NCAA Football New Mexico

New Mexico football coach Mike Locksley was suspended for one game and will be on unpaid leave for 10 days for his role in an altercation with an assistant coach last month, the school announced Tuesday afternoon.

Locksley will be suspended for the Oct. 24 game against UNLV and will not be allowed to have anything to do with the team in the week leading up to the Mountain West game. The suspension brings to an end the off-the-field turmoil surrounding Locksley and the 0-6 Lobos for weeks.

Embattled New Mexico coach Mike Locksley has resolved one issue that's been dogging him in his short tenure.

Locksley and longtime office worker Sylvia Lopez have resolved the issues that led to 54-year-old Lopez filing a sexual harassment /age discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission this past spring against the 39-year-old coach, the school announced Monday. All EEOC claims have been withdrawn.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the resolution was Lopez deeming the whole situation a misunderstanding and refuting the portion that claims sexual harassment in the filing with EEOC. Under the agreement, Lopez keeps her job.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- In a game of inches, none may mean more to Mike Locksley than the ones he didn't take Sept. 20. The first-year New Mexico coach was all but out the door following a heated altercation with wide receivers coach J.B. Gerald, when, he said, he "sort of lost it."

Those inches may wind up costing him everything.

"If I had that moment back ... ," Locksley said to FanHouse in his office Tuesday night. "I was literally walking out the door because I knew I was getting heated and it kept going back and forth. I'm walking out the door and I look over and another word was said and it was set off."

In that moment, he grabbed Gerald, an assistant who had followed him halfway across the country from Illinois. An altercation ensued. When the dust cleared all that was certain was that Gerald had a split lip. And two coaching careers were beginning to unravel, the coda to an argument from earlier in the day, an argument with a decade of history.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- The University of New Mexico athletic department has turned the incident involving head coach Mike Locksley and his assistant coach J.B. Gerald over to the university's human resources department, athletic director Paul Krebs said Tuesday.

Gerald filed a police report Sept. 20, claiming that Locksley punched him in the face and split his lip following an argument during a staff meeting. News of the altercation began seeping out slowly the following day, but it became an avalanche this week as the school opened up about the incident.

Locksley has not shied away and he has admitted his mistake to his team, Gerald, Krebs and the media. Locksley and Krebs dispute the fact Gerald was punched in the face, citing no witness accounts. Still, they realize it all looks bad on the first-time head coach, his program and the university.

New Mexico coach Mike Locksley released a statement Monday acknowledging an altercation with wide receivers coach Jonathan "J.B." Gerald. Locksley allegedly punched him in the face during a team meeting last Sunday. ESPN says that a police report indicates that during the meeting Locksley grabbed Gerald by the collar, and then punched him in the mouth.

Gerald refused to press charges, but allowed the incident to be part of a police report. Locksley is a first-year coach, hired from Illinois to replace Rocky Long after he resigned following a 4-8 season. The Lobos are winless this year, and have struggled with Locksley's specialty, offense. The incident happened the day after a 37-13 loss to Air Force.

If you follow the coaching carousel at all, you already know the name Mike Locksley. He's been on everybody's "coordinators to watch" list for a couple seasons now, and he's been connected with almost as many jobs as Lane Kiffin and Will Muschamp.

Well, Ron Zook's offensive coordinator is headed to the Southwest. Monday, the University of New Mexico named him as their new head football coach. Locksley was due for a head coaching gig. While Illinois football this year had all the consistency of failed custard, the Illini offense got the job done. Locksley is also known as a top-notch recruiter, which had to please Paul Krebs, the Lobos' sheriff.

Locksley's hiring increases the number of African American head coaches in the Football Bowl Subdivision from three to four. To put that in perspective, before yesterday one-fortieth of FBS programs had an African American head coach; now, one-thirtieth of them do. That's progress, but it's still a drop from the start of this past season, when we were all the way up to one-twentieth.

Time will tell how this move works out for the Lobos, but Locksley has a solid resume. The real question, however, is "What does this mean for Illinois?"

College football's midseason bloodbath of coaching changes continues today with news that former Lobo player turned coach Rocky Long will step down from the New Mexico head football job effective immediately. The decision came as a shock to the New Mexico athletic director. Read this quote and try not to scratch your head:

"It's a sad day for New Mexico football that Coach Long will no longer be our leader," [Athletic Director Paul] Krebs said. "In my opinion, Rocky's 11-year tenure is the best 11 years in the history of our football program."

Besides having an awesome football name, Rocky Long did some legitimately good things at New Mexico in taking them to five bowl games -- with just one win mind you but a party is a party and who doesn't love a postseason chance to party?

Whats interesting is that Long stepped out of the usual guarded state most coaches are in to deliver a series of blunt statements.

BYU beat New Mexico 21-3 in Provo, and they hope that most voters don't get the Mtn Network. The Cougars struggled most of the game against the very average Lobos. At halftime, it was only 7-3 in favor of BYU, and it wasn't until late in the 4th quarter that they salted the game away.

BYU's offense gets most of the attention, but in this game it was their defense that led the Cougars. They held the second leading rusher in the Mountain West, Rodney Ferguson, to 90 yards on 28 carries.

As it got into the 4th quarter, New Mexico put together its best drive. It looked like they scored to bring the game to within 5 points pending the extra point. Instead, the play was nullified by a very questionable block in the back call that was behind the play.

New Mexico turned the ball over on downs and BYU to their credit drove it 76 yards for the score to put the game out of reach. Still, for the high scoring BYU team, this was their lowest scoring output of the season.

This doesn't happen everyday in college football. New Mexico was offered $1.8 million dollars to move its home game with Texas A&M this fall to a "neutral" site in San Antonio, Texas by an unnamed third-party. Surprisingly enough, New Mexico would rather give the fans in Albuquerque a chance to cheer for their team in a home setting.

"We have to develop our fan base," [New Mexico Athletic Director Paul] Krebs said. "Moving the game to San Antonio, I think, would sell out our fans, would be a decision made purely for economic reasons. I think it sends the wrong message to our fans and to our football program."

An unidentified third party approached New Mexico at the end of the 2006 season, just after the school had signed a home-and-home contract with the Aggies, and offered the Lobos $1.5 million to move the game.

The offer kept going up, but New Mexico kept saying no.

San Antonio is some 817 miles from Albuquerque and only 170 miles from College Station, so it was hardly a neutral site in any sense of the word. It may have been a third-party that contacted New Mexico, but it was definitely with Texas A&M's interest in mind.

In a rare twist of BCS schools scheduling with a non-BCS school, the Aggies actually travel to New Mexico first with the Lobos coming to College Station in 2009 (which neatly avoids any last minute buyout surprises for New Mexico). This arrangement would explain why another party came in with the offer to move the game into Texas.