Lobo football can only hope portal swings both ways
Dec. 10—For the New Mexico Lobos, the transfer-portal dominoes have continued to fall — complicating coach Danny Gonzales' already daunting task in digging the program out of a 7-24 hole after three seasons at his alma mater.
Such is life for a college football program coming off a 2-10 season in the transfer-portal era.
By Friday evening, Gonzales' program had lost three of its most productive defensive starters.
Freshman All-America safety A.J. Haulcy's Twitter declaration Thursday evening was followed an hour-and-a-half later by that of sophomore safety Ronald Wilson.
On Tuesday, defensive end Jake Saltonstall, a senior with a graduate-transfer season available, entered the portal. Those three players combined in 2022 for 160 tackles, four interceptions, three forced fumbles, six passes defended and one quarterback sack.
With their departures, a potential six seasons of eligibility are lost.
On Friday, redshirt sophomore tight end/fullback Jaden Hullaby and defensive end Jaden Phillips became the latest Lobos to enter the portal. Hullaby rushed 13 times for 59 yards and caught two passes for 44 yards this past season. Phillips, a sophomore from Clovis, had 20 tackles, three tackles for loss and a sack.
God got me ????https://t.co/kzqhSZ9FFN pic.twitter.com/PL4JWhl9Fn
— Jaden Phillips (@jaden9hillips) December 9, 2022
As of Friday afternoon, a total of 10 2022 Lobos were known to have entered the portal.
In addition to Haulcy, Wilson, Saltonstall, Hullaby and Phillips, they are:
Wide receiver Geordon Porter; quarterback Connor Genal; running back Christian Jourdain; safety Benji Johnson, and wide receiver Antonio Hunt.
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Of those five, only Porter (22 catches, 322 yards, two touchdowns) was a major contributor in 2022. He was a senior with a super-senior season (allowed for those who played during the pandemic) remaining.
The transfer portal, of course, flows both ways. UNM, no doubt, will have some portal people among the new Lobos announced on signing day, Dec. 21. And no one player is irreplaceable.
Players like Haulcy, though, don't come around often. His brilliant true-freshman career — 87 tackles (24 in a single game), two interceptions, two forced fumbles, a fumble recovery — will make him an extremely popular target on the open market.
How college football has changed.
When former UNM football coaches battled though losing seasons to eventually find some success, it was by finding, retaining and developing young players like Haulcy.
Bob Davie's recruiting class of 2013 — Dakota Cox, Teriyon Gipson, Lamar Jordan, Nik D'Avanzo, Damien Gamblin, Reno Henderson, William Udeh, et al — endured a 3-9 season that fall. Those players went on to form the core of Davie's winning teams in 2015-16.
Gonzales was a first-year UNM graduate assistant under head coach Rocky Long in 1999 when the Lobos signed, among others, Dwight Counter, Jason Lenzmeier, Brandon Ratcliff, D.J. Renteria and Justin Colburn. The Lobos went 4-7 that year.
Three years later, with all the above players contributing, UNM went to its first bowl game since 1961. They played in back-to-back bowl games before finishing their Lobo careers.
Those players opted to stay rather than leave when their Lobo teams didn't win initially. But leaving, at least for another NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision school, would have meant sitting out a season.
Had the transfer portal existed then, not to mention NIL opportunities, would they have stayed? Some, probably so; all, probably not.
That's the slippery slope Gonzales is facing today.Â
