dpALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The Frontier Restaurant is an Albuquerque staple, located across from the main University of New Mexico campus on the corner of Central Avenue and Cornell Street. Its huge menu is mostly breakfast and lunch fare — the Frontier burrito, smothered in green chile stew, comes highly recommended — and draws a big crowd midday.
Central Avenue, running east and west, is a segment of famed Route 66. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Frontier and looking east down Central, the gorgeous Sandia Mountains loom out of the high desert.
The Land of Enchantment, indeed.
Joseph Gallegos of Albuquerque was standing in line waiting to order lunch at the Frontier when a visitor from Fargo struck up a conversation. Wearing a ponytail and a Lobos T-shirt, the friendly Gallegos seemed a good candidate to give the vibe on Saturday’s big Mountain West Conference football game between New Mexico and North Dakota State.
“It’s going to be a helluva game,” Gallegos said. “I don’t know much about North Dakota State, other than that they’re good. This is going to be a fistfight.”
It is highly unlikely that an enthusiastic preview of a Lobos football game would’ve been given two or three years ago. New Mexico was bad and nobody much cared.
Now? The Lobos are the hot item in this sprawling metro area of about 1 million people. With head coach Jason Eck — NDSU’s old buddy from his days as an assistant at South Dakota State — New Mexico is winning and selling tickets.
An athletic department spokesman said that as of Friday afternoon about 31,000 tickets have been sold for the game at the 37,440-seat University Stadium. It’s going to be rockin’. Albuquerque is into Eckmania.
“It’s just more fun and there’s a lot more hype around the team,” said Renee Garcia of Albuquerque, who was shopping in the university bookstore Friday afternoon with her husband Steve. “There’s more interest, it’s more fun. They’ve opened up Lobo Lane now, where they have food trucks and entertainment before the games. Before, we didn’t have stuff like that.
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“The hype around the team is different. They’ve done a good job of advertising and promoting and Coach Eck is just, he’s so much fun. He’s so bought in and you can’t help but follow him and love him.”
Steve was holding a black sweatshirt with capital UNM letters in red, the Garcia family purchase for the big game.
Naomi Yavneh Klos was making her way around the bookstore, too, wearing a gray hoodie with a red all-caps UNM across the chest. Her wide-brimmed tan hat was also emblazoned with the red UNM logo. In her hand was a ballcap that said “Lobos” with the letters spelled out in sign language.
Mike McFeely / The Forum
Saturday will be her first New Mexico football game and she was stocking up on gear.
“This is only my second year here and my previous school didn’t have a football team,” Yavneh Klos said. “I was in New Orleans at Loyola University and all we had was the Saints (of the NFL). So it’s very exciting to be at a school with a football team and especially one that’s doing really well. I am super-excited for the game tomorrow.”
Yavneh Klos, Ph.D., is dean of the University of New Mexico Honors College and said she’s proud a high-ranking athletics department official at the university is an alumnus of the Honors College.
“I think that’s outstanding,” she said. “We feel like we’ve got a great football team but we also care about our student-athletes as students. They can get a great education here.”
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It’s homecoming week at New Mexico, so elsewhere in the student union Lobo Louie, the school’s male mascot (Lobo Lucy is the female version), was hanging with cheerleaders and having his picture taken with students eating lunch in the food court. Lobo is the Spanish and Portuguese word for wolf, so Louie and Lucy are popular for selfies.
Among the big crowd expected Saturday should be a few thousand Bison fans. The road locales in the Mountain West Conference this first year are outstanding and Albuquerque continues a good stretch of away games at Air Force (Colorado Springs) and UNLV (Las Vegas).
Mike McFeely / The Forum
“I’ve heard there are going to be a lot of North Dakota State fans here. I’ve been hearing between 2,000 and 5,000,” Renee Garcia said.
If the past two conference road games were indicators, that’s probably about right. The 5:50 a.m. United flight from Fargo to Denver and the connecting flight to Albuquerque were filled with green and yellow.
At the Frontier, another man standing in line joined the conversation about the NDSU-New Mexico game. He was Verlyn Bailly, a 1978 graduate of NDSU who lives in Ohio who traveled to Albuquerque for the game with his son Michael.
“I played spring ball in 1974 as a freshman … and decided I better find something else to do,” Bailly said with a laugh. “Doug Burgum was a freshman on that team, too.”
Bailly lives near Columbus and is retired from the natural gas pipeline business.
Mike McFeely / The Forum
“We looked at the schedule and said, ‘Well, my wife isn’t going to go with the two of us to Hawaii,’ and we’ve already been to Vegas, so we decided to go to Albuquerque,” Bailly said. “We’ll do some fun stuff and I think it’s going to be a good game.”
The sharps have New Mexico as a 4.5-point favorite, so they expect it to be close. The winner will have an advantage in the race to make the Mountain West championship game and, with James Madison losing Thursday, should be back in the chatter for the Group of Six’s spot in the College Football Playoff.
It’s a big game, which Lobos fans seem to know. Yavneh Klos, the New Mexico dean, had this to say while finishing a conversation with an inquisitor from Fargo:
“It was nice meeting you and nice talking with you, but I hope you go home sad.”
