Peerman: Even if NMSU wrongfully terminated Moccia, it was the right thing to do

A fine line exists between doing the right thing and not doing anything wrong.

Mario Moccia, the former athletics director at New Mexico State University, has been walking that line for years.

Last week, NMSU fired Moccia for cause. Moccia may file, and in my estimation would win, a wrongful termination lawsuit. However, it’s never the wrong time to do the right thing.

In place of Peerman’s Power Rankings, here are my thoughts on Moccia’s decade as director of athletics at NMSU, my alma mater.

Moccia was by and large an exceptional athletics director.

That statement comes from someone who was born and raised in Las Cruces, graduated from NMSU and lived most of his adult life in southern New Mexico. I’ve been following the Aggies intently for nearly four decades and during my lifetime, they reached no greater heights than when under Moccia’s command.

He had to get creative to sustain winning programs, and that includes bringing in coaches and athletes who either are unproven or have a liability or two. Increased risk can increase the reward, such as on the stock market. And hindsight will show Moccia mostly invested wisely, increasing the Aggies’ stock during his tenure. Aggie Nation loved him for this.

However, Moccia made one massive mistake. He entrusted the men’s basketball team to a coach whose lack of integrity and discipline set the athletic department’s flagship program back years.

Moccia would fire first-year head coach Greg Heiar in February 2023, and nearly two years later, the program’s stock drop would eventually catch up to the athletics director.

NMSU president Valerio Ferme started Jan. 1 and his first act was to move on from Moccia.

The new president is hanging this decision on a New Mexico Department of Justice investigation that in part reported a “toxic culture” within the men’s basketball program two years ago and, according to Attorney General Raul Torrez, identified “institutional deficiencies that allowed that misconduct to go unaddressed by leaders inside the university.”

How toxic? Consider:

Players physically assaulted UNM students during a football game, a beat-down caught on camera

• and posted around social media. An NMSU official would later say players were “disciplined,” but the nature of the discipline, if any, has never been made public.
• One of the players involved in that brawl, on a business trip to play at UNM brought a gun with him on the team bus — a violation of student code of conduct

. The player snuck out of the team hotel, past curfew, to meet a girl. Turned out, she was scheming with the UNM students who got beat up to lure the player on to campus. Once on campus, the player

• . The player was shot and injured and in self-defense, the player shot and killed one of the students. After being shot, the player’s first call was not to police, but to teammates — also out past curfew — at a nearby party, who came to the scene to pick up the gun and his iPad before police arrived.
• Separate from the shooting, two players on that team would

, sexually, and humiliated in the team locker room, on the team bus and in the team hotels — and that coaches knew this and did nothing to stop it. After NMSU saw the evidence, attorneys decided it was best to

• to the two players and the father of one of those players instead of having a civil jury — which would have access to that same evidence — decide whether the university was responsible and how much it should pay those who filed suit.
• In an ongoing civil lawsuit,

• allege they too were victims of assault and that there was a pervasive and unsafe gun culture within the team — the player even alleging a teammate once pointed a gun at him.

“Toxic” is not a strong enough word.

After the sexual assault allegations came to light, NMSU rightfully ended the season early and fired Heiar.

“In the time since these allegations were first brought to the university’s attention, NMSU has launched multiple investigations, canceled the remainder of the previous basketball season, terminated our previous head coach, and begun to put safeguards in place to ensure this never happens again,” an NMSU spokesperson said in a text message to the Las Cruces Sun-News in October 2023. “We now have a completely new coaching staff and a completely different group of student-athletes in place and we look forward to them representing this university with integrity.”

Moccia, NMSU athletics director since 2015, made it through this situation nearly unscathed.

In fact, the last act of outgoing NMSU president Dan Arvizu in April 2023 was to give Moccia a pay raise and extend his contract through 2028.

State leaders took exception. A few weeks later, the state asked the justice department to do its own investigation into the allegations surrounding the men’s basketball team and said the state wouldn’t pay Moccia’s salary until the investigation was complete. The Aggie Athletic Club, the fundraising arm of the NMSU athletics department, would pay Moccia’s salary. That’s about $300,000 to $400,000 a year the AAC would line-item for Moccia’s salary instead of those monies directly benefiting student athletes.

Moccia and NMSU leaders seem to have legitimately been doing what they said they would do to help create a safer environment for student athletes.

The NMDOJ concluded: “Since 2022-23, NMSU has made significant improvements in many areas. The University has dedicated its attention to sexual assault and hazing education, prevention and response.” And the reported added: “But there is more work to do.”

Why couldn’t Moccia do this work? He’ll argue no investigation — and there have been more than a few — in the wake of the 2022-23 men’s basketball program’s downfall — concluded Moccia be fired.

Maybe Ferme has a “smoking gun,” some incident wherein Moccia didn’t do or refused to do something to benefit student safety, but from what’s been said publicly and available in public documentation, I don’t see it.

Timing-wise, I believe Moccia was wrongfully terminated.

He should rightfully have been terminated, with cause, in early 2023.

One of the stated core values on the NMSU Student Life website: “As Aggies, we are accountable for behaviors and actions. Accountability means more than just doing what’s right — it is an obligation to act with integrity, to make things better for others, and to do things in ways that further the goals of New Mexico State University.”

Just as Heiar, who was accountable for his players’ behavior and actions, Moccia was accountable for Heiar’s behavior and actions. By late November 2023, Moccia knew what kind of program Heiar was running and did nothing.

The father of one of the abused players told police he tried contacting Heiar and Moccia first, but when he couldn’t get a call back, he decided to involve the authorities. It wasn’t until that police report became public that Moccia acted. Too late.

The culture within the 2022-23 men’s basketball program was embarrassingly noxious at least — and potentially criminal at most — and as this happened under Moccia’s watch, his responsibility as captain was to resign. He didn’t do anything wrong, but that would have been the right thing to do. Arvizu also had a chance to do the right thing but wrongly awarded Moccia a golden parachute.

Nearly two years after Arvizu left, NMSU would finally have a permanent president in place.

Ferme’s first act was to fire Moccia and promote Amber Burdge to acting athletics director.

“From my perspective, you have to have a little bit of humility as an institution to say, let’s look at what happened,” Ferme said during a news conference announcing the change in athletic leadership. “Let’s take responsibility for some of it. Let’s see what we’re doing well, let’s see what we’re not doing.

“And then having the courage to say, you know what, we really need to move forward.”

That’s the right thing to do.