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.
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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 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 third-to-last time I saw Rich Abajian, the former UNLV assistant football coach and longtime Rebels uber booster whose funeral service is at 11 a.m. today at South Point Arena — he died in his sleep last week at age 62 — was at Findlay Toyota, where he was general manager and part owner.
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.
In 1864, the story goes, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wired a military order to Gen. John M. Corse back at Union Army headquarters in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The directive was supposed to say “hold on, relief is coming.” It came out “hold the fort,” and then after that, it became “hold down the fort.”