'We expect to win': Here's what Tony Sanchez has to say about leading the NMSU football program

Tony Sanchez, a wide receiver for the New Mexico State football program in the mid 1990s, came home to Las Cruces ahead of the 2022 season — as the team’s wide receiver coach — and found things were about the same as he remembered. NMSU was still losing, counting just seven wins over their last four seasons. Finances were still thin. Attendance was on a downward trajectory.

The locker room Sanchez remembered from his playing days? To his shock, exactly the same. Only thing new was the set of hands inheriting old, daunting problems the brief peaks of the last 25 years couldn’t solve.

“When we got here, we wanted to do a lot of things,” Sanchez said on Wednesday. “We wanted to move the program forward. We knew we needed — you know, you gotta get that first win. We gotta create a little bit of success out here.

“I mean, it was just like needle pricks.”

To Sanchez, the change he saw from then to now — mainly, losing to winning — made Wednesday, when he was introduced as the team’s 36th head coach, only that much more exciting.

“There’s a new standard here,” Sanchez said. “We don’t wanna win anymore — we expect to win. And that’s gonna be our attitude to every single day moving forward.”

Sanchez spoke to fans, university officials and media gathered in the Villanueva Victory Club at Aggie Memorial Stadium. The former Aggie receiver and graduate assistant replaces former head coach Jerry Kill, who led NMSU to a 17-10 record, back-to-back bowl games and unprecedented success over the last two seasons as the helm.

After splitting 11 seasons as the head coach at prep powerhouse Bishop Gorman High School (Nevada) and UNLV, Sanchez spent a year as an offensive analyst at TCU before Kill hired him as NMSU’s wide receivers coach. Sanchez was subsequently elevated to head coach in the wake of Kill’s abrupt resignation on Dec. 23, a decision NMSU athletic director Mario Moccia attributed to Sanchez’s previous experience.

“We had a lot of really good coaches that I thought might have the ability to take over,” Moccia added on Wednesday. “In my opinion, Tony was the most ready. And that’s why we made this selection.”

Sanchez has not yet signed a contract, but Moccia told reporters he’s expected to sign a five-year deal within the next 48 hours. Moccia has previously said Sanchez’s contract is expected to be in the same “ballpark” as Kill’s original contract of $600,000.

In leading the Aggies, Sanchez said he’ll be pulling from his time at UNLV, seasons spent coaching under Kill and former TCU head coach Gary Patterson and the year he spent away from the game in 2020. After he parted ways with UNLV on Nov. 25, 2019, Sanchez said his first season off in 22 years gave him an “awesome” opportunity to reflect on how he could improve going forward.

“I just think life makes you better,” he added. “I mean, I know that there’s a path to winning here and we’re gonna stick to it. I think we’ll be better in every facet, just from having the experience and being around a bunch of guys and seeing things that, ‘hey we did that really well, hey we could do that a little bit better,’ whether it’s in the recruiting area, whether it’s in diet and nutrition, whether it’s in strength and conditioning.

“There’s a lot of little things you can tweak. I guess that’s the goal for all of us, right? (In) our jobs and whatever we do in life: how do we make it a little bit better today?”

If minor tweaks are expected, major ones aren’t. Sanchez said there’s no reason to rip up the foundation Kill largely helped set, even if there’s some slight differences between how the two manage the program on a daily basis.

“Our plan’s not going to change,” Sanchez said. “We’ve got great coordinators here, we’ve got great coaches on the staff that have been intimately involved in everything we’ve done the last couple years. We can have the same type of success.

“I was telling Mario, I said, ‘What’s success here?’ You know, we gotta find a way to get to that third (consecutive) bowl game for the first time (in program history). We have to find a way to get ourselves back into a conference championship game.”

In other words: Keeping things the way he found it.

“It’s not gonna be easy,” Sanchez said. “It’s never going to be easy. It’s not easy anywhere. But we’re committed to it … I know we’ll continue to move this thing forward.

“We had a great path laid out in front of us and we’re gonna continue traveling down on it and challenging everybody in our way.”