Momentum Builds, A Pandemic Hits

Part 1 of The National Football Foundation's Good in the Game Newsletter Series, “UTRGV Football — The Heart of the Valley”

EDINBURG, Texas -- Hidalgo County, deep in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley near the southern tip of Texas, sells more Dallas Cowboys gear than Dallas County. This is an area of the country that loves football.

Dr. Guy Bailey had that knowledge when he took over as founding president of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley back in 2014, and soon thereafter made it his goal to start a football program at the university to give the community a local team to support, and conversely, a team to support the community.

Hidalgo County is a poor area. Roughly 63 percent of students at UTRGV are on Pell Grants, and around 90 percent don’t pay any tuition at all. The students were top of mind when Bailey decided to put together a football feasibility study in 2017.

“When we established the university, our goal was to create the best educational value in the United States,” Bailey said in an interview with the NFF. “That means high quality at reasonable cost…We wanted to establish football, but also do it in a way that’s responsible to our students.”

A group was put together – Mack Brown, the former national championship-winning Texas Longhorns coach, chaired the committee. Oliver Luck lended a helping hand, along with several community leaders, to figure out what a football team would cost the community, the students, whether they would sell enough tickets, and roughly a thousand other questions.

The verdict? Do it – start building a football program from the ground up.

There was a problem, though. Bailey felt he needed an athletic director who could unite each community in the Rio Grande Valley and connect with the student body on the benefits of adding football on campus.

Enter Chasse Conque, who Bailey hired from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in August of 2019. Not yet 40 years old, Conque had served as Vice Chancellor and Director of Athletics at Little Rock for four years, and in that time added a wrestling program, set multiple fundraising records and saw department-wide GPAs above 3.00 for 13 consecutive semesters.

Almost as soon as Conque got to campus, football fever flared up again.

“We’ve got the right guy,” Bailey remembered saying. “Chasse is terrific in the community. He really has become beloved in a really short time. He has such a nice personal style. He’s really good with people. He’s good with our students. He understands you have to work the entire Rio Grande Valley…If we would not have been able to hire him, we wouldn’t have football. It’s that simple.”

Conque got to work right away meeting with groups on campus and throughout the entire Rio Grande Valley, and real momentum started to build throughout the fall semester in 2019. Then, another problem.

“As we headed into 2020, things looked great,” Bailey said. “You know what happened in 2020, don’t you? You can’t start a football program in the middle of COVID.”

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The National Football Foundation sat down with UTRGV President Dr. Guy Bailey and UTRGV Athletic Director Chasse Conque this fall to discuss what it takes to build a college football program from the ground up. Stay tuned to hear how UTRGV made it through COVID better than they were before in an upcoming edition of the Good in the Game newsletter!