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Pete Thamel, ESPN
New Mexico has targeted Bronco Mendenhall to be the school’s next football coach, sources told ESPN on Tuesday.
Mendenhall has been an FBS head coach for 17 seasons, with successful stints at Virginia and BYU. A deal is expected to be finalized in the near future, sources told ESPN.
Mendenhall, 57, hasn’t coached since 2021, when he left Virginia to “reassess, renew, reframe and reinvent.”
He would be taking on one of the biggest challenges in college football, as New Mexico hasn’t won more than four games since 2016.
Mendenhall, a former New Mexico assistant coach from 1998 to 2002, knows the territory well. He has also done extensive work maximizing both BYU and Virginia during his time as head coach there.
“More than anything else, the success he’s had developing programs,” a source familiar with the search told ESPN. “He’s always been someone who wants to take a challenge and excel at it. He’s a great person and always done it the right way. In the industry, people see him as someone with high character and high integrity.”
Mendenhall led BYU to 11 consecutive bowl games and five seasons of 10 or more wins. At Virginia, he built the Cavaliers into a contender in the ACC, including a 9-5 Orange Bowl season in 2019.
Overall, Mendenhall has a 135-81 career record over 17 seasons. He led BYU to AP Top 25 rankings in seven different seasons, including the top 10 in both 2008 and 2009. He led Virginia to Top 25 rankings in two different seasons.
In 16 of his 17 seasons as a head coach, the teams he’s coached have been bowl-eligible.
Mendenhall has always been considered one of the sport’s top thinkers, program builder and a coach who values building sound structure.
New Mexico looms as a vexing puzzle, as there’s little local recruiting base and resources are limited. Part of what’s been appealing to Mendenhall has been the scope of the rebuild, sources told ESPN.
He would succeed Danny Gonzales, a New Mexico alum who was fired on Nov. 25 after going 11-32 in his four-year tenure.
