“He walked up to me when I was working and said, ‘I’m Craig Neal, I play for the Ft. Wayne Fury,’” Janet Neal said, referring to Craig Neal’s stint with the CBA’s Fort Wayne Fury. “I told him the Fury stink, or some other word. Then he told me, ‘Not anymore. They just traded for me.’ ”

The new University of New Mexico basketball head coach, Craig Neal, puts on the red jacket between Athletic Director Paul Krebs, left, and Deputy Athletic Director Tim Cass during a press conference in the Pit on Wednesday, April 3, 2013.

Wednesday, as he donned the familiar cherry blazer for the first time as the new head men’s basketball coach of the University of New Mexico Lobos, Craig Neal displayed that same confidence that first caught his wife’s attention — and then a healthy dose of the humility and emotion that made her fall in love with him.

When he wasn’t charming the collected Lobos fans, players, boosters and UNM employees in the Pit with talk of carrying on the success of the program from the past six seasons as associate head coach under Steve Alford, Neal was wiping away tears while talking about his family — wife and sons Cullen and Dalton — and the unexpected “groundswell of support” for him to get the job in the past four days.

“This is one of the happiest days of my life, between my two sons being born,” said Neal, known affectionately by most since high school as “Noodles” because he was such a scrawny kid.

Neal, who starred collegiately at Georgia Tech before an NBA playing and coaching career, replaces Alford, his friend since third grade. Alford announced Saturday he would leave Albuquerque to take the head coaching job at UCLA.

UNM gave Neal a five-year contract with $750,000 per year in base salary and compensation with an additional $130,000-plus available in incentives. Those incentives include:

♦ $20,000 for either a Mountain West regular season or tournament championship

♦ $25,000 for a Sweet 16 appearance

♦ $30,000 for an Elite 8 appearance

♦ $40,000 for a Final Four appearance

♦ $5,000 for being named Coach of the Year

♦ $5,000 for a team grade point average of 2.7 with no academically ineligible players

♦ $5,000 for a team Academic Progress Report score of 950

♦ $1,000 for each win over a Top 25 team

Alford was to be paid $1.25 million in base salary and compensation next season with more than $700,000 in incentives.

Neal said his biggest concern since Alford’s announcement has been to reach out to current players and recruits.

“I’m very excited. I think we’re all very excited,” UNM senior-to-be guard Kendall Williams said. “I have a great relationship with him. He’s the guy that recruited me, and especially for a guy like me that only has one year left, I was very happy they kept it in house.”

The return of teammates Tony Snell and Alex Kirk, as Snell has declared for the NBA Draft (he has until April 16 to withdraw his name), is still in question. Kirk has suggested an early graduation in August and a transfer to UCLA to follow Alford if Neal wasn’t hired. Both were wearing Lobos shirts and sporting huge smiles during Wednesday’s press conference.

“Right now with a Top 10 team in this room,” Neal said, “I don’t see any reason for anybody to leave.”

As for recruits, there was one in the front row of Wednesday’s audience that seemed to be the center of attention for many. Cullen Neal, Craig’s son who is a senior at Eldorado High School and who has already signed a National Letter of Intent to play for the St. Mary’s Gaels next season, may change his mind and stay home to play for his dad.

“If his mom’s good at recruiting,” Craig Neal said, “we’ll have a shot.”

Cullen, wearing a Lobos T-shirt, said a final decision on that has not been made.

Neal announced he is retaining assistant coaches Drew Adams and Craig Snow as well as video coordinator Brandon Mason and strength and conditioning coach Diego Baca.

Neal took the opportunity several times Wednesday to acknowledge the former coach at UNM that helped him prepare for his new job.

“I can’t thank him enough,” Neal said of Alford. “Steve set the bar really high and I’m going to jump over it.”

A week prior, Alford said the Sweet 16 was not an appropriate benchmark yet to measure the Lobos program, who lost as a No. 3 seed to No. 14 Harvard on March 21 in Salt Lake City in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Wednesday, it took just three questions before Neal was asked about that thus-far elusive goal for the program.

“We’re all disappointed in our performance in the NCAA Tournament,” Neal said. “We all want to do better and we’re going to strive to do better. … I talked to the players and we’ve got to get better in that tournament.”

On Wednesday, Neal unquestionably won the news conference minus one small gaffe. He compared the wait after Alford’s departure then the sudden elation of landing the job to childbirth — “I gave him the look,” Janet Neal said afterward. “Did you see me? I gave him the look like, ‘Really? It was hard for you?’ ”

Neal said expectations for the program should remain high from the fan base he said is one of the most “special” in the nation. While he frequently alluded to Alford’s mentoring and the goal to maintain success, he added he’ll speed up the offense and use a pressing defense on occasion, unlike his predecessor.

“We’re going to change some things,” Neal said. “I’m my own man. … I’ll put my own identity on it.”

In the days since Alford’s abrupt departure — UNM athletic director Paul Krebs pointed out the wait was a mere 80 hours between Alford’s announcement and Tuesday evening’s decision to hire Neal— boosters, players, recruits, fans, former Lobos and coaches around the country reached out to make it known to Krebs that there was no reason to prolong the inevitable.

“What I was hearing from everyone was he was ready,” Krebs said.

Krebs added that while he was aware Neal had a very big role with the team in the past six years, he was almost surprised to learn just how many of the day-to-day operations and final team decisions Neal actually orchestrated.

Krebs said there was plenty of interest in the job from around the country, and he did not want to make an emotional decision on hiring the next head coach. But it quickly became apparent that the man groomed for the job for the past six seasons at UNM and three prior to that under Alford at Iowa was the man for the job.

UNM President Robert Frank said he realized Neal was the man for the job during a Tuesday evening conversation with Neal.

“Paul said, ‘I’ve been talking to all these guys around the country and they all said you have the best guy right there in your backyard,’” Frank said. “… So (Tuesday) I got to have a conversation with Coach Neal, and I sat down and we were just a few minutes into the conversation when it became very clear to me that I had one smart, ferocious wolf right in our back yard.”

Frank and Krebs asked Neal to leave the room, and a few minutes later invited him back in to offer him the job.

“I was blown away,” Neal said. “I wanted it to happen so fast, and then all of a sudden I felt shocked by how fast it all happened. I was totally surprised they offered it to me.”

UNM did pay $2,500 to Collegiate Sports Associates, an executive search firm specializing in national coaching searches, but not to seek out other candidates. Krebs and deputy athletic director Tim Cass took care of trying to identify new candidates. CSA was retained to do the background check on Neal.

When three days of that came back with the same sort of glowing reviews from others around the college and professional basketball world as Krebs and Cass had already been hearing from the Lobo Nation, the decision was an easy one.

SCHEDULING: Asked if there could possibly be a UCLA-UNM home-and-home scheduling series down the road, Neal said, “I’ll ask him.” He then said that may have to be something settled by a bet on the golf course this offseason with Alford.

Neal then announced that the coming season’s scheduled December road game with Valparaiso, a contractually obligated game after Valpo played in the Pit this past season, will be moved to the 2014-15 season. UNM will play either Stanford or Washington in an ESPN game on Dec. 20 in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nev.

FASHION: Neal spoke to two fashion statements he plans to carry over from the Alford era. One being the cherry blazer — 44 long by the way — and the other being wearing celebratory championship nets around his neck.

“I’ve got to win one first,” Neal said of a championship that would lead to the celebratory cutting down of a net. “But, yeah. Once we get one, I’ll wear it around my neck.”

LOBOS LINKS: Roster | Schedule/Results | Geoff Grammer’s blog

— This article appeared on page A01 of the Albuquerque Journal