Ranked sixth nationally, UNLV’s special teams units have had as much to do with the 9-2 start as any facet of the Rebels’ game. UNLV hosts San Jose State on Saturday.
Sports Columns
Every five years or so, someone else is hired to assume the role of UNLV head football coach. Marcus Arroyo is next up.
The Rebels will have to prove history and the Mountain West preseason media poll wrong, a forecast that has UNLV finishing fifth in the six-team West Division.
One of the main problems with UNLV athletics, perhaps the central one, is the fact it either doesn’t realize or accept its place in today’s world of collegiate athletics.
In a college football universe built on free enterprise, losing 54-21 to Ohio State is another reminder of the massive sense of exclusivity that defines the sport.
The Vandals meet UNLV on Saturday night at Sam Boyd Stadium at 6, and will continue playing this season and next at the Football Bowl Subdivision level before dropping to the Football Championship Subdivision.
Do you know that saying about being a symptom of something much worse? Yeah. That’s what 2-16 is. That’s what being outscored by an average of 39-18 in those football games is. That’s the reality facing Mountain West teams and all others existing within the insignificant and dismal reality of a non-Power 5 conference today.
It’s not as if the crystal stemware has shattered into a thousand pieces. But there is a small chip or two, flaws only discernible to those who watched firsthand Boise State’s rise to college football prominence.
Dance Dance Revolution is a music video game introduced in Japan 16 years ago, where players stand on a platform or stage and hit colored arrows with their feet to musical and visual cues.
There might not be any bigger hermits in college athletics than head football coaches, secluded from society in dark film rooms and often absent from social events that don’t include glad-handing those boosters with deep pockets.