Former UVA Football coach Bronco Mendenhall is leaving New Mexico after one year and five wins to take the job at Utah State.
I’ve been a big fan of Mendenhall over the years, and thought he was done wrong by UVA Athletics Director Carla Williams when he was forced out back in 2021, but …
I don’t know if this is a good look on ol’ Bronco, leaving a job after one year to take something better, though I totally understand what’s going on there.
“My passion is developing young people and transforming football programs to reach their full potential,” Mendenhall said in a quote in a press release on the Utah State Athletics website. “Utah State provides a great opportunity to do both and allows a family focus that is essential to me and Holly. We look forward to adding to Utah State’s rich tradition and striving for football excellence.”
ICYMI
- Former UVA Football coach Bronco Mendenhall set to begin rebuild at New Mexico
- Bronco Mendenhall reassembling Virginia staff at new job in New Mexico
- Report: Mendenhall got thumbs-up from Carla Williams in chat with New Mexico AD
- Former UVA football coach Bronco Mendenhall hired at New Mexico
Mendenhall and a staff almost entirely made up of people he had either worked with or coached at Virginia was 5-7 in its one year at New Mexico, which had gone 19-60 over its previous seven seasons, with a high-water mark of 4-8 in 2023 under Danny Gonzalez.
New Mexico and Utah State are both members of the Mountain West, but Utah State is making the move to the Pac-12 in 2026.
Utah State is also a bit of a homecoming for Mendenhall, who was 99-43 in 11 seasons at BYU before taking the UVA job in December 2015, citing his issues with BYU deciding at that time to remain a football independent.
He took UVA from the depths of the Mike London era – London was 11-25 in his final three seasons at UVA, and left a roster that went 2-10 in Mendenhall’s first season, in 2016 – to previously unseen heights, getting Virginia into its first and to this point only ACC Championship Game in 2019, and then into the 2019 Orange Bowl.
Mendenhall would be out at Virginia just two years later, after resisting pressure from Williams to fire his defensive coordinator, Nick Howell, who reunited with Mendenhall at New Mexico for the 2024 season, after a two-year stint as the defensive coordinator at Vanderbilt.
The Utah State job became open when the school cut ties with Blake Anderson in the summer over an incident involving an incorrectly handled sexual misconduct incident involving one of his players.
Nate Dreiling, the defensive coordinator on Anderson’s staff, served as the interim head coach for the 2024 season, but Utah State, which had won 11 games with Anderson at helm in 2022, before putting up back-to-back 6-7 records the past two seasons, stumbled to a 4-8 finish in 2024, and Dreiling was not retained.
Given that this is being considered a homecoming for Mendenhall, I’m going to wonder aloud if he might have made this move even if what happened to him at Virginia three Decembers ago in fact hadn’t happened.
The Utah State opening represented a rare opportunity for Mendenhall to return to his roots in Utah at a school that will be competing at the Power 5 level by the 2026 season.
It’s fair to assume that Mendenhall would have faced similar challenges in terms of recruiting and retention that have befallen Tony Elliott since Elliott took over the program in Mendenhall’s stead.
It’s not hard to speculate that three more years of beating his head against a wall trying to maintain a winning program at a school that seems ambivalent about whether or not it still wants to win in the money sports would have worn Mendenhall out, the same as we saw here recently with Tony Bennett.
I never will like how he was pushed out the door by Williams; I would have preferred three more years of Bronco Mendenhall, even if it would have meant that he would have left us now to go back home to Utah.
This would have given us a seamless transition to the Jeff Monken era that probably never will materialize, because we’re going to continue to try to be Harvard from Monday to Friday, and Alabama on Saturday, despite decades of evidence, with the exception to the rule in the George Welsh years, that it just can’t be done.
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Chris Graham
