2025 College Football Review: Mountain West

Photo from New Mexico Athletics

It’s the last year of the Mountain West as we know it, and it gave us a hell of a fight for the conference championship game, with a four way tie at the top, and computer metrics determining who the contestants in the conference championship would be.

And shock surprise who ended up on top.

Biggest Surprise: New Mexico Lobos

Jason Eck took over as the head coach at New Mexico this season, and that’s a difficult job to take over.

New Mexico is far from a college football success story, and first year head coaches usually always have some growing pains no matter what the job is.

But New Mexico was one of the four teams tied at the top of the Mountain West and had an absolutely incredible 9-3 season.

Biggest Disappointment: San Jose State Spartans

Last year, SJSU went 7-6 in the first year for Ken Niumatololo.

You’d like to see something built off of that to grow the program and start fighting for conference titles.

A 3-9 season is not the way to build momentum at the program.

Niumatololo went from “solid coach to build with” to “hot seat” very quickly.

What I Got Right

I said that I was buying huge stock in UNLV, because Dan Mullen is a damn good football coach and now, in an era where cash reigns and recruiting isn’t the difficult grind it used to be, he can just coach.

UNLV went 10-3 and made the Mountain West title game, and that’s without quarterback Alex Orji who suffered a season ending injury early on in the season.

I’m not sure if we’ll see Mullen in Las Vegas for long.

What I Got Wrong

Colorado State made a bowl game for the first time under Jay Norvell last season, and I said there was no reason to think that progress wouldn’t continue, as Norvell has slowly but surely improved the Rams over time.

But this year, it all came crashing down to a 2-10 season and it lost Norvell his job.

It’s like in The Price Is Right where the mountain climber slowly gets to the top, and then the next bid is so outrageously large that the climber falls over the top and they lose.

Except they didn’t even get to the top.

That was probably a bad analogy.

Coach Of The Year: Jason Eck

New Mexico wins 9 games about one time every ten years.

Eck did it in year one on the job.

Incredible.

Player Of The Year: Anthony Colandrea

UNLV was going to split snaps with Colandrea and Alex Orji, but Orji’s injury led to Colandrea getting the lion’s share of the snaps, and he delivered, getting UNLV a ten win season and a conference title game appearance.

Team Of The Year: New Mexico Lobos

I’ve talked about New Mexico at length to this point, but I do have one more thing to point out.

This was not a fluke.

ESPN’s SP+ determines offensive and defensive efficiency. It’s a good way to look at metrics to determine if a team is good, or not so good.

That doesn’t mean the record will always be good, though.

Sometimes, the ball bounces the wrong way.

And there was a question in my head of if New Mexico was just simply lucky this season, but the advanced data didn’t go their way.

But it does, as New Mexico is 65th in SP+ in all of college football, right in the area of the other four teams they were fighting for the Mountain West title with.

The grass looks to be getting greener for the Lobos.