New Mexico State basketball is a program rebuilding its soul — and the 2025–26 season showed the Aggies are getting close to finding it. Jason Hooten’s third season in Las Cruces ended 16–16 overall and 8–12 in Conference USA, a record that undersells the year: the Aggies opened 6–0, beat rival New Mexico at home, and spent the first half of the season looking like a conference contender before the grind of CUSA play wore them down to .500.
The season was a study in modern roster construction. Hooten brought in 11 transfers and two freshmen to build a 15-man roster, with sophomores Gabe Pickens and Jae’Coby Osborne the only returners from the year before. The headliner was Jemel Jones, a 6-foot-4 guard from Cal State Bakersfield who averaged 18.9 points a game the previous year and earned a spot on the preseason All-CUSA team. Jones delivered, leading the Aggies at 16.5 points a game, while Julius Mims (8.4 ppg, 7.0 rpg) provided interior presence, and Chris Terrell, Jayland Randall, Elijah Elliott and Kyrese Mullen gave Hooten seven players who had averaged double figures at some point in their college careers.
The Aggies’ identity, as always, started on defense. A year earlier Hooten’s team had held opponents to 39.6 percent from the field and 29.1 percent from three — the shooting never quite caught up, and 2025–26 followed the same script: enough grit to hang with anyone, not enough shot-making to pull away. After the 6–0 start, the Aggies went 10–16 the rest of the way, and Hooten — who has been candid about how the transfer-portal era has changed his job — never let the season fracture. The team played hard to the end and finished with wins over Louisiana Tech and Sam Houston.
Hooten took over in 2023 with the program in crisis, and that context matters. His predecessor, Greg Heiar, was fired after a single season when the 2022–23 campaign collapsed entirely — the season was suspended and then canceled after a fatal shooting involving a player and subsequent hazing allegations, the darkest chapter in program history. Hooten, a longtime Sam Houston State head coach with deep Texas roots, was hired to restore order, and he has: two winning-ish seasons, a competitive roster, and a program that plays hard and behaves itself. The wins are coming more slowly than the culture did.
What he inherited, in talent terms, was a program that had been the class of the West for a decade. From 2012 to 2021, New Mexico State was the most dominant mid-major in America — eight WAC tournament titles in ten years, NCAA berths in eight of those seasons, and a machine built by Marvin Menzies and Chris Jans that won 28 games in 2017–18 and 30 in 2018–19. The peak came in 2022, when Jans’ Aggies — a 12-seed — stunned No. 5 UConn 70–63 in the NCAA first round behind Teddy Allen’s 37-point explosion, then pushed Arkansas in the second round. It was the program’s first tournament win since 1993 and its Sweet 16 drought stayed alive, but the point was made: nobody wanted to see Las Cruces in their bracket.
The Pan American Center remains one of the great venues in the region — 12,482 seats of maroon and white, and when the Aggies are rolling it’s as loud as anything in Conference USA. The building has seen the program’s entire arc: the Lou Henson years, when the Aggies reached the 1970 Final Four behind Sam Lacey; the WAC dynasty of the 2010s; and now the Hooten rebuild.
The Rio Grande Rivalry is the heartbeat. New Mexico State and New Mexico have played since 1904, and the 225-mile desert war remains one of the fiercest rivalries in the West — a series the Lobos have dominated lately but one the Aggies measure themselves by. The home win over the Lobos in 2025–26 was the season’s sweetest night, the kind of result that reminds Las Cruces what this program is supposed to be.
Conference USA is the proving ground now. The move from the WAC brought tougher nightly competition — Louisiana Tech, Middle Tennessee, Western Kentucky, Liberty — and the Aggies have had to learn that the talent that dominated the WAC needs more muscle in CUSA. The 2025–26 roster sometimes didn’t match up physically, a gap Hooten has acknowledged as he recruits.
Entering 2026–27, the arrow points up. The culture is fixed, the defense is real, and the roster churn of the portal era is a feature Hooten has learned to work with rather than against. NMSU basketball has been great before — the WAC dynasty years are recent enough that the standard is living memory — and the Aggies don’t rebuild toward mediocrity. They rebuild toward March.