Plan for Bronco Mendenhall to be next head coach – Deseret News

Utah State football pretty much has its man, and he is someone who is very familiar with Utah State football at the FBS level.

On Thursday night, ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that New Mexico head coach Bronco Mendenhall, who was head coach at BYU from 2005-2015 and head coach at Virginia from 2016-2021 before taking a two-year hiatus before last season, will be there is expected to soon be named the Aggies’ next head coach.

In recent days, and particularly on Thursday, momentum towards this measure had increased. Mendenhall will be Utah State’s 22nd all-time coach, inheriting a program that has been under a cloud of uncertainty throughout the 2024 season.

Last July, a month before fall camp began, Utah State fired Blake Anderson as head coach. As a result, the Aggies were led throughout last season by interim coach Nate Dreiling, who was the youngest head coach in the entire FBS.

The show also dealt with the tragic death of a player (Andre Seldon Jr.) as well as double-digit season-ending injuries to the starters, finishing the year 4-8 overall.

Overall, it was the worst full season (12 games) for the Aggies since 2016 and the worst season ever since the 2020 pandemic season, in which USU won a single game.

However, Mendenhall is no stranger to rebuilding, and that’s exactly what he’ll do in his fourth term as college head coach at Utah State University.

When he became BYU’s head coach in 2005, the Cougars had had three straight losing seasons. However, in his first year at the Cougars’ helm, Mendenhall got them back to a bowl game, and the following season they won 11 games, the first of four straight double-digit win seasons.

The reconstruction Mendenhall undertook in Virginia was no less daunting. Before his arrival in Charlottesville, the Cavaliers’ best season in more than a decade was an 8-5 season in 2011. In the four years before Mendenhall’s arrival, UVA’s best year was a 5-7 season in 2014.

Mendenhall took over at Virginia in 2016 and led the team to a bowl game the next season. Two years later, Virginia won nine games and played in the Orange Bowl.

Then Mendenhall took over a program at New Mexico that hadn’t won more than four games in a season since 2016. The Lobos finished 5-7 (3-4 in Mountain West Conference play) this season and narrowly missed a bowl game with a season-ending loss at Hawaii.

With 17 seasons of experience as a head coach at the FBS level, Mendenhall is a proven winner and the only active FBS head coach to have inherited at least two programs that emerged from a losing season and then had the team play in a bowl game two years after his arrival.

Perhaps most importantly, Mendenhall has a proven track record of developing NFL talent. More than 80 players who played for him at BYU or Virginia have signed with NFL teams after graduating from college.

Utah State has had difficulty bringing talent to the NFL of late, with Jordan Love being the Aggies’ final draft pick in 2020 (wide receiver Jalen Royals will end that drought in the upcoming 2025 NFL Draft).

Utah State is turning to Mendenhall at a pivotal moment in its athletic department’s history, and specifically its football program.

Earlier this year, USU accepted an invitation to join the newest edition of the Pac-12 Conference along with Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, Gonzaga (all sports except football) and San Diego State.

The Pac-12 should prove to be a step up in both competition and prestige – as the Aggies and the other Mountain West Conference defectors believe – and may prove to be a tougher test than the Mountain West.

Since Gary Andersen turned USU’s program around in the early 2010s, Logan has expected the Aggies to compete for conference championships.

In 2021, USU did just that, the first year of the Blake Anderson era. Since then, however, USU has gone 6-7, 6-7 and 4-8, dropping it out of the rankings of conference rivals.

Mendenhall is expected to once again turn the Aggies into a contender – even making them a threat to the College Football Playoff – while also dealing with the specter of the Justice Department, which has been investigating USU athletics since February 2020 over sexual reports Student-athlete misconduct occurred between 2013 and early 2017.

Add in the ever-changing landscape of college sports with the NIL and the NCAA transfer portal, and Mendenhall’s job is to help USU successfully navigate perhaps the most tumultuous time in college football history.