When Utah State football head coach Bronco Mendenhall interviewed for and took the job of head coach in Logan, he wasn’t given the prettiest picture of the state of the Aggies gridiron program. Sure, on the outside most could see a team that had just gone through a 4-8 season, and also that Utah State hadn’t posted a winning campaign since 2021. But surely things weren’t that bad, right? “I was told some pretty harsh things about the state of the program and the state of the institution,” Mendenhall said, “including there’s no chance that we’d be able to make a bowl. There would be a bowl ban because the academics weren’t strong enough. That was stated multiple times. There won’t be a chance to play post-season.” These concerns over academics played a role in the firing of Mendenhall’s predecessor, Blake Anderson. Former USU President Elizabeth Cantwell and former Director of Athletics Diana Sabau, cited the NCAA’s Academic Performance Rate (APR) metric in documents outlining their reason for dismissing Anderson. According to those documents, sent by Assistant Utah Attorney General Jaqualin Friend Peterson to Anderson’s legal team, Utah State had seen a decline in its APR from 965 to 899. Furthermore, according to Peterson’s