Wright: Local recruiting is not an exact science, but …

Sound familiar?

Spurned by the New Mexico Lobos in the recruiting process, despite having been in on 145 tackles as a Volcano Vista senior in 2021, linebacker Tyler Martinez went the juco route — signing with New Mexico Military Institute.

In his one season at NMMI, in 2022, he made a team-high 83 tackles. Still, no scholarship offer from UNM.

New Mexico State saw it otherwise.

Last season as an NMSU junior, Martinez led the Aggies with 96 total tackles. He was a second-team All-Conference USA selection in 2024 and is a first-team All-CUSA preseason pick this season.

As did his fellow VVHS grad, NMMI star and NMSU Aggie Diego Pavia, Martinez has not forgotten UNM’s rejection of his talents. An offer from his hometown school to walk on was, if anything, an insult.

Pavia, you’ll recall, responded to UNM’s walk-on offer and withholding of a scholarship with an insult of his own (look it up).

Martinez hasn’t taken his resentment to the lengths that Pavia did, but the resentment is there.

“It’s definitely a personal game for me,” Martinez said on Monday during the Aggies’ weekly news conference, five days before Saturday’s Lobos-Aggies game at University Stadium. “Out of high school, I felt like I did everything I could, you know, to get an offer, and they just never looked at me. … I come with that attitude every time we play them.”

In 2023, when Pavia led NMSU to a 27-17 victory over the Lobos in Albuquerque, Martinez made one tackle as an Aggies backup. Last fall, in a 50-40 New Mexico victory in Las Cruces, he led the Aggies with 11 total tackles.

As was true with Pavia, or so it appears, Martinez was a Lobo for the asking. The Lobos didn’t ask — at least, not with a scholarship offer.

Hey, look. You can’t recruit everyone just because they’re local. Some of those kids from Texas and California are pretty good, or so I’ve heard.

Besides, a preferred walk-on offer is not chopped liver. If Pavia and Martinez had really, truly wanted to be Lobos, they could have swallowed their pride, come to UNM as walk-ons and earned a scholarship.

Linebacker Cody Moon, a teammate of Pavia and Martinez at Volcano Vista, walked on at UNM and led the Lobos in total tackles (105) in 2022. And, yes, he earned a scholarship.

Every player and every situation, of course, is different. Few coaches if any would have looked at the gangly Moon during his senior year at Volcano Vista and predicted he’d go on to lead a Division I FBS college football team in tackles.

Pavia, in contrast, was a star quarterback (and a state champion wrestler) at VVHS who went on to lead NMMI to a national junior-college championship.

Since then, after two seasons at New Mexico State, Pavia has become a seminal figure in college athletics for successfully petitioning for four seasons of NCAA eligibility after having played two seasons of junior-college football.

So far this season, all he’s done is lead the Vanderbilt Commodores to a 4-0 record and a No. 18 national ranking.

Nostradamus could not have predicted all that. Yet, crystal clearly, then-UNM coach Danny Gonzales — whatever his thought process was at the time — made a terribly damaging decision not to offer Pavia a scholarship.

As a prospect, coming out of Volcano Vista, Martinez fell somewhere between a Moon and a Pavia. And we all know what we all say about hindsight.

But as productive as he’d been at Volcano Vista, and at NMMI, it’s easy to think UNM should have taken a chance.

First-year Lobos coach Jason Eck is off to a strong start recruiting the Albuquerque area. Volcano Vista linebacker Thomas Pettus signed with UNM and is a freshman on the 2025 roster; he has no statistics thus far. Cleveland wide receiver Jacob Maldonado committed to UNM in June.

Eck has made it clear that in-state recruiting is of great importance and said Tuesday of giving that local kid an extra-long look, “I think you need to handicap it a little bit.”

Well, yeah. Missing on Diego Pavia was a handicap, for sure.