach. I mean, there's a lot of times in my career I didn't think I'd be a head coach. And I think everything that I kind of went through, and I went through a lot of coaching changes when I was an assistant, I worked for. In 23 years as a assistant coach, I worked for 12 different head coaches. But you learn a lot. You learn a lot through the way you see how to do things, see how not to do things. You take a little bit from. From everybody along the way. And I think it put me in a position where when I finally did get the opportunity, I was. I was ready to take advantage of that.
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You know, you mentioned at some point, you never knew if you'd be a head coach. Some guys who are current head coaches, if you ask them, they'll tell you, my goal from day one was to
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be a head coach.
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I always thought I'd be a head coach. Other guys are like, honestly, this is not how it started for me. This is what it evolved into. Did you always, from day one in 1999, think, Man, I'm going to be a head coach? Or was there, like, an inflection point where all of a sudden it became real for you? This. This may be a possibility, and it's something I could see myself doing.
- [09:13]
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I was not that way. You know, I thought maybe being an offensive line coach, trying to, you know, move up the ranks, be a power, power four, power five at that time, get to the NFL and be an offensive line coach. I think that was more of my goal earlier in my career. Jim Huber, who I played for at Wisconsin, you know, had a great career as an online coach, spent a little time at the NFL at the end of his career. And then, you know, John Sticklemeyer, who I worked for at South Dakota State, great head coach. I spent six years with him. Him and Coach Alvarez were the two coaches I spent the most time with. And he told me, after my first year, there he goes, I think you'd be a very good head coach. And he was the first person who really ever said that to me. And I think that's something I remember a lot with our players, because the power of belief, I think when you show belief in someone, I think that kind of changed the way I thought about things. And I'm glad he said that to me. I'm thankful for that because it got me thinking about it. And I really enjoy being a head coach now because it's scary when you go into it. It's so different, you know, being, you know, being a coordinator, so different than being a position coach. Being a head coach is so different than being a coordinator. And I think there's a little nerves, like, am I going to be good at this? Am I going to like it? And I found out that I like it and my family likes it and I'm pretty good at it.
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You know, you mentioned something that triggered something to me because I, you know, there, I assume most people watching this right now can identify with having self doubt or at least uncertainty about self and someone you respect showing more belief in you than you have in yourself or maybe claiming they see something in you that you don't see in yourself at that time. Because you never forget those people. No, you never forget those moments. Now as you get a little older, like you said, when you reflect on them, then you start seeking out the opportunity to do that with younger people. And I imagine like that happening with you has to impact the way that you interact with players or maybe even young coaches on a day to day.
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No question. And I've seen the power of that, the power of building belief in people. And I think that's maybe one of the best things I do as a head coach is get, get people to believe. Even though, you know, it might not be a, you know, rational thought to say we can go compete with Oregon when you're in FCS school or you can beat UCLA when you're, you know, you've been playing football here 100 years and you've never beat a Big Ten team. But when you build that belief in getting them in that right mindset, special things can happen.
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The UCLA game last year sort of slapped a lot of people in the face. It was one of those games where New Mexico is going to play ucla when people are like mapping out their Saturday. Most people probably didn't say, I'm going to end up focused on this New Mexico UCLA game. And they're watching whatever game they're watching and then that score starts flashing across the bottom line. You're like, oh, New Mexico got out to a good start. Wow, they're pulling away. Wow, this is a blowout in the Rose Bowl. How impactful was that day for you? How impactful was it for the program?
- [11:56]
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It was huge. It was huge for the program. And the thing about it that was unique, it was a Friday night game. Yeah. So we had a, you know, I got so many texts from, you know, coaches who were at the hotel the night before the game, you know, watching their game. I mean, that, that game really stood out to me. Just in the coaching world, how many people you watch that game and reached out to us because you have those, you know, we're the, the only game on late at night on the, on the West Coast. And it was very influential for our program just because we had, we had to rebuild. You know, we were only averaging 16,000 fans a game. You know, I think in the 2024 season here, not getting great attendance. And I think that game kind of inspired our fans beating a brand name like UCLA and here, I think especially in New Mexico, because we've lost some guys. You know, the great basketball coach here, Coach Alford left here to go to ucla and even a couple years ago they had a great basketball player down in Vendetta who went to make millions at ucla. So I think you had a little inferiority complex that we lost people to UCLA before. So to beat them, I think inspired our fan base. And then we come back the next week, play New Mexico state. We have 37,000 people on the stands. It's the first sellout since 2007. So I think that was probably the most impactful thing to kind of get our program turned around was that win
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It didn't happen here. And you know, again, so many people have shown you can do it great in both. I remember when Florida was good, when Billy Donovan was in basketball and Urban was in football and winning national titles in both. And our fans have really turned out. Last year, we had the highest percentage increase in FBS and attendance. You know, we went from 16,000 a game to 25,000 a game. And now I think there's. That was with not much buzz in the off season. Now we're getting a lot of buzz and our season ticket sales are rising up. And, you know, I think people are realizing, hey, it's. It's a lot of fun to do both. It's a lot of fun to come to University Stadium and have fun in the fall. We were 60 the last time. The Love Boys were 60 at home before last season was like 1938, something crazy like that. So you send them home, driving home from the game, happy, just like they usually do when they go to the pit across the street. And it's been. It's been a good combination. Our fans have really supported us.
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The NFL has become famous for how the social teams handle schedule releases. College football, not so much. Except you guys killed it a couple of weeks ago with the whole Sopranos themed schedule release. So I'm watching that in Nashville and I'm thinking, man, someone was in the lab in that building. Some creative genius had to be behind this. But I didn't know who the creative genius was. You know who the creative genius was. And his. Slash.
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Her name is Kimberly Ek. Kimberly Eck is the creative genius not
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even on the payroll here. Officially, no.
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But she's a great supporter of our program. She's got a big social media presence that I think really engages our fan base. Engages, you know, the female demographic. I have countless moms and recruits who come up and, you know, tell me how I follow your wife on Instagram already. So she had that idea we would love the Sopranos show. And then, you know, I'm kind of. I'm not the detail guy. I'm the idea guy. I gave that to our team. And then Brendan and Frank just kind of ran with it and had some great ideas and of how to. How to market it. And, you know, we try to be creative in that stuff. We try to have fun. And really we just gotta get people talking about New Mexico football because for a long time people haven't talked about New Mexico football. And last two years you've done a great job of that of getting some stuff to get us on the map.
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I always think the job of a head coach Varies greatly depending on where you have the job. And there's some places where it's a legacy, blue blood, like institutional bedrock, part of college football. Ryan Day does not have to worry about getting Ohio State on the map, and so he does not have to therefore focus a whole lot of his energy on marketing. Yeah, you've actually got to have the marketing hat on. You've got to have that almost like a PR hat on times of. I got to make sure people know that we exist. I got to make sure we're on their radar before I even worry about performing. Ultimately, it comes down to wins and losses. Like, you don't ignore someone winning. But how. I don't know. How. How different is that compared to just being, like an offensive line coach in the Dakotas?
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No, it's different. I think that's, you know, I got these jobs, you know, Idaho and New Mexico, because they hadn't been good. No one wanted them, or the, you know, the pool of who I had to beat was not as good as, obviously, who Ryan Day would had to beat to get the Ohio State job. So it's definitely different. And I think about that sometimes, and I think we play into, you know, to be in the underdog. Our D coordinator, Coach Nowinski, does a great job. He kind of calls our defense the Mutts, you know, a bunch of, you know, guys at the pound with no pedigree who do that. And I sometimes I think, you know, one day we may have guys with a pedigree, but it's different. I think you have to adjust to the situation. And I found I really like it because I think it's really rewarding. It really goes back to what I saw Coach Alvarez do at Wisconsin. He took over a Wisconsin program that was awful during the 70s and 80s, just awful. And rebuilt that. And there's a lot of programs that have just won. Whoever the head coach has won historically over the years, probably because some outside factors, whether it's your recruiting base or that, and still those guys are really good coaches. But I think there's something that I find personal satisfaction of kind of giving people hope, building belief, even in your fan base, and getting them excited where they haven't been excited to go there. And I enjoy that personally.
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You've been on some staffs, like at Winona. Not Winona, Winona State, where, I mean, it's a loaded staff. No one knew it at the time, but there were multiple future FBs, like D1 head coaches that were on that staff. But not everyone's on the same timeline, like, so some guys get jobs before other guys get jobs. When some of your peers maybe are on like a rung higher or two rungs higher on the ladder than you are, how consistently is that 50 feedback spilling down or how much are you reaching up for that feedback to know, hey, what's, what's just out ahead of me? What should I expect?
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I, I think those guys are valuable helpers. I mean, you know, one of my, you know, I think my two biggest mentors probably as a head coach were Stigelmeier and Coach Alvarez. Well, those are guys who, you know, started their head coaching journey in the 90s, you know, so now you're starting back when I'm a first head coach in 22. I mean, they're looking back 30 years. Probably forget a lot of the stuff from your first year as being a head coach. A guy who I worked with at Idaho who was a head coach a few years ahead of me, Jonathan Smith, you know, did a really nice job at Oregon State and then his, you know, stint didn't go as good at Michigan State. But, you know, he was a guy I reached out to a lot about, you know, first year putting the staff together, his first transition, you know, he was a year ahead of me when he left Oregon State to went to Michigan State. That's valuable to talk to those guys who've been through things, especially in recent times, just their experiences, learn from them. You always try to learn from other people and what they did or what they would do again if they had to do it over again. So you're not making every first time mistake yourself.
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What is your sort of core philosophy on putting together a staff? A lot of guys really, really depend on feedback from others. Some guys want to have had personal interaction, although that's not realistic. You're going to fill out an entire staff. How do you go about putting staff together?
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The biggest thing I want is I want people who have good energy because I want people who the players, the student athletes are excited to work with every day. They're excited to go into the office. And this has evolved. I remember sitting one of my first interviews at Idaho with a player when I first got there, just trying to, you know, I sat down and met with everybody on the team and just got their take on it. And you know, one of them told, yeah, I try to, when I come into the facility, I try to go through this back way that's longer to avoid going by the coaches offices. And that just was like a red light going in my head, that's not what you want. You know, you want the players to just come and sit down in the coaches offices, hang out. So the energy. And when you're assistant, you know, staffs are so big. When you're assistant, you're always going to have a guy or two on the staff or you have a professional relationship, but, you know, he's probably not your cup of tea, not somebody you'd want to have lunch with or have a beer with. Now that I'm the head coach, I want everybody on your staff. Someone who I would. I just enjoy their energy. I'd want to be around them outside of work. So that was my starting point. You know, from there, you know, I think you have to compliment yourself, you know. You know, I knew when I got to Idaho, I hadn't done a lot of Pacific Northwest recruiting, the Dakotas. I needed some guys who had some really strong connections and knew the lay of the land. Knew, you know, right off the bat, you know, what are the high schools we have to go to? Same thing. When we came here, here, we hadn't recruited Texas when we were up in Idaho, just because the travel, distance and cost. Well, New Mexico, that's our neighbor. I had to hire a few guys right away who I knew were dialed in Texas. And one thing that's helped me is having all those jobs and working under 12 different head coaches. I worked with a lot of people at the lower levels, and I was able to identify some really talented guys who I had worked with. We had a few guys last year. We had four coaches on our staff who got power four jobs right after the year years ended, and those were guys who never had had power four jobs. So I knew some kind of really talented, outstanding guys who just hadn't got that break yet. And then you also, you know, lean on your network. You know, our strength coach who does a tremendous job for us, he. He had worked with Rob Ar Rich, my first D coordinator at Idaho, who's now the D coordinator at Nebraska. And so he, you know, Rob just went to bat and he goes, I know you don't know this guy, but I'm telling you, he's really, really good. Yeah, he's been with us now five years. So I do think people I really trust who I've worked with, you know, I love when guys have skin in the game when they're recommending someone to come work with us, because I feel like a lot of people recommend someone to not work with them. But when they were saying, no, I want To. I want to work with this guy. I want to be back with this guy. That's powerful, but it's not 100%. But you got to. You got to really dig in. But I want the energy. You got to have people who can relate to the young people and connect with them, because there's so many coaches who know a lot of stuff, but it's all about what the players know, and you got to connect with them to get that across.
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You know, that's the one thing that's always fascinated me about the difference between a great mind versus a great coach. You can know every bit of football there is to know, and if you can't put it in someone else's mind, it's sort of like making a teacher ineffective. You are an ineffective teacher. If you can't put it in my mind now, I. I don't know that you can totally quantify what that skill is, but I imagine you realize pretty quickly whether a guy has it or not.
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No question. And like I said, a lot of. It's just. It's that. It's that energy. It's the thing that they want to be around. Because, you know, if you're. If your players don't want to be around the coach, they're not asking a lot of questions. They don't want the meeting to go longer. They're like, get this meeting over with so we can, you know, go back to the locker room and hang out. But if, you know, if they feel like they like the energy, they like the vibes, they feel like they're getting developed, and that's powerful. And coach. Coach Alvarez used to always say this to the staff, and this is something that's always stuck with me. He said that if. If your players feel like they're getting better, you're not going to have a morale problem. And I really think that's critical as a group of five school to try to keep guys from going in the transfer portal. You know, they have to feel like you're developing them and you're getting them better. And it's not, well, if I can go to a bigger school, I'm sure they're going to get developed better. So I think that is critical for your morale. Your team, your players are feeling like you're adding value to their life into their career by their experience of being part of your program.
- [24:09]
B
So people identify you. Currently, you're the head coach at New Mexico. You were the head coach at Idaho, coached in the Pacific Northwest. You've coached in the Northern Plains You've coached in Big Ten country, but you went to high school in Georgia.
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I did.
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Like you were, you were right in my backyard. And you're intimately familiar with the state of Georgia. So A, explain to people why you were there. And then B, like, what do you remember about Georgia? What stands out to you the most?
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I, you know, I've lived in like 14 states of my life. I was in a coaching family. You know, I didn't take the, you know, the easy route. You see a lot of the, the Bowden's or the Patinos where you have a, you know, a father son in the same sport. But my father was a Division 1 basketball coach, so I, it's tough to find any data. You know, he was the head coach at Toledo, so I'm, there might be some other father son, different sport, football, basketball, head coaches. There's none that I'm aware of. So we moved around a lot and we were, I went to junior high in Ohio and I was all set to go to high school there. And then they lost the Mac championship game by one point to Miami of Ohio and he kind of got pushed out of Toledo. So I, I kind of saw how my mom tried to talk me out of going into coaching because she saw that like where I went to high school was decided by one bucket. And he ended up working down in South Georgia in Albany. The team had two names over two years. It was the first year was the South Georgia Blues and then it was the Albany Sharpshooters of the Global Basketball Association. So he, he, he stopped us in Atlanta. We moved to Atlanta and went to St. Pius the 10th, spent all four years there. That league ended up going belly up. And then he got back into coaching at the college level at Loyola University Chicago, spring of my junior year. And I'm very thankful he let me stay and finish my senior year at St. Pius X in Atlanta. And you know, I think it, I think it capitalized my love of football. I mean, I was already moving that way. My body was more pulling guard than shooting guard, so it was a better fit to be in football. But you know, just seeing, having spring practice and pads, you know, having 10 practices and pads and you know, the, you definitely feel how important, you know, the football is in the south. And there's something special about it. I really enjoyed our time there. It was a little bit of an adjustment, getting used to the humidity and the heat and the summer workouts down there. And then it spoiled me because then when I went to my freshman year at Wisconsin, it was like the hardest winter of my life because you got spoiled by being down in the weather. But yeah, the Southeast football, that SEC footprint, you know, going to games. We had a great running back at our school. School who. Philip Rogers, who went to Georgia Tech. But, you know, I tag along with him and all of his visits and things. So I went to Georgia, to Sanford. I was a walk on at Wisconsin. So I wasn't very heavily recruited, but he was heavily recruited. So it was fun to go to those, you know, college visits, game day visits, you know, as a high school player.
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B
Now you were in high school, what years?
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I graduated 95, so my four years I played would have been 91 through 94. Had a lot of great, you know, players around there. Patrick Pass was at Tucker, one of our rival teams. Matt Harpering was a great quarterback for Marist and then ended up having a great NBA career with the Utah Jazz. A lot of good players throughout there in Georgia around that time.
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You're in, you're in the Atlanta area in, like, the sweet spot of sports history there. Braves have blown up in the 90s.
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Olympics.
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B
Olympics are coming to Atlanta in 1996. And I'm like, almost too young to remember, kid, at that point. I do remember, like, watching the Olympic torch come through. But, like, that's me. That's the bedrock of my childhood is remembering how great the Atlanta Braves got in the 90s and how like every, every bit of attention in the sports world all of a sudden shifted to Atlanta because of the Olympics.
- [27:51]
A
It was huge. We'd go to a lot of those games. My father grew up in Wisconsin, so he actually was a Milwaukee Braves fan as a young kid. So he, he kind of got caught up in that. And we'd go to games. I'm. I'm a Cubs fan. We know whenever the Cubs were in town, we. We'd go. Don't tell my principal. One day I skipped school for an afternoon businessman special to go special Cubs Braves game one spring. But. And then the Olympics. I went back. Even that was the summer after my freshman year at Wisconsin. I made sure I, you know, went back for that. To hang out for a few days with high school buddies and go around to some of those events. And that was a happening time in Atlanta.
- [28:28]
B
So, like, when you've been where you've been, you've experienced all the kinds of weather that the United States can offer from a football perspective. I haven't. So, like, I grew up in the south, so people from the south get painted as very soft you don't want to play up north in November and December, which is true. Like, we don't define cold. What is cold to you?
- [28:52]
A
To me, when we. We talk about that. And, like, when I was at South Dakota State, you know, we had playoff games in December, blizzards. We played Villanova in a sideways snowstorm in 2016, played Duquesne in a first round matchup where you could not see the field that was white. They were trying to shovel it off. To me, it's like anything else. It's something you can't control. You got to block out and focus on what you can control. So you embrace where you're at here. We embrace the Sunshine. We get 310 days easy to embrace. Yeah. Love the weather. We embrace that. You know, in Idaho, we played in the Dome. So you embraced having the Dome. And always the Dome.
- [29:29]
B
The dome.
- [29:30]
A
College football 14 made it famous, and, you know, it was the perfect weather always. But at South Dakota State, you know, the other three Dakota schools and FCs all played in domes, so we really leaned into that. And, you know, we'll tell recruits that, you know, hey, if you're going to play in Lambeau or Soldier Field and you're a pro, you gotta be ready to doing that. So I think you lean into it, and I think it's a unique thing in football that adds to something. And many people love watching those NFL games in December and January where weather has a factor and lean into whatever you have.
- [30:04]
B
I'm gonna ask a broad question, because you can take it anywhere you want, but as a head coach, you're still pretty new in that role, just a few years into that role. So I, of course, imagine you had a vision of how you'd handle things when you become a head coach and you got a game plan for everything, and then half of it gets thrown out the window when you start seeing how it really works. So take what you've done so far and what you've accomplished so far, but also, like, what you want to be, the vision for, where you want to go. Where are you on that whole timeline.
- [30:33]
A
Personally, you learned so much your first year as a head coach, because there was a lot of things when I first got to Idaho. Yeah, I haven't thought of that or I didn't know we had to do this or that type of things. You know, I. I was never a great budget guy, just even with my family and stuff. So now you're looking at all these numbers and trying to put this together. So I learned so much, and I Did that much better prepared me for the transaction coming here just because I knew what to expect. I knew, you know, that that first 30 days when you get a job is like drinking through a fire hose. You know, so many people are, you know, you have like 600 on return text messages and it's, you know, some people just congratulate and you have people who want jobs, people who have a player they want you to recruit. And it's, it's overwhelming. And I think being prepared for that the second time around, you kind of know what it takes and you know how you got to organize your day. So I've learned a lot through the process. I think it was a smoother transition coming here. I think we're still, you know, still evolving. I think the, the thing that, that I, that I've tried to do with our staff this year is I think, you know, one of my strengths was creativity and driving that when I was more centered on, you know, running the offense as an offensive coordinator. And I've really tried, as we had some adjustments to our staff this year, I tried to really target that because you have to stay on the cutting edge. You have to keep having new ideas, you have to keep, you know, tweaking things. And in college football, the rules have changed a lot recently just with all the off the field stuff. I think the, the key with that is you have to stay ahead of the curve.
- [32:02]
B
There's a lot of talk about the way G5/G6 football is covered. It always really heats up around the playoff. Cause everyone's got this opinion on should there be an auto bid or not, should the G5 have its own playoff? And I always find myself conflicted because purely from a product standpoint, I'd love to watch a G5 playoff. And it'd make more sense then from a practical standpoint. Okay, but that's a financial cord that you're completely severing. So I get both sides. Truthfully, if I structured the playoff, I'd probably keep that G5 inclusion, even though like it doesn't serve my own personal self view of sports or whatever. But you're in the middle of this. You're a head coach at this level. So how aggressive do you have to get, not just for your program, but like for that entire moniker to make sure I'm doing my part to make sure we're viewed the right way, talked about the right way, represented the right way. Here's what I'd love for us to do or here's how I'd love this world to exist. How much of that responsibility do you feel?
- [33:02]
A
I feel responsibility for that. I think every time I talk to our team, I said every time you play a game against a team like that, you know, we got to compete. Because I, I think there's probably some TV executives out there who wish there were no Power 4 FCS games or Power 4 Group of Five games. And every game was Power 4 or even SEC versus Big Ten game that way. So I think how you handle yourself, how you compete in those games are important. I do think access to the playoff is important. And I know folks keep tweaking the rules. They tweak the rules right away. When Boise got a home game to make sure that didn't happen again, then they tweaked the rules. When two teams snuck in, they, that, you know, really was more of the ACC's tiebreaker issue. They wish they had the Mountain west tiebreaker. It didn't help us last year, but it was a better tiebreaker for getting the best teams in there. I think we have to have that. But I, you know, I think there, there could be some creativity. You know, I wouldn't mind seeing if, you know, if one team went to that, then maybe the best other six group of six teams have a little playoff. And especially if we're moving the season up, I think that could be some great, you know, TV things because people still tune into those bowl games, the TV ratings for those bowl games, the two group of six teams are better than NBA regular season games. So I do think, I feel that every time as a group of six school, you're representing that. And I'm sure those coaches didn't feel too bad because they got big jobs right away. But, you know, I'm sure they were not happy that they didn't have close playoff games because that opens up the conversations of, well, they didn't belong, we should, we should get rid of them. But, you know, I think you want what's best for football. And again, the problem now is all the players transfer up and you see how fewer FCS and group of six programs are getting guys drafted because of the, the movement of talent upwards because of the money. You know, you, you hope that that doesn't ever discourage programs to the part where they start cutting programs and not funding it because those still are valuable training grounds that, you know, if it wasn't for Ferris State football, that quarterback at Ole Miss true wouldn't have got developed to lead them to, to the semifinals like they did. So you hope it doesn't get to that point. And you know, I've coached at Division 2, I've coached at FCS. So I, I do, I try to keep the best of college football as a whole, including those lower levels and my thoughts of what's best for the game going forward. But I am, I am concerned at some point there may be a time where the Power 4 schools say, all right, we're going to have you see it just creeping eight conference games to nine. Or they eventually they say, hey, we're not going to play fcs. We're not going to play group of six. And that's be a shame.
- [35:33]
B
You know, I think you guys last year popping a nine win season took a lot of people by surprise. I don't, I don't know what the local preseason expectation level was, but I'm almost certain you exceeded whatever the preseason expectation level was. So then you enter this year and you've got the, you know, the expectation level all of a sudden is there because you've set a precedent and you gotta obviously make sure you hit reset in the building. There's no complacency that sets in. There's none of that. But there's also big changes in your conference. Like, there are a lot of teams that used to be in this conference that now have migrated to the new PAC 12. So, like, the landscape of the conference is different too. So, I mean, how much of a player do you expect to be in this conference race this year? It's still spring, obviously, but how good can this team be this year?
- [36:20]
A
I think we can compete for a conference championship. And I, every day when I drive in, I look up at the back of the press box. We haven't won a conference championship here since 1964. It's been a long time and, you know, we lost a lot of good programs. So, I mean, it was in some ways a shame that the league broke up, but Boise State had been a power. I mean, that's an amazing run they've had over countless different head coaches have done a great job. Coach Danielson's doing a great job there now. But you lose a team like that has been picked to win this league 20 straight years. That opens things up. And I, I really thought coming here that that was my goal, is to make it where New Mexico was a consistent contender every year. And I, and I think, you know, we'll be up there and, you know, new and obviously be very good this year. Coach Mullen does a great job. Coach Chang's done a good job at Hawaii I think they'll be tough. And then North Dakota State, I played them a lot when I was at South Dakota State. They're going to be a good, good addition to the league and I wouldn't be surprised if they're right in the top. And then with the transfer portal, you can't. It's tough to judge. There'll be somebody like we were last year, the team who no one thought and we were picked to finish 11th last year in the league and then we tied for the regular season title. There'll be somebody like that in the league too. It makes a big jump up because they do a good job in the portal. So it'll be a challenge. But I think we can factor certainly in this race and I expect us to be there every year.
- [37:33]
B
Jason, this is our first trip to New Mexico as a state, not just the university. You took care of us, man. We appreciate it.
- [37:39]
A
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