What does it mean for a team to be bad?
Well, yes, they have to lose a lot of games. Losing to bad teams certainly helps, so they’ll want to be in the MAC or Conference USA. Several years of dreadfulness helps the case, and a historical penchant for the same is important too.
Throw those ingredients into a pot together, stir well, and check the consistency of your concoction. Is it a listless orange and blue? Then congratulations! You’ve homebrewed your very own UTEP.
Texas–El Paso has the 126th-ranked all-time record among FBS teams…out of 130. Despite existing since the start of World War I, it’s also bottom 25 in total wins. Only Kent State, FIU, Georgia State, and Charlotte have worse records, and only the Flashes have a football history anything near as long as the Miners’.
Whereas all of those schools bowled in 2019, UTEP lived up (down) to its historical standard, claiming one win to reach a record of 2-34 in the last three years. Mike Price and Dana Dimel have taken a historically awful team and made it the worst it could be. I mean, look at this!
We can go into more specifics if you want, like how UTEP hasn’t had three straight winning seasons since the sixties, or how they’ve put together losing runs of 16, 11, 3, 8, and 5 years in between their six (!) winning seasons since then. We could, perhaps, point out that they’ve managed exactly one consensus All-American in 106 years of football, and that was tight end Brian Natkin in 2000, who went on to start exactly one NFL game. He’s now an Arizona Cardinals assistant coach. Seems like a swell guy.
Here are the positives from 2019:
- Beat their FCS opponent this time, unlike in 2018
- So they didn’t lose all their games
- That’s it
It’s hard to imagine a team more utterly anemic than UTEP has been these last three years. Maybe it’ll get better? *glances at returning production numbers* …nope. The Miners are second-to-last in that.
Well, this should be a blast.
Offence
2019 TERSE: 21.8 (120th)
2020 Returning Production (SP+): 39% (118th)
It’s true, UTEP lost eleven games last year (all in a row after their single win, to boot). But their offence wasn’t the worst in college football over that stretch. Why, it wasn’t even in the bottom ten!
Yeah, we’re really scraping the barrel for optimism. Get used to it.
Leaving out a 36-34 win over Houston Baptist (a 5-7 FCS team which, hey, UTEP at least beat), the Miners did actually have some decent showings offensively. They put up 35 against New Mexico State and 26 against North Texas. Now the bad news: the former ranked 126th, the latter 92nd, in defensive TERSE. Against all other teams, UTEP averaged 15.3 points per game. That would top the PPG averages of Rutgers and Akron in 2019…and no other team. Season-long, UTEP scored fewer points per game in C-USA than Kansas did in the Big 12, 23.5 to 19.6. So it might actually be good news that quarterback Kai Locksley isn’t coming back.
You may have heard of Locksley in one of several different contexts. He entered the realm of conversation as an electric four-star in 2014, was a freshman backup quarterback at a 5-7 Texas* way back in 2015, dropped off of sports-reference.com’s radar for a full two years, than showed up at UTEP post-transfer, started, and promptly led the team to a 1-11 season. Then he got arrested for DUI, possession of marijuana, unlawful carrying of a weapon, and terroristic threat. Then UTEP reinstated him and decided that he should start another year, whereupon they went 1-11 again.
*Not the 5-7 Texas that lost to Kansas. That one was the next year, when Texas was ‘back’. They were not.
There is some explanation for Locksley’s troubled career, in that his brother Meiko was fatally shot in 2017 during the quarterback’s two-year stint out of Division I. Locksley’s fall as a football player—along with his rise as a person—is an important reminder that this is just a game.
As for UTEP’s offence…well, aside from the quarterback competition (only one player in it has ever played college football, and Gavin Hardison owns a 44.3% completion rate and a misspelled name on sports-reference), the Miners get New Mexico transfer Q’ Drennan, with a four-year career average of 21.3 yards per catch on 26 catches. They also bring back wide receivers Jacob Cowing (550 yards, 17.7 yards per catch), Tre’shon Wolf (433 yards, 12.7 yards per catch), and Justin Garrett (446 yards, 11.2 yards per catch), and running back Joshua Fields (312 yards, 5.3 yards per carry). While Locksley is gone, most of the rest of the offence is actually intact, aside of course from their number one player, Treyvon Hughes. Figures.
Defence
2019 TERSE: 16.8 (128th)
2020 Returning Production (SP+): 44% (119th)
Downside: only two UTEP players had even three sacks last year. Upside: their names were Praise Amaewhule and Denzel Chukwukelu. The former returns for 2020, the latter departs.
As for the rest of the defence…I gotta say, it ain’t the best. It is literally the third-worst defence in football. But it had…moments? The defensive highlight of the year was a 28-points-allowed performance against bowl-bound Charlotte, a whole 1.8 points below the 49ers’ average! That’s notable, though, only because the other 10 FBS teams UTEP played all topped their season averages in PPG.
Though the offence was stagnant at times, fresh blood in the quarterback position gives it a little hope to be kind of, sort of average in 2020. There’s little such hope for the defence, just because it has so many pieces that didn’t click last year. There’s the five interceptions, total, and the fact that the players who got them all depart. Or the fact that Michael Lewis (also gone) led the team in tackles, yet didn’t hit 100. Literally one turnover is back from 2019.
This is the part of the preview where I usually find a spin that reverses the stats, pointing out that though a unit was generally good (or bad) last year, there were times when it was bad (or good). That’s not true for UTEP. As mentioned above, the defence’s only decent performance was giving up four touchdowns to a team that ended up in the Bahamas Bowl.
There’s no spin for Texas–El Paso. There is only sadness and disappointment.
There is no hope.
Below are C-USA’s teams in 2020 TERSE preseason ratings. Just in case you weren’t sure, the little yellow dot that’s a mile below the rest is indeed UTEP, only saved from the dubious distinction of being the very worst team in FBS by the puzzling existence of UMass.
I truly do wish that UTEP had a shot in 2020. They’ve had one of the worst histories of any FBS team, and it’s only been getting worse lately. They’ve had one winning season in the last 14, seven in the last 50, and success is just getting harder to achieve in El Paso.
But UTEP is set for one of the worst seasons in modern football history, and there really is no hope.
None at all.
(Unless Hardison turns out better than he did in 61 passes last year, but hush. I’m trying to set a mood.)
CORN 