(Photo: Trey Lanthier/WCSN)
College football programs are built on “golden eras” of success. Every school has had them, and for Arizona State few other periods in team history have matched the achievements of the late 1990s.
A conference championship, Rose Bowl appearance and a near-miss at a national title were all pinnacle moments during the late Bruce Snyder’s nine-year head coaching tenure in Tempe.
“He did a lot, getting them to the Rose Bowl, and that team in 1996 was something you don’t see often at ASU,” former Arizona Republic columnist and ASU reporter Paola Boivin said. “I think much of his tenure was great; it’s hard to last nine years at any program.”
But for all of the joyful accomplishments that came out of those triumphs, the crash back down was just as painful. For the Snyder era of Sun Devils football, no single game encapsulated their decline more than a 1999 upset loss to the New Mexico State Aggies.
Thursday, the Aggies make their first trip back to Tempe since, but nearly two decades later, the sting of that debacle still remains.
Not many losses in the program’s existence have signaled such a change of eras. A 22nd ranked ASU squad was steamrolled, beaten at home 35-7 while looking outclassed by a small-conference team with essentially zero history of success.
“We did not play up to our ability, and our defense wasn’t stout. We didn’t make enough plays on the offensive side of the ball when it counted,” J.R. Redmond, the star running back of the 1999 Sun Devils and later Super Bowl champion with the New England Patriots, said during a phone interview.
The lopsided loss made for a tortuous night for ASU. The impact of the defeat lasted much longer.
Instead of recapturing national glory, the loss sent the Sun Devils into a spiral. It was the first step in Snyder’s decline, rebranding him from conference-winning coach to hot seat candidate. It was also the beginning of the program’s slip back into irrelevancy, a status they have consistently battled to break out of since.
1999 was supposed to be the year ASU returned to prominence. They entered the season ranked and were tabbed as a legitimate Pac-10 contender. Three years removed from their run to Pasadena, the Sun Devils had restocked behind Redmond, fellow future NFL star Todd Heap, and third-year starting quarterback Ryan Kealy.
At ASU, rare is it that expectations could be higher to begin a new season.
“We had a lot of returning guys, so we were definitely experienced. We had enough athletes and returning guys to make a push for the (Pac-10 championship),” Redmond said. “Ultimately, (personal success) is secondary to the team goals. I also wanted to be in a big-time bowl game and make sure we had enough wins to possibly (keep) ourselves in the rankings. That’s always the goal going into every season.”
New Mexico State on the other hand had won a total of six games in their previous three seasons and had not been to a bowl game since 1960. Since they began keeping track in 1979, the school had never beaten a ranked opponent and were trampled by the Sun Devils, 41-10, in their previous trip to the Valley in 1997.
Even then, the Aggies returned to Tempe with an uncommon optimism. Not many teams playing the role of the sacrificial opponents of a major program early in a season have belief that they can win. NMSU did.
The Aggies’ starting quarterback KC Enzminger came into the game especially confident. A lifelong ASU fan, the Aggies QB grew up wanting to play at Arizona State. But his path instead took him to NMSU, where he and his young teammates hadn’t been through many mismatched contests like the game against ASU. He said they didn’t know any better than to think they had a shot.
“(The) walk-through the night before the game, that I will never forget,” Enzminger recalled. “Our quarterbacks coach, Gerry Gdowski, walked up to me and asked why I was in such a good mood. I replied, ‘I don’t know coach, I just have a good feeling about tomorrow night.’ He smiled and replied back, ‘You know what? So do I.’”
Still, the Aggies were massive underdogs. ASU had not lost to an unranked opponent at home in almost two years. The official betting line had the Sun Devils as 26-point favorites. Even the local Arizona Republic’s game-day preview was worriless, labeling the game a “tune up.”
Boivin’s Sunday morning recap for the paper began much differently: “Hey fans. The choke’s on you.”
“I remember it sort of defining the negative part of Snyder’s tenure,” Boivin said when looking back on the game. “I thought it just killed that momentum they had established during his career at Arizona State. As ASU fans can do, they turned on the team pretty quick…I think that was the beginning of the end for him.”
She was right.
“I remember thinking I didn’t want to ever go to another ASU football game again,” ASU graduate and long-time football season ticket holder Ryan Tolman said. “This was one of those games where everyone was anticipating maybe we make a run and we might be pretty good. Obviously that didn’t happen.”
Despite the odds, NMSU’s makeshift backfield of Chris Barnes and true freshman Walter Taylor ran wild on an ASU defense that had become known for its ability to stifle opponents’ rushing attacks. Of the Aggies’ more than 500 yards of offense, 363 came on the ground.
“We are ASU. A smaller school is not supposed to come into our place and just run it like that,” Tolman said. “The frustration level was so high because we had done nothing on offense and couldn’t really stop them.”
On the other side of the ball, a Sun Devil attack centered around Redmond, an early Heisman contender that year, was shut down. Despite setting taking a season high 24 carries, Redmond gained just 62 yards.
“Offensively we thought we’d be more explosive, but for one reason or another we weren’t able to get it done. Defensively we couldn’t stop the bleeding,” Redmond said.
The Sun Devils didn’t score a point until the 12:17 mark of the fourth quarter, when Redmond crossed the goal line from a yard out for the team’s solitary touchdown; NMSU had a 28-point lead by that point.
“You ask any long-time ASU fan and they’ve been haunted by these types of games, where the team comes in ranked, and they just lay an egg,” Boivin said. “I remember thinking, here ASU goes again, after having all this great momentum in the two, three previous years.”
By the time the clock expired to end the Sun Devils’ nightmarish performance, the damage had been done. More than 56,000 fans left in disbelief. NMSU returned home in a similarly dumbfounded way.
“During the bus ride home, there was nothing but sheer jubilation; it felt like a dream,” Enzminger remembered. “Back in Las Cruces, we found that the goalposts at Aggie Memorial Stadium had been torn down. We knew the impact of our victory when we all saw that.”
The impact was two-fold.
As expected, the Sun Devils dropped out of the top 25 after the game. It was the last time they would ever be ranked in the AP Poll under Snyder. By the end of the 2000 season, a still reeling program cut ties with Snyder, just four years after the school’s auspicious conference title and national championship bid.
“You don’t lose those games if you are Urban Meyer, Jim Harbaugh, the guys who stick around at places until they don’t want to be there anymore. You just don’t lose them,” Tolman said. “When you lose to a mid-major like that, everything changes, and that’s what happened really quick, and after the next season he was gone.”
Even to this day, ASU has not reached the same heights of Snyder’s tenure. Current head coach Todd Graham has come close, achieving something Snyder never did by winning 10 games in back-to-back seasons. But another conference title and Rose Bowl appearance has proven elusive.
Another loss to a school nicknamed the Aggies has drawn comparisons to the 1999 flop. In 2015, a 38-17 loss to an unranked Texas A&M dashed the Sun Devils’ College Football Playoff hopes on the season’s opening day. In 2014, a road loss to a last-placed Oregon State also derailed ASU’s Pac-12 title chances late in the year.
But even those losses didn’t serve the program with the indignation felt eighteen years ago.
“That New Mexico State game was actually the turning point, because it took us I don’t know how many games to recover from that,” Redmond said.
The team managed to salvage a bowl game out of the 1999 season, ultimately going 6-6. But Snyder never fully recovered from the embarrassment to NMSU. As Enzminger and the other victorious Aggies celebrated on Frank Kush Field, the demise of ASU’s other famous coach began.
When New Mexico State returns to Sun Devil Stadium this week, fans of a certain vintage will be obliged to unwanted recollections of the blowout. The program-defining game will always have a home in the dark memory of Sun Devil football.
“It defined the negative part of Snyder’s tenure,” Boivin said. “I don’t know specifically where it ranks, but I think (in terms of ASU’s worst ever losses) it’s definitely top three.”
