UNLV basketball coach Kevin Kruger watched from the front row at NRG Stadium in Houston as San Diego State beat Florida Atlantic in the Final Four on Saturday.
UNLV Basketball
Gilbert, a point guard, leads the Rebels in scoring (15.9) and assists (3.3) while shooting 56 percent through a 7-0 start to the season.
It was Senior Night for UNLV on Wednesday, and Bryce Hamilton was the final player to walk onto the Thomas & Mack Center court. How fitting. Saved the best for last.
That UNLV team was ranked No. 1 all season and had just one game decided by fewer than 10 points. Three of the NBA’s top 12 draft picks that year played for Jerry Tarkanian.
UNLV’s basketball team went winless in Asheville, N.C., losing the seventh-place game 77-73 at Harrah’s Cherokee Center.
The Rebels bounced a defending Mountain West co-champion and unanimous preseason favorite to repeat right out of the Thomas Mack Center on Wednesday, beating Utah State 70-53.
The calendar flips this time each year and college basketball welcomes conference play, when even teams that endured some forgettable results the previous month can hold onto the idea that failure is simply the opportunity to begin anew.
The Rebels and Arizona certainly didn’t disappoint Saturday night in delivering the type of tenor most hoped for, an overtime thriller won by the Wildcats 91-88 before 14,579.
The opening chapter of how the Rebels went from a team under Lon Kruger that made four NCAA fields his last five years to one that just concluded the worst season in program history begins in 2011, when Nigel Williams-Goss was a sophomore at Findlay Prep.
When everyone else was running from UNLV’s basketball program like frightened guests from a T-Rex at a fictional park, Jalen Poyser didn’t budge.
How ironic, and absolutely fitting, that on the day family and friends and fans and former players gathered to say a final goodbye to Jerry Tarkanian, it was a person with no UNLV ties that offered the most poignant and memorable tribute.
The rain clouds have moved away from those storms of disaster that were road losses to Fresno State and Air Force, and light appears to be shining through the mist upon UNLV’s basketball team.
The history of a college basketball program is not unlike the roads and highways and bridges that join towns from one part of the country to the next. Each link serves its own essential purpose, and often many of the more significant ones are overlooked as time passes.
Well, we know this: The suit jacket experiment lasted 20 minutes.
The first part everyone needs to get over is the denial, the pledges to remain in Las Vegas, to finish his coaching career at UNLV.
