NM State Football Postpones Season to Spring

More fallout of the fall season continues to impact area college football programs. The latest casualty is New Mexico State, which announced early Thursday morning that the program will postpone the fall season to spring due to "COVID player health & safety concerns as well as 14-day quarantine requirement when traveling back into (New Mexico)."

Brett McMurphy of Stadium was the first to report the news.

The Aggies were down to just four regular season games because of all the different cancellations and postponements. They only had UAB (Sept. 3), UTEP (Sept. 26), Texas State (Oct. 3) and LA-Lafayette (Oct. 24) on the schedule still.

The domino effect of Power-5 conferences such as the Big Ten and Pac-12 postponing fall sports impacted schedule changes across the country. Then, Group of 5 conferences joined in the movement to postpone the season, such as the Mid-American Conference, Mountain West Conference and, as of Thursday morning, the Western Athletic Conference.

The Big 12 announced on Wednesday that they plan to play football this fall. UTEP still has one non-conference opponent in Texas (Sept. 12) after Texas Tech, Nevada, and now, NMSU were all canceled.

NMSU paused football practices last week due to a positive COVID-19 case among a player, as Jason Groves of the Las Cruces Sun News reported.

NM State Director of Athletics Mario Moccia previously told 600 ESPN El Paso how much of his focus turned to finding opponents for the football program to add on its schedule this fall. He tried to salvage as much as possible but the hurdles were too massive to jump through, considering COVID-19 safety concerns, New Mexico travel restrictions and the lack of opponents on the schedule.