Miners dig their new coach

TEMPE, Ariz. – On their second offensive series Thursday night, the UTEP Miners lined up with an empty backfield, so let’s hope somebody back in Pullman remembered to second-guess Mike Price for it.

Lord knows no one in El Paso will.

Down on the borderline, they’ve chugged all the Kool-Aid. As far as they’re concerned, Mike Price invented the game of football – or will soon invent a facsimile to transform their perpetually pitiable Miners into winners and make the Sun Bowl a source of something other than indifference and dismay on fall Saturdays.

Right now, Mike Price would be a hero in his new hometown even if he staggered out of a strip club and fell fully-clothed into his hotel room bed with a strange woman.

Wait. Sorry.

That’s how he wound up in El Paso.

And by extension, that’s how he wound up on the business end of a 41-9 noogie applied by Arizona State in the Miners’ season opener, an event which normally would have rubbed off whatever romance that didn’t first melt away in the hellish 104-degree heat.

But there will be none of that. Not this soon, maybe not ever.

“You forget how bad the losses feel,” Price acknowledged, “but it doesn’t feel as bad as not coaching.”

They say misery loves company, but no more so than desperation – and it was at that intersection where Mike Price and UTEP hooked up nine months ago. For better, because it couldn’t get much worse.

Not for the Miners, who had turned the two-win season into performance art. And not for Price, who had been run out of Alabama in disgrace before he could work off the hangover of his frat-boy indiscretion.

His tumble took on the overtones of tragedy – if not Greek, then at least southern-fried. The coach who took Washington State to two Rose Bowls in the space of five years had carved out a generally impeccable reputation, only to misplace his humble bearings and have his head turned by the riches and rock-star status when he fell into the Alabama job almost by default.

And then fell out of it before he could coach a game.

Even in El Paso, he admits, he has expected somebody to drive by and yell, “Hey, dumb ass!” And he’d have no problem hollering back, “You’re right.”

But the sports fan can only chew on ridicule so long before he has to wash it down with a little redemption and Price is this year’s flavor – having taken over what may be college football’s most downtrodden program, though it’s not as if he’s doing it as volunteer work and it’s not as if UTEP is the same dismal outpost it’s always been, in a football sense.

What the Miners lack in the way of a pedigree in comparison to even a nouveau heavy like Wazzu, they have more than made up for recently in facility upgrades – an $11 million football center to go along with the spiffy Sun Bowl. And when athletic director Bob Stull gassed coach Gary Nord last fall, he saw an opportunity to get the program out of the rut of hiring overmatched and unproven assistants.

“Our time is right now,” Stull said. “We had a chance to get a guy we normally couldn’t touch.”

The other finalists were also “been there, done that” guys – Dick Tomey and Bob Toledo, formerly of Arizona and UCLA. But the guy president Diana Natalicio picked, despite the Alabama wart, was Price.

As surprising as it was that Stull didn’t have to fast-talk his president is the amount of money UTEP has plowed into personnel. The football payroll has increased 35 percent to nearly $900,000. Price’s base salary eats up $225,000 of that, but there are performance incentives that can up that another $250,000 and attendance and sales bonuses that could pad it yet another $300,000. Even a body-bag game like ASU – if it guarantees the Miners $400,000 or more – kicks back $20,000 to Price, which seems like a rather venal clause.

This is the same school that, a year ago, had Nord pull his assistants off the recruiting trail for three weeks because of budget concerns.

Season-ticket prices were jacked up an average of $36 apiece to begin paying the tab and still the enthusiasm around Price boosted sales more than 1,500 from a year ago.

Which, in a way, sort of torpedoes the whole notion of Price’s ongoing defamation suit against Sports Illustrated for its reckless reportage of the strip-club affair. How damaged can a man’s reputation be when within a year he can land another job potentially worth more than half a million dollars and have his new constituents thrilled?

But beyond the bank account, he has been able to resurrect a coaching partnership with his sons Eric and Aaron, who reportedly turned down NFL assistants’ jobs to follow their dad to the desert. And he’s found a place where he’s obviously wanted and needed, even more so than he was in Pullman, where he was sometimes only tepidly appreciated.

“I thought it was too good to be true,” standout linebacker Robert Rodriguez recalled of the hiring announcement. “I didn’t really believe until I shook his hand.”

Cosmetically, the UTEP Price is different from the Pullman Price, having shed some 30 pounds and his eyeglasses (he underwent lasik surgery) and having had hip replacement – and, please, no cracks about how you didn’t think he was hip to begin with.

Still, he isn’t here for reinvention but for retrofitting – finding a new audience for his old tricks.

For instance, he strutted into his first meeting with his UTEP team – do we even have to say it? – dressed as a Miner, with the appropriate props.

At Wazzu, it had died into bad vaudeville. Here, it was Def Comedy Jam.

“We all started going crazy, yelling and screaming, like we were at a concert,” said Rodriguez.

Well, if you’d won six games in three years, maybe you’d be easily amused, too.

This team may wind up with more Prices than wins, too. On Thursday night, it mostly resembled some of the dreary years at Wazzu – the early and late ‘90s – with Jordan Palmer, brother to Carson but otherwise not close yet, throwing four interceptions. But the inclination is to give the Miners more credit than that.

“I’m disappointed because the players have done everything that I’ve asked them to do,” Price said. “They took it serious, they were prepared, they expected to win. We just didn’t play well. But this program is going to work and this system is going to work. They are not the same team that they were.”

If they do have the makings of a good team, then they have the makings of a great story.

“Any publicity is good publicity,” Hawaii coach June Jones told reporters at the Western Athletic Conference media day, something Alabama’s president might dispute. “That stuff he went through at Alabama in the long run is going to be a positive thing. Everybody’s going to know what UTEP does. When he turns them into winners, it’s gonna be magnified.”

He is Mike Price, high priest of the second chance.

Much to his relief, he gets yet another one next week.