The finale to a disappointing season for the New Mexico State Aggies was also the 101st Battle of I-10 as the University of Texas at El Paso Miners came to Las Cruces to claim the silver spade and brass spittoon.
UTEP started the scoring fast, as a strip sack by defender Maurice Westmoreland and defensive end Bryton Thompson were able to take the ball into the end zone to quickly put up points. The Aggies offense once again struggled at mid-field, having to rely on the leg of Abraham Montaño to hit a school record 59-yard field goal.
Montaño’s successful field goal injected some life into the Aggies. Quarterback Parker Awad found Seth McGowan for a 21-yard touchdown before his backfield partner Mike Washington ran in a nine-yard touchdown to take a 17-7 lead as the Aggie’s defense started to wake.
With some early success, the Aggies were not done. Awad managed to find TJ Pride, who opened space after a nasty juke for a 35-yard touchdown, which got the team to 24 points. At the time, UTEP was missing scoring opportunities, but not too many. Running back Jevon Jackson’s two-yard touchdown got the game to a manageable 14-24.
The Miners ramped up their defense, as defensive lineman Kyran Duhon and Westmoreland both got sacks in the second quarter. A UTEP interception by defender Kory Chapman was undone after a big hit by NMSU running back Tim Gans. That caused a fumble and a 10 second run-off. With that, Montaño had a 57-yard field goal attempt.
After some successful icing by UTEP using a timeout to get in his head, the score remained 24-14.
Remember the tidbit about changing plans? Well, it was a tale of two halves, something that would make Charles Dickens proud. The crowd of over 15,000 just did not know it yet, but by the end of the night, coach Tony Sanchez and the Aggies would know it all too well.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever been a part of a game like that where we absolutely gave it away, it’s embarrassing to lose that game,” Sanchez said. “We did everything we could to completely give that thing away, that’s exactly what we did tonight.”
The onslaught of a Miner offense began with another Jackson touchdown, but that was just the beginning. Next, a 30-yard touchdown to receiver Kenny Odom. But even with that, the worst was yet to come.
Kam Thomas returned a 93-yard punt for a touchdown, but the Miners delivered the knockout punch just 10 seconds later with another fumble recovery from Thompson for his second touchdown to bury the Aggies in a 42-24 hole less than two minutes into the fourth quarter. He went into detail on this after the game.
“I just told myself at halftime I gotta be the spark. I gotta be the playmaker of the team because the team needs me,” Thomas said. “I can’t let the team down, so I made a promise to myself that I won’t let myself down.”
Thompson and the defense had their own game plan for the Aggies offense.
“We knew coming in that we were gonna have to kill the run,” he said. “And coming out of halftime, had a real sit-down talk and really evaluated we weren’t playing hard. I felt like we weren’t playing our hardest first quarter and first half and in the second half we really came out and started playing the kind of defense that we expect.”
After a disappointing season, coach Sanchez mentioned his wish list for the offseason.
“We gotta get better in the back end of the secondary, gotta do much improvement out there,” Sanchez said. “We need much better at the quarterback position and we need some dogs at the wide receiver spot.”
In a much better mood, UTEP head coach Scotty Walden looked at this win as a glimpse of the future under his tenure in El Paso.
“We’re building something, something of substance, and that takes time,” he said. “That’s just the reality of where we’re at, I know people don’t want to hear that but right now this is a program defining victory. We talked about in our culture, we want to make winning the battle of I-10 something extremely important to our program.”
The move to the Mountain West in two years may leave the annual Battle of I-10 in limbo, but both teams will undeniably look to be back and be better.
