Sitting in front of a camera for a zoom press conference after Utah State’s 19-point loss to New Mexico Saturday afternoon, Aggies running back Miles Davis had his head in his hands, trying to explain what went wrong.
“We just got to make plays,” Davis said. “Every position got to make plays. We all got to do our 11th.”
He repeated the line amid other questions, even noting he felt like he sounded like a broken record.
But there isn’t really a better way to put it. Utah State has “got to make plays” where right now, they’ve struggled to do so in recent outings.
The Aggies have lost three of their last four games, an exact flip of the 3-1 start they began the season on. The reasons for Utah State’s sudden case of the L’s are not new. They’ve been present in every game (with a small exception being the McNeese game, but they’ve been there in all FBS matchups). The difference in the wins is that problems were either masked or simply overcome by great performances in other aspects (Bryson Barnes is responsible for a lot of the latter).
While there are plenty of things that could be brought up, like penalties, pass protection, special teams, there are two notable concerns that rise above others from the loss at New Mexico. The first is a returning issue regarding pass rush and blitz tendencies, the other being the offense’s performance in road games this year, particularly in conference matchups.
Starting with the latter, Utah State managed to play well enough in road games against elite teams like Texas A&M and Vanderbilt. The Aggies put up 57 total points in those games against what are likely the best two defenses they’ll face all year. But the two most recent road games have not been against elite defenses from top-ten teams. Hawaii and New Mexico held USU to a combined 40 points, the Lobos being the first team to truly shut down the Aggies offense by limiting it to basically two big plays that produced the two touchdowns. Aside from a 64-yard TD run and 56-yard reception, Utah State averaged 4.0 yards per play.
Mendenhall made a passing note in a press conference a few weeks ago about how the team hadn’t played well on the road but didn’t want to draw conclusions yet. Now is becoming a good time to start drawing conclusions about the team, at least the offense, struggling to perform on the road. Just look at the raw statistics of USU at home and on the road.
USU Per-Game Offense Averages (Home/Road)
| Stat | at Home | on Road |
|---|---|---|
| Points | 38.8 | 24.3 |
| Yards | 480.3 | 346.0 |
| Yards/Play | 7.3 | 5.7 |
| Turnovers | 0.5 | 1.3 |
If you want to be positive, there’s a host of excuses you can cook up. Two of those games were against top-ten teams, the Hawaii trip was plagued with logistical issues, etc. That argument does melt down a bit, though, when faced with the New Mexico game. In what was arguably the worst offensive game of the year, what went wrong there? New Mexico has an average defense but looked elite against the Aggies?
Moving on to the other side of the ball, we’ve got to look at what’s been going wrong with Defensive Coordinator Nick Howell’s scheme. Howell has often used high blitz rates to dictate terms to the offense by putting pressure on the opposing QB. The only problem is that the Aggies aren’t getting home to the QB no matter what they do. According to PFF tracking data, Utah State has one of the highest rate of blitzes in the Mountain West but also the lowest rate of getting pressure on the QB. The Aggies have generated pressure on opposing QBs on just 26.6% of dropbacks, even while dialing up blitzes 54.5% of the time. Isolating to just blitzes, USU is only generating pressure on those plays 32.7% of the time. It’s a rate dwarfed by some of its conferences mates like Boise State (50%), UNLV (47.6%) and Hawaii (44.3%).
This is a catastrophic failure within the scheme. The risk of blitzing, leaving the back end more open for passes, is supposed to be covered by the fact that the quarterback simply doesn’t have the time to read the defense and find the opening. It is, after all, very hard to see down the field when your vision is obscured by an angry 300-pound lineman flying at you. Consider how teams have managed to, at times, slow down Utah State’s QB, Bryson Barnes. When they’ve blitzed him, his passer rating is 103.85, down from 111.05 when choosing not to blitz him. Barnes sack rate on dropbacks also ticks up to 9.7% from the 8.5% when teams don’t send the extra guy.
In sending extra players to the line, you’d think there would at least be a buff to run defense as well, but per CFB Graphs, the Aggies rank 93rd in yards allowed before contact and 108th in yards after contact in the ground game. These two numbers have dipped in recent weeks at Utah State had ranked roughly average, particularly in yards after contact.
So, there’s a lot of holes in the Aggies’ defensive performance. How does it get fixed. The simple answer has just been to execute better.
“We’ve got to run our stunts right, our blitzes right,” safety Brevin Hamblin said. “At the end of the day, when we hit someone that got to fall backwards instead of fall forwards.”
It may sound a little too simple, but it’s important to consider that this team isn’t hopeless on defense, there have been encouraging signs. Even with a seemingly very high number of missed tackles in the most recent game, Utah State ranks well in missed tackle rate (i.e., they don’t usually miss tackles) and have good metrics related to tackles in general. Between the San Jose State and New Mexico games, the defense has allowed an average of 24.5 points to the opposing offense (remember, nine of UNM’s points came from its special teams and defense, absolving the Aggies defensive unit specifically of those points).
We’re not to the point of last year’s defense that was constantly allowing a 40-piece to any team that it shared the field with. Improvement in other areas is certainly possible with more development and adjusting the schemes where necessary. After all, Howell made a drastic adjustment against San Jose State, calming down the storm of blitzes but still finding plenty of success in key areas despite giving up some chunk yardage here and there. And against New Mexico, after allowing 17 points on defense in the first half, the Aggies gave up only seven more in the final two quarters.
It’s not like Mendenhall and Howell have been stubbornly refusing to adjust and try to make improvements.
Since the end of Saturday’s game, there have already been rumblings about the coaching staff. Mendenhall losing to a fellow first-year coach can make one doubt whether Utah State made the right decision to hire him over, say, Jason Eck. You also have some more justifiable doubt in the coordinators, particularly Howell as his defenses have largely struggled in the past four seasons in his multiple stops with Virginia, Vanderbilt, New Mexico and now at USU. At this time, however, light critique is as far as things should go. The main thing that’s been learned about Mendenhall and his staff is that he can’t step in and win right away at a high level when he has 70+ newcomers on his roster. And, to be frank, this is something that was able to be deduced prior to his first game in Logan.
Mendenhall’s two worst seasons as a head coach were his first year at Virginia (2-10) and his first and only year at New Mexico (5-7). Of the six times in Mendenhall’s 19-year head coaching career where his team didn’t finish above a .500 winning percentage, four were in his first or second year with a program. And that’s not currently including Utah State which sits at 4-4 and would make that ratio five out of seven.
Whether you consider it a flaw or not, Mendenhall has always needed time to work success into the program’s he’s taken over. And he’s also pretty much exclusively taken over teams that struggled prior to Mendenhall taking the reins. BYU, Virginia, New Mexico and Utah State combined for a 17-30 record in the year immediately before Mendenhall became the head coach with zero winning records or bowl appearances between them. In the case of BYU and Virginia, it took only until year two for at least bowl eligibility, and by year three, eight-win and even 11-win seasons were on the table.
History remains on Mendenhall’s side, though that shouldn’t remove concern entirely. Both of those previous success stories were before the NIL/portal era. Developing rosters is not longer a task you can automatically have the luxury of taking two or three years to do. Players you might have been able to sink years of development and training into often won’t stick around long enough to take advantage. And those players who just started showing potential can easily uproot and erase all progress you’ve made within any position group.
Is Mendenhall capable of holding a roster together in the portal era? If the team doesn’t pull through for a strong finish, that will become the most important question to be answered. Mendenhall’s predecessor, Blake Anderson, routinely failed to iterate on his successes, developing some players and then losing them to the portal. And that’s the challenge Mendenhall has yet to prove he’s capable of meeting.
The other challenge Mendenhall hasn’t quite worked out a system for? Being bowl eligible as a first-year coach. He snuck in a bowl appearance at BYU in 2005 but missed out in 2016 with Virginia and 2024 with New Mexico. Fans would find patience for a rebuild a lot easier to find if he fixed this trend in his coaching career before tackling the transfer portal.
