FanHouse Mountain West

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 All EEOC claims have been withdrawn.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.

---

---

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.

What was left of BYU's season sat just above the cast on Dekoda Watson's left arm, a paperback-sized chunk of manicured grass that looked like a divot from Goliath's back nine.

The Florida State linebacker the turf trophy around in front of a small crowd of Seminole supporters in LaVell Edwards Stadium, beaming like an oversized 5-year-old at his first show and tell. Florida State had arrived a seemingly fragile program, looking at a 1-2 start following a heartbreaking loss to Miami in Week 1 and a vague impersonation of a win against Jacksonville State last Saturday.

But over 60 minutes of a 54-28 rout of Brigham Young that likely proved even Utah friendly has its limits, the Seminoles hadn't just ripped their heart out. They'd ripped their turf out, too.

By the time Watson finished his parade, they had literally taken the ground out from under the Mountain West Conference. The Cougars lost the battle, the MWC lost the turf war.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Minnesota head coach Tim Brewster preached it all week. He knew his team had to somehow maintain its focus, despite the festivities planned to celebrate the dawn of a new era for Gopher football. The opening game of TCF Bank Stadium Saturday night did come with much celebration. For some time, the Gophers were caught up in the moment.

Thanks in part to some ill-timed penalties, Air Force took a 10-3 lead in the third quarter. The Gophers finally turned it on after that, scoring 17 straight points en route to a 20-10 win.

Former San Diego State head coach Chuck Long really wants to collect his $715,900 salary from the school. The Aztecs and Long's attorney still have not worked out an arrangement for Long to get most of his money from the contract after being fired in November. Instead he is doing "special projects" for the school. In grade school, this would have been considered "busy work."

Long's first assignment was to write a report on ways to improve the football program. Specifically, "streamlining admissions for student-athletes, housing of football players and attracting youths and families to SDSU with sports camps." He turned it in at the end of July and his recommendations appear to have come from repeated viewings of the first half of "Revenge of the Nerds."

The capsulized version of the 23-page action plan: lower admission standards for football players -- especially for junior college transfers, give them the best dorm housing on the campus (it has a pool, grill and the best dining hall), and let them join fraternities if they desire.

Hard to believe it only took him about six months and 23 pages to come up with these recommendations.

There's always an endless fascination with finding programs that can be considered "sleeping giants." Those are the schools where it seems that with a little work and the right coach, the program could go from bottom feeder to ranked and respectability.

Rutgers is the most recent example of a football program that had the natural recruiting territory and finally made the move from historical laughing stock to good program. The mistake is assuming that it all related to simply hiring and retaining the right coach to recruit, coach and change the culture. There's no denying the importance of that. The other component, though, is just as important: a competent and committed athletic department. Without the latter, no real change will happen -- no matter who is hired.

On the West Coast, San Diego State holds the distinction as the program most commonly considered a "sleeping giant." Often just slightly below .500 and occasionally competent there was much working for them.

Buried in the details surrounding the BCS contract extension signed by the Mountain West and the WAC was this nugget in an Idaho newspaper: "The conference (WAC) will attach a letter 'that will lay out the concerns we have and basically express our strong objection to the current BCS structure,' Boise State president Bob Kustra said."

Yep, a bona fide letter. (Possible illustration, right). Thanks to the tremendous connections of the ClayNation column in conjunction with the awe-inspiring power of FanHouse, and the action news team that, er, located Gene Chizik's inaugural address to Auburn, we were able to artfully re-create this letter below:

Just a few days after the monumental Senate committee hearing on whether the BCS violated antitrust law, the WAC and the Mountain West put pen to paper, extending their deal with the BCS. And by "their deal" I mean the "big six conference and Notre Dame deal" that happens to include all other teams by the magnanimous generosity of the entity known as the BCS. Even if, you know, that entity doesn't actually exist.

Yes, the BCS is like Prince, it's name is an unpronounceable symbol. Or a pronounceable curse word. Later this week, I'm going to do a column where we come up with a symbol to represent the BCS for the 2009 season since it doesn't legally exist. But before we can do that, I have to figure out how to unlock the symbol collection on my keyboard. And let's be honest that could take me months.

In the meantime, the real question to ask here is why did the Mountain West and WAC sign the agreement and has it strengthened or weakened their case against the BCS? Proceed, fearless reader.