Mineral Area College is so back

When people ask you why college basketball is so funny, well, here you go

Photo by Jason Pofahl

Even in 2023, even in our frighteningly interconnected world, things that happen in certain far-flung-ish places – like, say, the rural campus of a New Mexico public land grant college situated in Las Cruces, N.M., an hour from the U.S. border with Mexico – can sometimes fly slightly under the radar, at least to non-locals. And so it is probably worth reviewing what happened in the 2022-23 New Mexico State Aggies men’s basketball season, the program’s first and only under head coach Greg Heiar, just for the folks that might have missed it.

In November, a New Mexico State player, Michael Peake, was involved in a shooting on the New Mexico campus in Albuquerque. According to police reports, the shooting arose as the result of a revenge plot by three UNM students against Peake for a fight during the Aggies-Lobos football game in Las Cruces the previous month. When Peake arrived in an Uber in the early morning – he had apparently been lured to the scene by a 17-year-old female friend – three UNM students attacked him. One, Brandon Travis, fired a gun at him. Peake returned fire. According to the police report (and campus surveillance footage) Peake was hit in the leg and injured. Travis was killed.

Later, cameras showed three New Mexico State players picking Peake up in a yellow Camaro. This is where the men’s hoops program became more directly involved, in ways that did not exactly inspire confidence in the staff’s ability to lead and inspire the next generation of leaders: