Former UNLV coach Jeff Horton thinks Tony Sanchez can create tradition

SAN DIEGO — They would not be etched with the sort of history any of them envisioned, and yet if Rebel Park were defined by how well UNLV’s football program has performed over the past three decades, well, I suppose a place of ghosts and haunted memories and distressing epitaphs would suffice.

Time might erase inscriptions, but it can’t totally expunge results.

“We kid around all the time about that graveyard out there at Rebel Park,” Jeff Horton said. “It has Bobby’s tombstone out there. My tombstone. There are a lot of coaches’ tombstones out there. I suppose if they get that practice facility built, they will have to move all of them to make room for it.

“Oh, we tell a lot of stories. Most of them are unprintable.”

UNLV has employed 11 head coaches in the program’s history, four of whom produced winning records in their time leading the Rebels.

They were also the first four.

The last seven have combined to go 113-242 in 31 seasons, including current second-year coach Tony Sanchez. In the win-now-or-else existence of college football, those kinds of numbers eventually lead to one conclusion for the guy running things: a funeral.

UNLV meets San Diego State at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Qualcomm Stadium, and on the staff opposing the Rebels are a few names who know well the gargantuan hurdles that have faced those who have sat in the head coach’s office overlooking the cemetery that has been Rebel Park.

Horton is in his sixth season on Rocky Long’s staff at San Diego State, now an associate head coach/offensive coordinator who was an assistant at UNLV in 1990 and 1991 and then head coach from 1994 to 1998, having led the Rebels to a Las Vegas Bowl victory in 1994.

Bobby Hauck is associate head coach/special teams coordinator for the Aztecs, for whom he landed after his stint as UNLV’s coach from 2010 to 2014.

Hunkie Cooper is the wide receivers coach who played at UNLV while Horton was an assistant.

“Rocky is brutally honest with every player and coach,” Horton said. “He tells you what to expect and then lets you do your job. No fluff. No fancy stuff. The program is built in his image — tough, hard-nosed, physical, come right at you. I feel very fortunate to be part of this.

“Oh, yeah. San Diego is hard to beat, too.”

They look 330 or so miles away, from the ocean to the desert, and see there is another trying to scale those hurdles and meet the arduous challenge that is building UNLV into a competitive side more weeks than not.

Horton, for one, isn’t surprised at the latest name to attempt such a feat.

He predicted it.

“When I would recruit Bishop Gorman when (Sanchez) was there, I always told him he would one day be the coach at UNLV,” Horton said. “He ran his high school team like a college program. I loved watching their practices. Tony did such a great job and got close to all the movers and shakers at Gorman. Relationships are half the battle. He made all the right connections.

“If they give Tony what he needs (at UNLV), he will really get it going there.”

He speaks about advantages those who came before Sanchez lacked and a level of commitment from the university to football that didn’t come close to matching that of another sport across the campus of a basketball school.

True story: When he first arrived at UNLV as an assistant and recruits were hosted for official visits, Horton and his fellow coaches would hang pictures of plans for a new football complex off a tractor, selling a bright future with the sorts of bells and whistles that always catch the attention of kids. The next home of UNLV football appeared to be imminent and impressive.

Seriously. A tractor.

When the recruits left, they took the signs down, not because UNLV coaches didn’t dream of such a structure but because they understood the chances of it becoming reality were so minimal.

That was more than 25 years ago.

Now, not even midway through Sanchez’s second season, UNLV has raised more than $16 million toward the Fertitta Football Complex, a 73,000-square-foot, two-level state-of-the-art training facility that is expected to cost $24 million to $26 million and open within 10 months.

For the most part, Sanchez has raised a majority of the money through those connections of which Horton spoke, because that’s the UNLV football job — embracing the fundraising and community and hand-shaking aspects of it as much as the coaching part.

Maybe more.

“I was fired from there, deservedly so, because I didn’t win enough games,” said Horton, who went 13-44 in five seasons at UNLV. “No excuses. That’s the business. We didn’t win enough. You know that going in.

“But the hardest part about the (UNLV job) is trying to develop tradition. Tony has done a real good job getting people to buy into that program, no matter where they’re from. There’s a lot of apathy there. That’s the biggest thing, and they need to help him. We live in a show-me society. If he gets the right things and they keep recruiting as they have under Tony, all of a sudden, you have hope.”

And, perhaps, one fewer tombstone.

Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be a heard on “Seat and Ed” on Fox Sports 1340 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. On Twitter: @edgraney