ISN'T THAT LUCK for you? You coach your guts out for five years and you have only five wins to show for it, and then hours after they fire you your football team goes out and claims its biggest win in years.
Too late.Luck never was on Mike Sheppard's side. During his five years as coach at New Mexico, the Lobos lost 15 games by a touchdown or less, 10 of them in the past two years alone. All those close games, and yet somehow they never won more than
two games in a season. 0-11. 2-10. 2-10. 2-10. Now they're 2-8 heading into Saturday's game against Utah. A year ago, New Mexico had Utah down 27-0 at the end of the third quarter - and lost.
In Albuquerque, they have come to expect such fate. With the Lobos holding a two-point lead with two minutes to go against Nevada-Las Vegas earlier this season, someone told Cathie Sheppard - the coach's wife - "We've won."
"No, we haven't," she said.
The Lobos lost 23-22 on a last-second field goal. Cathie lowered her head and cried.
Last Saturday, just five hours before New Mexico was to meet Air Force, Lobo officials summoned Sheppard to a meeting and told him he was fired. Sheppard kept the news to himself, and his team defeated Air Force, a team on the brink of a national ranking, 34-32. Three days later Sheppard finally told his players that he was no longer their coach.
Sheppard had seen it coming as early as last season, when the Lobos, with 23 seniors, won only two games. If they couldn't win then, what chance would they have this season with all those graduation losses? Sheppard figured the Lobos wouldn't reach form until late this season, when it might be too late. Sure enough, after early blowouts (94-17, 60-7), they played BYU and San Diego State nearly even and beat Air Force.
"It was a great victory," said Sheppard. "You forget what it's like to win."
Sheppard realized he faced a stiff challenge when he took over the Lobo program. He looked at the record book and saw that the Lobos had produced just 13 winnings seasons since the end of World War II. Their last winning season was 1982. "They were 10-1 that year, so I thought if they can do it, we can do it," he recalls. But once on the job, Sheppard discovered some surprises. He learned that the Lobos had less than 60 players on scholarship - well under the NCAA limit of 95 - and that the facilities, which at first appeared so good to a coach coming from the austere Long Beach State program, were the worst in the Western Athletic Conference.
"I was naive," he says.
The Lobos still haven't recovered. Sheppard never had the financial backing to turn the program around, and the rules didn't help, either. The NCAA limit of 25 new scholarships per year, along with the annual graduation losses, make it nearly impossible for undermanned programs to catch up with their rivals. The Lobos have 78 players on scholarship.
"It's ludicrous and unfair," says Sheppard. "I'm mad if someone's got one more scholarship than I do, yet alone 15 or 16. We're the only sport that does this. If a basketball coach loses 15 guys, he can go out and get 15 more players. If you're in a football program that's down, it's hard to get up . . . We've fought it for two years through all the proper channels in the NCAA. People who are not affected by it don't take the time to look at it. The only people who care are the ones affected by it, but there aren't enough of them. We're fighting the old guard."
Sheppard has taken aggressive measures to improve the Lobos. He has hired 12 new assistant coaches in the past two years. He's utilized three starting quarterbacks this season. He converted the Lobos to the latest style in offenses, the run and shoot, at least partly because he could rarely recruit tight ends.
As recently as last year, the Lobos were happy enough with Sheppard that they awarded him a three-year contract extension. Now they are willing to pay $155,000 to buy out the remaining two years of his contract and be rid of him. The word is, the Lobos finally are ready to make a bigger financial commitment to the football program, but with a new coach.
Sheppard isn't thinking about his future, he says, only the final two games of the season, against Utah and Colorado State. With Sheppard's luck, the Lobos will win them both - by less than a touchdown.