On the January evening Dave Rice was fired just three games into the Mountain West schedule, as unprecedented a move as you will find in college basketball, he looked UNLV’s seniors in the eyes and promised they would see him again.
Ed Graney
Ed Graney is a sports columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, covering a variety of topics and the Las Vegas sports scene.
egraney@reviewjournal.com … @edgraney on Twitter. 702-383-4618
First things first: There is no perfect way to ensure that everyone will be kept safe. Not the losing team and its coaches. Not even the winning team and its coaches.
We again have foolishly mixed athletic gifts with moral compass, shocked those we admire most for their physical skills in sports aren’t also shining examples of virtue and acceptance.
We might be witnessing the worst college season for officiating in history, and that’s saying more than a mouthful about those blowing whistles. But rare is the night in which games don’t include questionable calls, no calls, clock errors, interpretation errors, miscues of all types.
You can never underestimate the spirit of sports, those intangibles that make certain athletes rise to the occasion when all seems lost in a season, when your bench has been reduced to the point your basketball coach spent part of his day before a conference game against your biggest rival glancing at the school’s football roster.
The overall record is 29-1, and the national ranking is a robust fifth, and the goal of reaching another Division I state tournament has been realized, and everything they say about the Centennial High girls basketball team and its prominent place in Nevada history seems more than trustworthy.
UNLV lost a basketball game to Air Force on Tuesday night by a final score of 79-74. The problem: For much of it, the Rebels played as if it was 100-64 all over again.
In the narrative that is UNLV basketball, Stacey Augmon is royalty, the greatest player in program history not named Larry Johnson.
The forgettable journey that has become UNLV’s basketball season, some of it the fault of injury, a lot of it the fault of poor execution and again inflated expectations, nearly took one final tumble off the cliff of Mountain West mediocrity Wednesday night before the Rebels rallied to save themselves from complete embarrassment.
It happens this way often in sports, that great success by a team is created through unforgettable disaster, that amazing individual achievement is born from embarrassing failure.
It could be our inherent stubbornness, the part of us that continues to look through the eyes of the past and won’t allow ourselves to see what the present offers. Generations pass. The gap widens. Change occurs.
In a town that produced the National League’s Most Valuable Player (Bryce Harper) and Rookie of the Year (Kris Bryant) in Major League Baseball last season, Las Vegas also will feature a linebacker on the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers when Super Bowl 50 kicks off Sunday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
Lamar Hunt was creative, clever, a visionary, as forward a thinker as the NFL has known. I wonder what the late owner of the Kansas City Chiefs would have thought about the league housing a team in Las Vegas.
Roger Goodell has always owned a pretty loose definition of integrity when it comes to an NFL team ever moving to Las Vegas, on one hand standing behind the idea that his league should exhibit a blunt refusal to be compromised by sports gaming and on the other gladly accepting the massive levels of money and sponsorship and popularity it produces.
Josh Norman appears to be staking his claim to a seat at the table of the elite when it comes to climbing inside opposing heads, a lifetime from the days when trash talking was limited to claiming one’s team was better and guaranteeing a Super Bowl victory.
