Start with what Matt Drinkall did after his team got run off its own field. He didn't hide behind clock-management gripes or a missed call. He stood up and told everyone New Mexico is "a good football team," "well-coached," "very well-talented," and, in his words, a "championship contender." Then he turned the lens on his own team: "There's good and bad. The bad part is that it's going to eat us up that we did not play our best in any aspect. We don't get that back."
That's an honest coach. It's also a coach conceding the argument before anyone else could make it for him.
On paper, Central Michigan-New Mexico is a 38-7 final, just another Group of Five season-opener loss. It wasn't that. For three quarters on Saturday night in Albuquerque, this was a total shutdown. New Mexico built a 35-0 lead before Central Michigan ever got on the board, and the Chippewas didn't crack triple digits in total yardage until deep into the fourth quarter, against New Mexico's backups. Central Michigan finished with nine first downs and 149 total yards in sixty minutes of football. New Mexico had 364 yards and 28 first downs. That's a team getting physically overwhelmed for the better part of three hours, not a rough half.
The lone highlight for CMU was almost an accident of garbage time: Nasir Williams took his only carry of the night 23 yards for a touchdown on fourth-and-1 with the outcome long decided. A nice moment for one player, but it doesn't say much about an offense that managed only 30 passing yards and watched starting quarterback Angel Flores throw an interception while completing just three passes.
On the other side, James Laubstein scored twice on the ground and was clearly the engine of the New Mexico offense. Grant Glasgow was money from mid-range, hitting from 48, 46, and a game-sealing 49 yards. New Mexico did this while sorting out its quarterback room on the fly, rotating multiple passers over the course of the night. That the Lobos could win this convincingly without a settled answer at the position should worry anyone circling them as a program on the rise this season, even this early. For context: this was reportedly the first time since 2005 that New Mexico opened a season with a win over an FBS opponent, a real marker for a program that's been trying to climb out of irrelevance.
None of this makes CMU a bad team forever. It's one game, both sides entered at 0-0, and Drinkall did take this program to a bowl game a year ago after a long postseason drought. League coaches picked CMU to finish fifth in the conference again this season, so nobody outside the building expected a big year anyway. A loss to a favored opponent isn't the story here.
The story is the margin, and the fact that CMU's own coach spent his postgame press conference selling the other team's ceiling instead of defending his own locker room's floor. This is a program still searching for its identity heading into a home opener against an FCS opponent next week, one it should win comfortably if Saturday's version of the offense doesn't show up again. If it does, the conversation about Drinkall's second year gets uncomfortable fast.
