UNM hires Bronco Mendenhall to lead football program

Everyone’s a Lobo.

But there’s only one Bronco.

New Mexico hired Bronco Mendenhall as its next head football coach, the Journal learned late Tuesday.

Mendenhall, 57, compiled a 135-81 record over 17 seasons as a head coach at BYU and Virginia. The Alpine, Utah native and Oregon State graduate also served as UNM’s defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach under former head coach Rocky Long from 1998-2001 before taking the same role at BYU.

Mendenhall will succeed former head coach Danny Gonzales, who was fired on Nov. 25 after a 4-8 season. Gonzales accumulated an 11-32 record over four seasons at the helm.

Gonzales was paid $700,000 in 2023. With new Nevada head coach Jeff Choate set to make up to $1.05 million a year, Gonzales’ pay rate would have ranked second-to-last among the 12 Mountain West coaches.

Mendenhall’s contract details were not immediately available late Tuesday. UNM would not comment on the possible hire.

After abruptly resigning from Virginia in 2021, Mendenhall had indicated he may be interested in taking on another rebuild. UNM, which hasn’t had a winning season since 2016 and has historically struggled, fits that billing.

Climbing the coaching ladder

A defensive back and team captain at Oregon State in 1986-87, Mendenhall started his coaching career as a graduate assistant with the Beavers before working his way up the coaching ladder as a position coach or coordinator at Snow College (Utah), Northern Arizona and Louisiana Tech.

In 1998, at 32 years old, he was named UNM’s defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach. With a future Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Brian Urlacher manning the UNM defense, Mendenhall helped rebuild the Lobos into a winning program.

After a 6-5 season in 2002, Mendenhall took on the defensive coordinator role at BYU. Two seasons into his tenure with the Cougars, former head coach Gary Crowton resigned in 2004 and Mendenhall nearly left Provo, Utah to become the defensive coordinator at UNLV.

But Kyle Whittingham — then the defensive coordinator at Utah and the Cougars’ first choice — rejected BYU’s initial offer, bringing Mendenhall back into the fold. He was hired as head coach in December 2004.

BYU stumbled out the gate to a 1-3 start in his first season before finishing with a 6-6 record. The program promptly ripped off 19 straight Mountain West wins on its way to back-to-back conference titles in 2006 and 2007, a revitalization of BYU’s once-proud football tradition.

Mendenhall notched three more double-digit win seasons at BYU but hinted in 2011 that he might not finish his career with the Cougars. Regardless, his decision to part ways with BYU in 2015 stunned many around college football.

Utah to Virginia

In considering his next stop after BYU, Mendenhall told ESPN’s Edward Aschoff he wanted to coach at a school that cared about something other than football, was in a Power Five conference and was generally “awful.”

Virginia checked all those boxes. Mendenhall was announced as the Cavaliers’ next head coach on Dec. 4, 2015, inheriting a 4-8 team that was consistently rated at the bottom of the Atlantic Coast Conference and hadn’t beaten rival Virginia Tech in 12 years.

After a 2-10 first season, Mendenhall led Virginia to three straight bowl games before peaking in 2019. In his fourth year in Charlottesville, Mendenhall and Cavaliers snapped a 15-game losing streak to the Hokies to clinch their spot in the program’s first-ever ACC title game.

Mendenhall led Virginia to a 5-5 season in the 2020 COVID-19 seasib, and then to a 6-6 finish in 2021.

But unbeknownst to his team, Mendenhall was considering leaving coaching altogether. He made his decision to resign — but not retire — public on Dec. 2, 2021, shocking college football once more.

“I don’t know what’s next,” Mendenhall said in a press conference at the time. “But if I didn’t think the decision was necessary to add more value, then I wouldn’t have done it. So this isn’t to break and pause and then become irrelevant.

“This is actually to break and pause to then become hopefully more impactful and helping and developing and teaching and serving others. So I’m excited about that. What is it going to look like? I don’t know. There’s no remorse. There’s emotion.”

A break in Montana

Long known as one of the game’s most cerebral and thoughtful personalities, Mendenhall moved to northeast Montana with his wife, Holly. An ESPN profile by David Hale in 2022 detailed a life spent fly-fishing, riding horses and reflecting on reaching “maximum” renewal before a possible return to coaching.

“There are so many ways to look at this in terms of challenges and reasons to get out,” Mendenhall told Hale in 2022. “But with that, there’s new opportunities to really make a difference in terms of stability and emphasis and purpose. There might be people leaving the profession, and I might be one of the people running back in.”

Mendenhall had previously been mentioned as a candidate for other jobs in 2022, even going on ESPN’s College Gameday podcast last year to pitch himself. He expressed interest in completing another rebuild similar to his work at previous spots.

“I would argue there’s not a more prepared, rested, and focused head coach on Earth in Power 5 than I am right now,” Mendenhall told Rece Davis on ESPN’s College Gameday podcast. “All that’s happened is solidifying my true intent, which is delivering, I think, really, really strong results, especially to rebuilding programs.

“BYU was struggling when I inherited that program and we won for a long time. Virginia, that was a struggling program when we started, and five bowl-eligible seasons in six years hadn’t been done in like, 22 years.”

Mendenhall entered the 2023 cycle as another candidate, cited by multiple publications — including the Journal — as a possible choice to replace Gonzales. Less than two weeks after the job opened up, Mendenhall has been tabbed as the Lobos’ next head coach.

Coach Bronco in action through the years