University of New Mexico Basketball….Men and Women’s
Posted by Pete | Posted in News | Posted on 15-12-2014
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Now get this…Our Lady Lobo’s were 1 – 7 coming into yesterdays game with University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP) and the Lady Miners were 3 – 4…Our Lady Lobos have been having a tough year, not injury related, just a bad year…Even so, now get this, 5,328 fans turned up to watch them play…Now, is that a devoted fan base or what?…And it paid off with the Lady Lobos blowing out the UTEP Miners 72 – 59…..I am amazed, 5,328 fans….In winning seasons they will have from 7000 to 9000 fans pulling for them….Wow..
University of New Mexico Lobo’s mem are 6 – 3 in a rebuilding year after losing 3 outstanding seniors…..all 3 going to the next level…Alex Kirk, 7’1″ center, Cameron Barstow, 6’10” forward, and Kendall Williams, 6’5″ guard….we have outstanding talent to replace them, but being lots of freshmen and sophomores and suffering injuries to our best shooter and a couple of other injuries to talented players, out Lobos don’t really know who they are yet…neither do the fans. Still they turn out, usually in excess of 15,000 plus and I think the low number would be like 14,000 plus. So like the Lady Lobos, the fans are fans, but like most fans we prefer a winning program and we will get there this year. Coach Neal will get the best of the team on the court most of the time. We have lost this year to Boston College (close) and Texas A&M and Southern California, all three good programs and we have beaten 6 including Valparaiso, George Mason and our biggest rival, New Mexico State. But at times, we have problems with our offense. Saturday night we played and beat ULM in the Pit, both teams playing well on defense and woefully on offense. Roots Sports was televising the game. The color analyst for the game made a statement that if these two teams played a game of horse it would take them a couple of weeks to complete it…..That was funny to me, but probably not to the teams. In the second half the Lobos pulled in front of the Warhawks by a pretty good margin, beating them by double digit points. Anyway, Albuquerque is a basketball town….(Well, they back the Isotopes pretty good also, now the AAA farm club of the Colorado Rockies after spending forever as the AAA farm club of the Dodgers. I will talk about baseball again in the spring)
We hope both teams will play well enough to go to a tourney….I think we can…er,, I hope….well, maybe so…
Thanks for the review of the Lobos’ basketball accomplishments this year. Most of us outside of NM do not have that much of an opportunity to keep up with them. I don’t believe that the Lady Lobos even played an intercollegete schedule back 45 years ago when I was following the Lobos. They’ve come a long way in such a short period of time.
Yes, they have come a long way in sports in every category, especially women’s basketball. The last two years have been down years for that program however. We hope they can turn it around.