The mess at New Mexico State

The Aggies' once-proud men's basketball program was mired in a series of controversies this past season. Within that university's athletic department, the misdeeds hardly end there.

Editor’s note: This story contains alleged accounts of sexual assault. If you or someone you know is a survivor of sexual assault, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or at https://www.rainn.org.

Tucked away in southern New Mexico about 40 miles north of the United States-Mexico border, New Mexico State University exists as something of an outpost.

With only one Division I school within a three-hour drive of their Las Cruces campus, the Aggies have been nomads for much of their recent history, with four different conference affiliations since 1983 and with a fifth on the way. Beyond their semi-regular appearances on NCAA men’s basketball tournament brackets, they can fly under the radar in the broader world of college athletics.

This year, that has all changed – and in the worst, most ghastly way imaginable.

For the better part of the past seven months, the NMSU men’s basketball program has been a magnet for controversy, with each development creating more unsavory headlines than the last.  Beginning with a brawl at a football game against archrival New Mexico on Oct. 15, the Aggies have been tied to a deadly shooting involving one of their players in Albuquerque, an investigation into lewd and potentially criminal behavior from a handful of their players toward a pair of teammates, a lawsuit stemming from that investigation, the firing of their first-year coach 24 games into his tenure and the cancelation of their season with at least a month left to play. Whenever it seems like things can’t get worse, they invariably do.

And, sadly, it’s not confined to the men’s basketball program, either, as the women’s basketball and football programs have also been the subject of unsettling allegations over the past year.  Overseeing it all has been a group of administrators who have done little to inspire confidence in their ability or even desire to clean up an unmitigated mess.

For a program at its level, NMSU has a proud men’s basketball history. Prior to this past year, it had made the NCAA Tournament 10 times in the previous 16 years and in 2022, it even won a game, knocking off a Connecticut team that would coast to a national title 12 months later. Among its 26 all-time tournament appearances are five Sweet 16s and a Final Four appearance, in 1970. The Aggies’ women’s program made the tournament four times in a five-year stretch from 2015-19. Even their football program, a perennial doormat, competed in and won just its second bowl game since 1960 this past season, its first under coach Jerry Kill.

But what should be a time of celebratory time for NMSU has been anything but, as the school and its athletic department are becoming an embodiment of the distasteful and seedier side of college sports.