The UNLV team that will compete at the Spring Showcase at noon Saturday at Johann Memorial Field is better and deeper and more prepared than any others coach Tony Sanchez has offered.
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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.
Losing starting quarterback Armani Rogers indefinitely this week to a toe injury is hardly a desired reality, but this is the sort of moment coach Tony Sanchez has prepared for through recruiting.
Sanchez had a choice about how to assemble from scratch — there is no such thing thing as rebuilding a program with one winning season since 2001 — and wisely picked the correct but yet often painstakingly slow option.
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.
Tony Sanchez began his third season as UNLV’s coach, and you couldn’t imagine a more forgettable and disheartening result as the Rebels lost to Football Championship Subdivision opponent Howard 43-40.
This is the sort of tale — player walking onto the local college baseball program, improving each year, producing a Triple Crown season as a junior, returning home and joining the Henderson Police Department — that resonates.
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.
UNLV ran past Fresno State 45-20 on Saturday night at Sam Boyd Stadium and in the process offered the sort of quarterback play from Dalton Sneed that wins games far more times than not.
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.