Aggie-Lobo game another Corona casualty

When word came down last week New Mexico State University had canceled its football season, you could hear the snarky comments coming from miles away, things like: “Hey, the Aggies will finally have an undefeated season!”

And while it’s true NMSU’s football tradition is not quite that of Ohio State or Notre Dame, they are OUR Aggies, and we do love them. As recently as December 2017, half the city of Las Cruces made the four-hour trek west to Tucson and watched the Aggies win the Arizona Bowl in thrilling fashion.

Most of us knew a football season was increasingly unlikely as the Coronavirus continued digging itself in. In the days prior to the Aggies’ announcement, several other conferences, as well as the NCAA’s Division II and Division III, had canceled their schedules. So when the Western Athletic Conference announced it would not hold its fall sports, it pretty much sealed the fate of Aggie football.

While NMSU is independent in football, the Aggies compete in the WAC for all the other sports.

The state of New Mexico had already canceled fall high school sports, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham had asked the state’s universities not to hold games with fans.

Perhaps most disappointing will be the lack of an Aggie-Lobo football game. The two rivals have met on the gridiron 110 times before, and the 111^th was scheduled for Aggie Memorial Stadium in Las Cruces. The Rio Grande Rivalry began in 1894, and the teams met six times before New Mexico was even a state.

This will be the first time since World War II the game has been halted. There were no games in 1943, 1944 or 1945. Prior to that, the last time the game had a hiatus was 1918. The Aggie records say there was no team that year due to World War I, and it’s likely that season was also affected by another pandemic, the Spanish Flu.

New Mexico historian and author David Holtby, in his book “Lest We Forget: World War I and New Mexico,” wrote that 128 soldiers, nine of them New Mexicans, died at Camp Cody, a National Guard training center near Deming, in the six weeks prior to the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918. America lost more soldiers to the pandemic in World War I than on the battlefields.

And, no, the Aggies were not likely to be a Top 25 team this season, but attending NMSU football games is a Las Cruces tradition and almost always a fun time, win or lose.

I think it would be cool for UNM and NMSU to find a way to play the game this year even if, to make it happen, we have to travel back to Tucson, or maybe down the road in El Paso, where the UTEP Miners, as of this writing, are still planning to hold football games.