UNLV’s football team was presented an opportunity Friday night, a chance for the Rebels to end their four-game losing streak and enter their only off-week of the season on the sort of high that has been near impossible to discover this season. It took them all of 60 minutes and an additional series of plays, but they finally embraced such a moment.
There is this theory about preseason college football polls: That while they might be good for creating dialogue and definitely profitable for those magazines that release their own Top 25 rankings in August, they unfairly create a perception of which teams are best in a given year.
Football can continue to make its rules and add the threat of penalty or worse to those who break them. It can keep cracking down on aggressive hits to the head and neck while trying to create as strong a culture of safety as it can to a violent, merciless game.
When it comes to an increase in yellow flags, I still believe the NFL thought that by calling more penalties this season, the game would eventually produce more action.
San Diego State proved superior in every way while beating the Rebels 34-17 in a Mountain West opener for both teams before 28,005, the latest example that UNLV simply isn’t good enough in most areas right now to have a chance at defeating anyone capable.
The thunder and lightning and heavy rain couldn’t conceal the truth longer than an hour, that in the world of national high school football rankings, nothing is certain.
The Rebels need to solve what is a glaring weakness quickly, as in tonight at TDECU Stadium against Houston, or a 1-2 record will be 1-3 long before the final seconds elapse.
UNLV produced the greatest offensive quarter in school history and one that still has a solid place in the NCAA record book, in a game played 20 years ago this week between the Rebels and Idaho.
It’s a sad but obvious truth: Many fans love their favorite team and its star athletes so much that they find it easy to rationalize what are otherwise despicable or deceitful acts as a mere miscalculation of reasoning.
The tweet was one of thousands on Monday that offered an opinion about a woman-beater/running back being released from his NFL team and suspended by the league indefinitely. It read: “The Ravens didn’t release Ray Rice when they saw this video. They released Ray Rice when YOU saw this video. Remember that.”
